The darkness surrounds me.

It always has. Since I was thirteen, I had seen far too many horrors. But it’s all him. He took and took and when there wasn’t anything left, he preyed on others. Then again, he’d always done that. I recall the first time I learned what he was.

A monster.

It was that day my life changed. I’d never be the same again and now that I’m eighteen, I feel as if I’m an old ragged man. Even though I’m only starting my life, not the life I wanted, but the one I was thrust into at an early age.

There’s a stench in the basement when I enter. Five rooms sit to my left, and another five to my right. That’s ten captives he holds each year. One month, four weeks, he takes one of those lucky ten and ensures they shatter. The process is simple, they come in, they get tortured and used, and then on their final day, a group of men and women walk in, watch the show and choose which they’d prefer.

He’s broken them in for years. It’s the way he gets off. I’ve seen the vilest of acts being done to girls over the years. He’s had boys here too. However, they don’t earn him enough, so he focuses on the girls. They can offer him what the boys can’t.

And as many years as I’ve been here, I’m still trying to find a way out. A way where I can run with my brother and my best friend and never look back. Slowly, with each night that falls, I know that day will never come. But I hold onto that faraway emotion that we’re taught to hold as kids.

Hope.

The problem is, in this place, that’s a fruitless wish. There’s no such thing as hope in here. Life will end here the same way it started. In agony. It’s the cries and screams that haunt the walls of the mansion. Even though the captives are kept in the basement, being on the upper levels, even in my bedroom I hear them. As if they echo to me, to taint me for what I’ve helped be done to them.

I recall the day I walked into the basement when he was in one of his sessions.

* * *

The door is ajar. There’s a dim light that tells me to run, to hide, but I don’t. I’m intrigued. I’m ten years old and all I want is to learn to be a good boy. He tells me I need to be, but I never understand what he means.

I reach the last cold concrete step and peek through the space in the door. A gold light comes from within. A scream so loud, so filled with pain, I can’t help stumbling back. It’s a girl. I can tell that already.

I lean forward once more, and the door slides open another inch. The image before me causes me to retch. The sound echoes along with her screams, and he snaps his vicious glare at me.

“Bring him in.” The familiar deep voice I’ve known all of my short life vibrates through the walls of the basement. Cold concrete greets my ass when I fall back.

Two strong meaty hands grip my bony shoulders, lifting me with no effort. My skinny legs flail wildly in the air as a man who’s the size of an ogre carries me inside the room where he’s standing.

“What the fuck is he doing in here?” the man questions.

I recoil when a hand reaches for my face. Gripping my neck, he lifts me onto the steel gurney and presses me flat on my back. The smell of blood is thick in the air and I retch once more.

My body folds in the middle, my small arms hold onto my stomach, but he growls, ordering the ogre to bind my arms and legs to the four corners. Once I’m unable to move, he chuckles when I beg for mercy. But I know for a fact he won’t show it.

The little girl on the gurney beside me is not moving. Her long blonde hair is matted with dark red liquid. It looks like she’s sleeping, her eyes closed, her face at peace and I notice that her chest isn’t moving. She’s no longer breathing.

“What did you do?” My question is hoarse, my throat burns at the realization that’s running through my mind. I shake my head when he looks at me and nods.

“She served her purpose.” His words are cold, then I notice him pulling up his zipper on the dark slacks that he always wears to work.

I don’t understand. My brows crease in confusion. He hurt her. I know that.

“Perhaps we can have him trained?” the man asks the ogre. They both look at me as if I’m an experiment. I’m not sure what they mean, but my chest tightens, and my breathing gets more difficult.

“I think he’ll be a good investment,” the ogre agrees after a long while of studying me. He smirks, his mouth curling evilly as he watches me.

“Tie him in the training chair,” the old man grins happily. He cups my cheek in his hand and leans in. His breath stinks of alcohol and blood which makes me choke on the spit dripping down my throat from his open mouth.

“What if he doesn’t—”

“I said tie him to the fucking chair,” the man bites out angrily at the ogre. “He’ll learn to appreciate my business. He is my son after all.”

* * *

Shaking my head of the gloomy time in my life, I move into the empty cell and start my clean up. The wet mattress has already been pulled out of the room, and the bucket needs to be removed, emptied and cleaned. Grabbing the mop, I start on the floor that’s now dried where she’s pissed herself while I was holding her. I shouldn’t have gotten angry, but it was her weakness that I hated.

When he told me two weeks ago he was bringing a new girl in, I was scared once more at what I’ll have to do when he’s finished with her. I’ve become wary of the girls who arrive, because I know the moment I see them in their beauty, it will be the last time they’ll ever look that way again. But when I saw her, there was something I wanted to do to her, something I’d never wanted to do to any of the other dolls he brings in here.

I wanted to save her.

I wanted to sever the link to him and have her be mine.

But as much as I want that, I know it can never be. He owns them all. Each one that’s brought into hell, he takes them and makes sure they never see the light of day again.

But it’s not the fact that he takes from them, it’s the way he does it. A scrape of a boot sounds from behind me and I find my brother at the door. He eyes me wearily. We’ve both been working here for the man we call father for so long it’s become second nature to clean up the mess left by each toy.

“She going to last?” he questions naturally as if we’re talking about the fucking weather.

“I hope so.”

I’ve never uttered those words. Never once cared if the girls come back from their sessions or not, but with the pretty toy I’ve just led to the den I wonder if I’ll ever see those pretty eyes again.

“There’s no hope in here, Drake,” my brother grunts in frustration. He’s younger than me by two minutes. But I was dragged into the darkness much earlier than he was.

“I know,” I finally respond, causing him to glance at me. The blue eyes that match mine stare at me for a moment. Our mother had told us we were special, then only three years later, on our seventh birthday, she died. One thing I remember about her was when she told us our piercing eye color matched with the seas in Greece.

Her ancestry took us back to Europe. Both our mother’s and father’s blood lines originated there. But now we live in what is known as the ‘land of the free’ which to me is a lie, because it seems to stifle everything good in our lives.

“Is she pretty?” he questions as he unscrews the bottle of bleach. The harsh scent still bothers my senses as he douses the floor in the clear liquid.

Is she?

Yes.

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, not answering his question because I know there isn’t any reason for me to want her.

“Then perhaps you should go in there and ask Dad if he’ll allow you to play the final round.” I glance at my brother then. It’s the first time we’ve really gotten to talk about something like this. An option of perhaps winning and keeping one of the girls.

But even so, if I do get her, she’ll hate me for what I’ve allowed to happen to her. I’ve left her in there with the Devil himself. I know what she’s going through right now. In my mind, I recall the training chair. My father’s idea of teaching impressionable youths on the basics of human nature. That’s a fucking joke. More like the intricacies of being an animal.

“That will never happen,” I tell him.

“You never know,” Dante murmurs as he carries the bucket from the cell and disappears, leaving me to wonder if I’ll ever have a chance against our father.