CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The nightmare began like it always did: in his childhood home, a vast, cavernous cold mansion he’d always hated. Despite the size of it, he could still hear his mother and father screaming at each other, each barbed attack more vicious, more hateful. How, how could he be related to these monsters?
He would hide. As a kid, and even now, as a grown man, the imperative was to run, run far away, get out, hide.
But in the nightmare, there was no escape. The walls were solid, grey stone and every door he closed melted away as the banshee cries of his mother came closer. She would come to him, desperate to love and be loved but utterly incapable of that feeling. So, she would punish him, again and again, verbally, physically until he was bleeding and broken and begging to die.
