Pain. So much pain. Each movement was a new agony as she was hit again and again. She was covered in cuts and bruises, none inflicted by herself. She gasped as the knife flashed down, curling into a ball, trying to fend the man off. A sharp burst pain in her left side and a crunching/grating that went through her from head to toes, jerked her awake.
Lying on the mattress that was her bed, Niele Wik'a'ni felt tears rolling down her face as she tried to keep the flood, caused by the nightmare, in check. Rolling over onto her back she gasped as another burst of pain erupted in her side. She gritted her teeth to keep from crying out, knowing that this was the pain that had awoken her, caused by the two broken ribs in her left side.
Staring up at the ceiling, her mind went back over the night that they had been broken: two days ago, her father had come home high and drunk and had started beating her for "breathing loudly". She sighed, then winced as the sigh jostled her broken ribs. She felt sad, knowing that if anyone were to see her memories, they would think it cruel and unacceptable, yet to Niele, it was a part of life.
Her father had started beating her a little over two years ago, when he had gotten hooked on meth. He would come home late at night after partying with his drug friends, drunk and high, and would wind up hitting his wife and/or daughter for no reason. Niele\s mother had tried to stand up to him but was always beaten back.
He had steadily gotten worse, assaulting people outside his family, stealing from stores and trying to sell drugs to kids. He had gotten arrested a couple times and Niele's mother, Pele, had always, for reasons unfathomable to Niele, bailed him out as soon as he called her from jail. And yet he was never thankful and it had escalated so much that, when he came home one night, he had murdered his own wife as his terrified daughter looked on.
That had been almost a year ago. He had been on the run since then, from both the police and the bail bondsmen, as he had just been bailed out, yet again by her mother, only a few days before he'd killed her.
Being on the run, he would disappear for weeks on end, leaving Niele to fend for herself. Luckily, her mother had left her everything, her will stating clearly that her husband had no control whatsoever over Niele's inheritance.
Niele had never called the police on her father, even though she had seen him kill her mother in front of her eyes. She knew that he would kill her before the police could reach the front steps.
So she'd lived with her father's abuse and neglect for two years, acquiring an impressive list of injuries. Her two broken ribs were only the most recent of these.
Groaning, Niele pulled herself upright, preparing to face the new day, wishing she was still asleep. Because her life was far worse than any nightmare ever would be.