One hundred and fifty-nine

Flashback: Nicholas

Trembling from head to toe, I stared at my father, my chest squeezing with agony at the sight. There was a rough, dirty-looking bandage on his shoulder, with blood seeping out of it, and his naked body was a mass of cuts, bruises, and scrapes. His face was even worse. Below the old bandage on his forehead, there wasn't a spot left that wasn't discolored or swollen. The most horrifying thing of all, however, was the huge bleeding gash running through his left cheek and all the way up into his eyebrow—a mess of ragged flesh where his eye used to be. Where his eye used to be. They cut out his eye.

I couldn't even begin to process that at the moment, so I didn't try. For now, he was alive, and that was all that mattered.