She beat me every day. She told me I should have died with her. She is my stepmother, the one who taught me, as a 5-year-old, to “stay quiet.” Then one night, a battle-hardened Malinois showed up. It was only trained to deal with bombs. But it smelled my fear from a hundred meters away, and its next action... It wasn't the strap that hurt the most. It was the sentence that always came before the strike. "If your mother hadn't been so weak and died, I never would have been burdened with you." The