Hearing the loud slap, the metallic crash, and her daughter's frantic, heartrending screams, Sarah rushed out of the glass patio doors in a blind panic. Her heart dropped straight into her stomach as she took in the horrific scene before her: her three-year-old daughter lying on the hard stone deck, weeping hysterically, with a visible bloody head wound near her hairline. "What kind of monster hits a three-year-old?!" Sarah shrieked at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking with pure, raw horror. She dropped to her knees on the stone tiles, pulling Lily gently into her arms, pressing her olive tank top against her daughter's head to stem the bleeding while kissing her tears away.
Instead of showing an ounce of remorse or concern for the bleeding child, Harold stood tall on the patio, his expression devoid of any human empathy. With a terrifyingly calm and deliberate motion, he unbuckled and gripped a heavy black leather belt from his waist, uncoiling it with a sharp snapping sound. Nearby, the grandmother looked on in frozen horror, too intimidated by her husband to step in, while Sarah's husband, Mark, stood just a few feet away in a casual grey T-shirt. A tense, suffocating drone seemed to fill the air as Harold sneered down at his weeping daughter and injured granddaughter, declaring in a cold, booming voice that the child took something without permission and now she would remember the lesson forever.