And then he smiled again. That same twisted curl, the kind that had haunted my nightmares.
“You’ve been a good little pet, haven’t you?”
God. The word made my stomach twist even harder, coiling my intestines into a knot that burned with nausea. My hands trembled at my sides. My legs felt heavy, cemented to the floor.
I tried to tell myself I was still Grace. That I wasn’t the scared girl who woke up in that horror show. That I had skills, weapons, allies.
But none of it reached me. Not now.
He moved closer. Slow. Certain. Watching me. Happy to see me scared. Happy to see me…here.
I could only breathe shallowly, heartbeat a drum of panic in my ears, and feel the raw, unfiltered terror that reminded me — he didn’t need to strike me. His presence alone was enough to undo every hard-won inch of control I thought I had.
Yet, my feet seemed sunken into concrete. I was shackled in place like I wore that chain around my ankle again. All I could do was stand there, frozen, waiting for the next move, every instinct screaming at me to survive while my body refused to listen.
His hand moved again. Just a fraction of an inch this time, but in my world it was seismic. Every nerve ending in my skin screamed before he even touched me. My vision narrowed to him—the scar, the blind eye, the ghost of his smile—and the rest of the room became a soft blur.
I could feel the air shift as his fingers hovered over my arm, the faint brush of fabric sending sparks of panic up my spine. It was unreal. I wanted to jerk away, to shove him, to strike, to dosomething, but my body didn’t belong to me anymore. My muscles twitched, useless, and my thoughts were a riot of broken memory fragments.
Waking up to that hell. The gut-wrenching cries of despair and pain. Skin slapping against skin. The odors of bodies, sex, and sweat. The sticky feeling of his release all over me. The suffocating smell of his cum staining the air.
Each memory collided with the present, folding around his hand as it descended toward me. It moved like slow water, inevitable and unstoppable.
The tip of his finger brushed my cheek. Just a touch, feather-light. I felt it in every cell. My stomach lurched, bile rising. My knees threatened to buckle, but I stayed upright, rooted to the floor by some cruel twist of fate.
His smile widened. “Still so tense… I like it.”
I could feel the phantom of his hands where they’d held me before, the ownership, the violence, the control. My body responded—adrenaline, fear, nausea—a symphony of sensations I couldn’t smother.
Everything slowed. My pulse was thunder in my ears. Every breath was deliberate, hot and rasping. My skin tingled, hairs on end. His hand brushed again, slightly firmer this time, and it was like fire on my veins, a lightning strike I couldn’t escape.
Remember. Breathe. Move.
My mind tried, weakly, to summon the Grace I had spent the past several months becoming. The woman who could take him down, who could fight like hell, who could andwouldfight without choking on terror. But she seemed a distant memory and so alien from the one standing here as to be from a different galaxy.
I was small.
Scared.
Trapped.
In a nightmare all over again.
Had I ever actually escaped?
That scraped open another layer of horror, ripping me apart.
His hand lingered, cupping my cheek and filling my nostrils with the stale scent of tobacco. He’d been smoking. It was acrid. Made my eyes water. My nose run. I wanted to sob, but even my tears abandoned me.
“My beautiful pet,” he said, possessive pride in his claim of ownership.
My stomach twisted into itself, nausea clawing up my throat. My vision tunneled even tighter. All I could see were his fingers, the scarred knuckle, the curve of his wrist, and nothing else existed.
His other hand moved closer. Slow. Casual. Watching me. Measuring. Enjoying. Even as that awareness I was frozen in the gravity of it, trapped between every instinct I had ever had and the pure, raw terror that had returned to claim me.
Fight. Run. Scre?—
The words died before they formed. My tongue felt like sandpaper. My throat contracted. And all I could do was let him close that last inch, let him touch me fully, and endure the moment where control was no longer mine, where fear ruled everything.
