“Is that what you want?” I snarl at the ceiling, at the corners of the room where I know he’s watching. “To see me broken? Begging? Because you’ve done it. You win. You win.”
The words taste like blood.
But still—no door. No boots. No monster coming in to mock the mess he made.
I think that’s what breaks me.
Not the punishment. Not the cruelty. Not even the way he makes my body betray me.
It’s the absence.
It’s the silence.
It’s the fact that he’s choosing not to come.
My knees hit the floor again, hard, like I’m praying to some god who never cared. I drag my fingers through my hair, nails scraping my scalp, just to feel something—and I stay there, panting, wrecked, drowning in the ghost of him.
“I hate you,” I whisper, voice like a secret I wish I could believe. “I hate what you’ve made me.”
But the worst part?
I don’t hate him.
I hate that I don’t.
I hate that some twisted, shattered part of me still aches for his hands. His voice. His control. Because when I’m under it, I don’t have to think. I don’t have to feel. I just burn.
I just belong to something.
Someone.
And maybe that’s what scares me most.
Not that he’s ruined me.
But that he’s the only one who knows how to put the pieces back together—wrong. Backwards. In his image.
And maybe…I want him to.
Part Three
The Unmaking
I don’t remember what day it is.
I don’t remember what my voice sounds like when it isn’t breaking.
He says things that don’t make sense.
Things he shouldn’t know.
Sometimes I think the door was never locked.
Sometimes I think I was.
I still want to kill him.
But not as much as I want him to come back.
