Not tonight.
Not until I make him bleed for it.
The fire crackles behind me like bones snapping under pressure, and I close my eyes, just for a second—just to shut him out.
But the past doesn’t need permission to break in.
It slips beneath my ribs like smoke, curling tight around memory until I’m not in the room anymore. I’m seventeen again. Rain soaking my hoodie. Shivering. Bleeding. Running.
That night.
The night everything cracked.
The alley behind The Thistle & Thorn bar was slick with oil and shadows, and I remember thinking—this is where girls like me disappear. And maybe that would’ve been mercy. Maybe the world would’ve been kinder if it just swallowed me whole. But instead, I found him.
Or maybe he found me.
A tall silhouette at the end of the alley, hat pulled low, coat sharp as razors. I thought he was a trick of the light at first—some story my trauma made up to keep me company as I bled from the gash in my thigh. But then he spoke.
“You look like something someone’s already tried to break.”
His voice had no warmth, no sympathy. Just curiosity. Like I was a puzzle he wanted to crack open. A shattered music box he could wind up just to hear the scream.
I remember snarling something back. Teeth bared, too wild to be scared. “Fuck off.”
He laughed.
That slow, dark sound. That sound that felt like ink spilling in my lungs.
“I think I’ll keep you.”
I didn’t know what it meant then. Just a line from a stranger. Just another man with god-complex eyes and hands that looked like they could rebuild or ruin anything they touched.
I never forgot the way he looked at me—like I was already his.
Even back then.
Even before I knew his name.
Even before I knew he was the one pulling all the strings.
Even before I realised the worst cage is the one you run into yourself.
The floor is cold, but it’s the kind of cold that settles into bone like regret. My cheek presses to it, my breath fogging against the tile in soft, broken exhales. There’s dried blood under my nails—mine, I think—and the remnants of a necklace chain twisted like a noose around my fingers. The broken clasp digs into my palm. I don’t let go.
My thighs ache. Not from him, not from now—but from then.
And it hits me like a slammed door: the past never stays buried, it just waits until you’re too tired to keep shovelling dirt.
It starts with the smell. That thick, acidic burn of alcohol wipes and sweat and polished leather. My mother’s voice behind it, soft as silk and sharp as knives, whispering not to scream this time, because no one likes a girl who makes noise.
Then his voice—another man, wronger, older. Saying my name like it’s something filthy. My stomach clenches, and I claw at the floor because I can’t claw at him. Because I didn’t then.
He told me I was a fairy once. That fairies were made of light and air and silence. But all I remember is being small. And bleeding. And learning how to disappear without leaving the room.
The present pulls at me again—Hook’s voice from days ago, sneering in my head like a poison-tipped echo. “You want to be broken, little fairy. You want someone to see the ruin and say, mine.”
And I hate that he’s right. I hate that my body remembers his hands like a promise. I hate that the shame and the ache are starting to blend. That my survival looks more like surrender every day I stay.
