Neither free.
I drag myself up onto the bed—not like a prisoner, but like an offering, necklace still clenched in my fist, blood smearing the sheets.
And I whisper into the silence, not sure if it’s a curse or a prayer:
“Come break me, Hook. Or I’ll break myself.”
The camera blinks once.
Red.
Unmoving.
Watching.
The silence laughs with it.
And I finally stop.
Hook
The papers don’t lie.
Neither do the bruises.
I watch her on the monitor, curled in the centre of the bed like a sacrifice that doesn’t know which altar it was laid upon. The surveillance screen flickers in the darkness of my study, its cold blue glow the only light in a room thick with shadows and the lingering scent of aged whisky.
The necklace drips red across her fist, blood blooming down the chain where she clutched too hard, each crimson bead catching the firelight from her room and transforming into tiny rubies of pain. It stains the sheets—expensive silk, Egyptian cotton, the kind that costs more than most people earn in a month—seeping into the fabric like a signature scrawled in the only language I can read.
Ink.
Blood.
Both belong to me.
She thinks contracts are cages. She thinks words on paper bind her to me, that the elaborate legal documents with their witness signatures and embossed seals are what keep her here in this sprawling estate with its endless corridors and locked doors.
She’s wrong.
Those were only the prelude, the overture to a symphony already composed. I would’ve taken her without them. I would’ve found her without signatures or witnesses or permission, would have tracked her across continents if necessary, followed the scent of her defiance like a predator following blood through snow.
The contract was never for me.
It was for her.
Proof. A map. A reminder that what she calls coincidence is destiny written clean in black and red, in ink that cannot fade and blood that has already dried into permanence.
That before she ever spat curses in my face, before she ever shattered the antique mirror in the east wing with her bare fists, before she ever screamed at the silence of these stone walls, she was already marked. Already mine.
Placed.
The first time I saw her, I knew. That alley years ago—rain-slicked cobblestones in the oldest part of the city, where street lamps cast jaundiced light on crumbling brick and the air tasted of rust and desperation—wasn’t chance.
It was design.
A story already drafted in ink invisible to everyone but me. A girl already broken, fragmented into beautiful pieces, waiting for me to collect the shards and remake her into something sharper, something that could cut us both.
She doesn’t remember all of it. Not yet. The mind is merciful in ways the body never is. She remembers the blood on her leg, warm and wet against her skin. The rain, cold and relentless, drumming against the pavement like fingers on glass. My laugh, sharp and wrong in the darkness. But she doesn’t remember what came after—what I did to make sure she survived longenough to end up here, in this room, on these sheets, with my name carved into her consciousness like a brand.
