One day, she will.
And when she does, she’ll hate me more than anything else alive. More than God, more than death, more than the cancer that took her mother or the father who sold her to lesser men before I claimed what was rightfully mine.
And still—she’ll stay.
Because hate is just another name for worship when it runs deep enough, when it burrows into bone and makes a home in marrow. Because she understands, even if she won’t admit it, that I am the only god she’ll ever need.
My hand drifts across the mahogany desk to the folder I keep locked tighter than any door in this sprawling estate—tighter than the wine cellar, tighter than the vault where I store the things I’ve taken from those who dared to touch what wasn’t theirs.
The leather portfolio is worn at the edges, softened by years of handling, and the brass lock gleams dully in the lamplight. Inside: pages spotted with old blood, brittle with time, yellowed at the edges like ancient parchment. Her name in ink that’s faded but still legible, still damning. Receipts. Letters. Promises made by men who thought they had the right.
Proof that she was never free.
I should burn it. Tear it up, feed it to the fireplace in the library where flames consume everything I decide to erase from existence. Free myself from the lie of bureaucracy and leave nothing but the truth—her body in my bed, my name in her mouth, my fingerprints on her skin. But I don’t.
Because she needs to see it.
She needs to choke on it, needs to feel the paper between her fingers and understand that every word, every clause, everygoddamned signature was another nail in a coffin she climbed into willingly, even if she didn’t know what she was agreeing to.
She needs to bleed on every page until she understands that the cage isn’t paper. It isn’t steel. It isn’t the locks on the doors or the cameras in the corners or the silence that presses against the windows like a living thing.
It’s me.
I am the contract.
Signed in her scars.
Stamped in her sobs.
Sealed in her blood.
The monitor flickers again, static hissing like a warning, like the whisper of something watching us both. The surveillance equipment is top-of-the-line—military grade, impossible to detect, wired through walls built a century ago when this house served a different kind of prison—but I don’t look away. I never look away.
I watch her whisper something into the dark, lips shaping my name like a dare, like a plea, like a prayer to a god who has already decided her fate. She doesn’t think I hear it. She doesn’t think I’m listening, doesn’t know that every room in this estate is wired for sound, that I can hear her heartbeat from here if I focus hard enough.
I always am.
Her voice is ink.
My obsession is blood and together, they write a story neither of us gets to escape.
The folder is heavy in my hands, heavier than it should be—paper doesn’t weigh much, but history does. Every page is a brick in the wall that keeps her here, every scrawled note and stamped seal another stone in the coffin she keeps pretending she hasn’t already climbed into.
The weight of it presses against my palms like a living thing, like guilt given form, though I’ve never felt guilty about anything I’ve done to keep her.
I spread them across the desk like an altar, like offerings to a religion only I practise. The wood is cool beneath my fingers, polished to a mirror shine that reflects the documents in warped, distorted shapes. Her name repeats in a chorus of signatures, margins filled with notations from men who thought they were gods, deciding what a girl was worth.
The ink has bled over the years, some of it water-damaged from the flood that nearly destroyed the east wing, some of it blood. Mine. Theirs. It doesn’t matter any more.
I trace one line with my finger, the pad of my thumb smudging ink that refuses to stay fixed on the page. Her birthday. Not written with sentiment, but as a fact, as proof, as evidence in a case that will never see a courtroom.
A date that bound her long before I ever touched her, long before I knew her face or her voice or the way she screams when she thinks no one is listening.
“You were mine the moment you breathed,” I whisper into the dark, my voice barely audible over the hum of the monitors and the distant creak of the house settling into night.
On the monitor, she shifts. The movement is small, barely perceptible, but I notice everything. Her hand twitches around the necklace, blood smearing the charm—a delicate silver thing I gave her, engraved with words she hasn’t yet learned to read.
She’s still awake. The tension in her shoulders gives her away, the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the way her fingers curl and uncurl against the silk. Good. Let her feel me in the silence, even when I’m not there. Let her think the absence is punishment. It is.
