Placed.
Owned.
The words chase me, even in dreams. Especially in dreams, where they take shape and substance, where they become monsters with teeth. I see his handwriting in the dark behind my eyelids, scrawled across the sky, across my skin, across the mirror that cracks every time I look at it.
His voice murmurs the lines like scripture, low and reverent, like he believes them more than he believes in God. Like I’m his religion and he’s a zealot willing to burn the world.
I press my palm flat against the sheets. They’re damp, soaked through in places. I don’t know if it’s sweat or blood or tears I don’t remember crying. I don’t care. I drag my fingers through it anyway, paint it across my thigh, mark myself like he would’ve, claim the violence before he can. Take back what’s mine, even if it’s just pain.
“Not yours,” I whisper into the darkness, but the word tastes like a lie, bitter on my tongue. The syllables feel wrong in my mouth, unconvincing even to me.
When I close my eyes, I still feel him. In the silence that presses against my eardrums like hands. In the red blink of the camera mounted in the corner behind the ornate moulding, its tiny light pulsing like a heartbeat.
In the air itself, thick with the ghost of smoke and dust and want that seeps through the floorboards from whatever room he’s in. He’s here even when he isn’t. Especially when he isn’t. His absence is a presence all its own, heavy and watching.
I hate him for it.
I hate that he doesn’t need chains any more.
I hate that he’s taught my body to kneel without asking, without force, without anything but the weight of his gaze through a lens.
The mirror watches me from the wall, an antique thing in a gilded frame that probably belonged to some dead aristocrat. The crack splits my reflection in two again, sharper this time, more jagged, like it’s grown overnight, spreading like veins through glass. Like it’s alive.
I crawl to it on shaking knees, silk nightgown clinging to my thighs, bare feet sliding on the polished hardwood floor that’s cold despite the fire. Press my fingertips to the fracture until glass bites, until thin lines of red bloom across my skin like ink blots.
Splinters.
That’s all I am now.
Shards of a girl who used to be whole. Fragments of someone who had a name before it became a signature on his documents.
And the worst part? I don’t even want to be whole any more. Whole girls are weak. Whole girls break easy.
I drag my bleeding fingers across the mirror, smearing the crack with streaks of crimson until both versions of me blur together, red-eyed and ruined, twin monsters in the firelight.
My chest heaves, my throat tight with something that might be sobs or might be laughter, but I smile at her anyway—the broken girl staring back, the one who looks like she’s been living in hell and learning to love it.
“Do you see it now?” I whisper to her. To me. To him, wherever he is in this labyrinth of stone and shadow. “You don’t own me. Not if I can break myself first. Not if I destroy what you want before you can take it.”
The glass doesn’t answer. Of course it doesn’t. Glass is honest that way. But the silence does, heavy and thick, pressing in from all sides.
Somewhere behind the walls—behind the faded wallpaper with its pattern of roses and thorns, behind the plaster and stone and centuries of secrets—I swear I hear the faintest hum. Like static. Like breathing. Like the mechanical whisper of surveillance equipment running through wires embedded in walls that have witnessed worse than me. Like him, listening, watching, waiting for me to break in exactly the way he wants.
And I laugh again. Low. Hollow.
Splintered like the glass beneath my fingers.
Because maybe that’s what survival is now—not fighting the cage, not screaming at locked doors or throwing myself against walls that won’t budge. But learning how to make the cage bleed. Learning how to cut it from the inside out.
The laugh won’t stop.
It crawls out of me like a curse, jagged and ugly, the sound of glass breaking in a throat that doesn’t know how to sing any more, that’s forgotten what music sounds like.
My forehead rests against the crack, cool and sharp, and I push harder until I feel it bite, until pain blooms bright and real and mine. The sting is small, insignificant, but it makes me real. Proves I still exist in a way that matters.
Blood beads where the glass kisses skin, a line of crimson pearls across my brow. I smear it across the surface with the heel of my hand, painting over my reflection until I don’t look like a girl any more. Until I look like something monstrous, something that belongs in fairy tales told to frighten children. Something he made.
The necklace chain dangles from my other fist, swinging lazy arcs against the mirror, catching firelight. I let it hit once. Twice. The clink echoes like the clock I destroyed days ago—smashed it against the wall until time meant nothing—a reminder of time I don’t have, time I don’t own, time that belongs to him like everything else.
