I swing harder. The charm snaps against the crack, splitting the fracture wider, a spiderweb stretching across my reflection like lightning frozen in glass.
My face breaks into pieces—eyes scattered across the surface, mouth split between different versions of me, blood dripping down both halves until I can’t tell which side of me is smiling and which side is sobbing, which side is sane and which side drowned weeks ago.
“Come on,” I whisper to the silence, voice hoarse and cracking. To him. To the ghost in the walls, the monster who lives in the spaces between breaths. “Don’t you want to watch me ruin myself? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
The red light in the corner doesn’t blink faster. The lens doesn’t move. The silence doesn’t shift, doesn’t crack, doesn’t give me anything. He doesn’t come.
I slam the necklace again. Again. The chain cuts my palm deeper, blood slick now, slipping, staining the glass until the whole surface glows crimson in the firelight, until it looks like something sacrificial. The mirror trembles in its gilded frame but doesn’t fall, held fast by screws driven deep into stone walls.
I laugh harder. Hysterical. Splintered. The sound scrapes my throat raw, shreds whatever’s left of my voice, but I don’t stop. Can’t stop.
I claw at the crack with my nails, desperate to force it wider, desperate to see something finally break the way I have. Shards catch my skin, slice thin ribbons across my fingers, my wrists, my forearms, but I press harder, harder, until every touch leaves streaks of red across the glass like war paint.
The girl staring back is a monster now. Hair wild and matted, eyes bloodshot and feral, lips twisted into something that might be a smile or might be a snarl, chin smeared in crimson like she’s been feeding. She looks like she’s been feeding on rage and silence for days, sustaining herself on fury and spite. She looks like Hook’s creation. His masterpiece of ruin.
I slam my fist into the mirror. Once. Twice. A scream tears loose with it, raw and high and hollow, ripping through the room and echoing off the vaulted ceiling. The glass shatters finally, exploding outwards, raining down in glittering knives that catch the firelight as they fall, beautiful and deadly.
Pain blooms across my knuckles, bright and alive and so beautifully real. Blood drips down my arm in thick rivulets, painting lines across pale skin.
I collapse to my knees in the wreckage, breath shuddering, chest heaving, surrounded by shattered glass and my own destruction.
The shards glitter around me like stars scattered across the dark hardwood floor, like diamonds, like promises that cut. I pick one up—a particularly vicious piece, long and sharp and perfect—press it flat to my throat. Cold. Sharp. Promising an end, promising silence, promising freedom from this endless game.
The silence leans closer, listening, waiting, holding its breath.
I press harder. A bead of blood wells where glass kisses skin, warm against the cold edge. My pulse hammers against the blade, screaming to be opened, begging for release, for an ending I can choose.
And then—I stop.
Because that would give him what he wants. That would be the easy way, the clean way, the way that makes me nothing but a tragedy he can mourn.
Death isn’t rebellion. It’s surrender. It’s letting him win.
And I’m not done yet.
I drop the shard. It splinters further against the floor, joining the constellation of my ruin, adding another star to the wreckage. My laugh dies in my chest, leaving only silence, heavy and raw, but this time it feels different. Not punishment. Not absence. Not the weight of his control pressing down on me.
War.
I press both hands to the blood-smeared floor and crawl back to the bed, leaving crimson prints behind me like signatures on a contract I never signed, like evidence of a crime still in progress. My body aches, muscles screaming, my skin stings from a hundred tiny cuts, but my eyes burn bright with something new. Something sharp.
He’ll see it when he comes.
He’ll see what I made of his cage.
He’ll see what I became without him, what his absence created.
And he’ll bleed for it.
I curl into the sheets, broken glass still glittering at the edge of the mattress like a border between his world and mine, necklace clutched in my fist—a weapon now, not a gift—blood drying sticky between my fingers, under my nails, in the creases of my palms.
“Your move, Hook,” I whisper into the darkness, into the camera, into the silence that carries my words to him wherever he is watching from.
And then I close my eyes.
Not to sleep.
To sharpen.
