—T.F.
Tahlia
Iwake to the smell of iron.
It coats my tongue, thick and sour, seeping into my teeth, my throat, my lungs. The sheets are stiff with blood, dried into ridges that scrape against my thighs. Paper clings to my skin where sweat welded it in place, the ink blurred into bruises.
The mirror is gone, reduced to dust and shards. The girl in the glass is dead.
I touch my face and feel dried streaks of tears crusted against my cheeks. My fingers shake, split open and swollen from the glass, but I don’t flinch. Pain doesn’t scare me anymore. Pain is clean.
It’s him I should fear. The hook. The contract. The way he whispered into me even as I slept. I should be trembling. I should be begging for freedom.
When I press my palm flat against my stomach where his weight crushed me into the bed, my lips twist into something I don’t recognise.
A smile.
Small. Crooked. Sharp.
He thinks he owns me in ink and blood. He thinks the contract is complete but what he doesn’t understand is that I signed something else in the dark. Not with him. With myself.
A vow.
That I will outlast him.
That I will burn hotter than the cage he locked me in.
That I will make ruin my resurrection.
I drag myself upright, every muscle screaming, my body still slick with his claim, but I don’t crumble. I plant my feet on the glass-strewn floor, shards biting deep, and I welcome the sting. Each cut is another line in the new scripture I’m writing across my skin.
No mirror. No pages. No signatures.
Just me.
And the war I’m about to become.
The room stinks of him. Smoke. Sweat. Blood. My body aches with it, filled and emptied, claimed and ruined. For a moment, I think about curling back into the sheets, letting it swallow me whole. Letting him win.
I don’t.
I rise instead, slow, deliberate, each breath scraped raw through my throat. The glass cuts deeper with every step, shards grinding into the soles of my feet until I’m bleeding fresh across the floor. The pain sharpens me. Wakes me.
I crouch and sift through the wreckage of the mirror, picking a jagged piece of glass from the mess. My reflection stares back—fractured, wild-eyed, lips cracked. Not a girl. Not prey. Something else. Something with blood in her teeth.
I curl my hand around the shard until it bites into my palm, red dripping fast. I don’t let go. I let it brand me.
This isn’t his lesson anymore. It’s mine.
The cage was meant to silence me, to strip me down into obedience. But silence isn’t emptiness—it’s space. Space to think. To sharpen. To become something he can’t predict.
I move through the room, leaving bloody prints across the papers, across the bed frame, across the walls. My mark, not his. My body may be bound, but the room is mine now.
The necklace lies tangled in the sheets where I dropped it last night. I lift it, chain sticky with blood, charm bent and sharp. It cuts my fingers as I wind it around my wrist, tighter, tighter, until it bites deep.
A weapon disguised as jewellery. A collar disguised as choice.
Let him see it and think I’ve surrendered. Let him believe I’ve folded. He’ll never notice the moment I bite back until it’s already too late.
