I whisper, broken, trembling:
“I will never say it.”
The walls don’t answer. The camera’s red light blinks steady, watching. Always watching.
But the silence betrays me because even as I whisper, I feel it rising in my chest, traitorous, sharp as glass and hot as fire. The word he wants. The word I swore I’d never give.
I press my bleeding hand against my mouth, biting down until copper floods my tongue, choking it back and yet it hums louder, a heartbeat I can’t silence.
Love.
I squeeze my eyes shut, curl tighter into myself, and pray for hate to drown it. But hate feels thin now, fraying around the edges. Every cut he made sings. Every bruise burns. Every mark whispers the same vow he branded into me.
Not alive. Not whole. Not even in death.
Forever.
For the first time, I don’t know if that’s a promise or a prayer.
The silence is heavier than his hands ever were.
It presses against me, suffocates me, louder than his voice, louder than his thrusts, louder than the hook when it carved across my chest.
I try to curl tighter, to make myself smaller, to fold into a space where he can’t reach me. But the cage has no corners. The walls bleed into me. The sheets stink of him. Even the mirror reflects me as something I don’t recognise—bloodied, branded, marked.
My pulse won’t slow. It stutters, frantic, desperate, as if it knows there’s no safe rhythm left.
The word he wants hums louder.
Love.
It rattles against my ribs like a bird trying to escape.
I slam my bleeding hand against my chest, press it down hard over my heart as if I can crush it, as if I can bleed it out. My nails dig crescents into my skin, pain searing sharp, and for a breath I almost believe I’m winning.
Then his face floods the darkness behind my eyes—the curve of his mouth when I nearly cut his throat, the wild hunger when I ground down on him, the raw rasp of his voice when he said he’d loved me from the moment he wanted to kill me.
The fire flares again.
I hate him. I hate him.
My body betrays me even here, clenched and aching, slick and shivering, as if it’s starving for the monster I swore I’d never need.
I sob into the mattress, muffled, pathetic, shaking until my throat feels raw and my lungs scrape for air. The cage answers back with silence, with the blink of the camera’s red eye, with the endless echo of the vow he branded into my skin.
Forever.
The word swallows me whole. Hate collapses in on itself. Love twists sharp in the wreckage.
Somewhere between the two, I break again.
My body finally gives out. The sobs fade into shallow gasps, my limbs trembling, heavy, leaden. My eyes sting, blur, burn, until exhaustion claws me under.
Even as sleep drags me down, the silence doesn’t loosen.
It whispers the word he wants.
The word I’ll never say.
