And she doesn’t say no.
She doesn’t speak the whole way back to wherever I’m taking her.
Doesn’t fight anymore.
Doesn’t run or try the door handles.
Just sits there—wrecked, ruined, trying to pull the strings of her pride back together like they didn’t snap around my fingers minutes ago.
The car becomes a container, sealed and moving. Leather creaking. Glass reflecting streetlights. Low vibration through the frame. The city outside sliding past like it’s already lost interest in her fate.
I don’t rush the journey.
I want her to sit in it.
I want her to feel every second of that slick heat between her thighs drying onto her skin, becoming part of her.
I want her to think about the mess I made of her and how fucking easy it was.
She thought she was sharp, thought she had edges. Thought she was flame but now she knows what fire does when it meets something colder, stronger, more patient.
It dies quietly and I don’t need to touch her again to prove it.
I just drive through the darkening streets.
Streetlights thin as we leave the city centre. Buildings give way to dark stretches of road where the silence grows heavier with every mile, stretching tight until it feels like a noose tightening.
And still—she doesn’t ask where we’re going.
She already knows she isn’t going home tonight.
I don’t live in Neverland anymore.
I own the land it burnt down on, bought the ashes and built something new.
And the castle I built from those ruins?
It’s for girls like her.
Glass girls. Fight girls. Girls with rage in their mouths and trauma in their bloodstreams and a death grip on independence that’s already starting to slip through their fingers.
She’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for, what I’ve spent years preparing for.
The gates appear without warning—iron and black, twisted like something grown instead of built, organic in their menace—and when they open, slow and deliberate on well-oiled hinges, she tenses, just a flicker, just enough to make me smile.
She hasn’t seen anything yet.
The car slows along the gravel drive, tyres crunching. Each sound beneath the wheels feels final, like punctuation at the end of a sentence. The house rises out of the dark like a secret the world buried too deep to unearth, all sharp angles and shadowed windows.
Three storeys of darkness.
No neighbours within sight. No exit visible.
And windows so tall they look like confessionals waiting for sins.
I stop the car in the circular drive.
Kill the engine with a press of the button.
