“There’s always a reason we turn out the way we do,” she says gently. Her fingers shift, more of them coming to rest against myscar. She traces the line of it, her touch gossamer-soft, and each faint brush of her skin sends a flicker of unease flashing through me. “Do you remember anything from when you were younger?”
My breath catches. When I inhale, it comes out uneven. My temples throb with a slow, blooming ache, and I blink against the sudden dizziness pressing at the edges of my vision.
“Yes,” I answer before I even decide to. The word slips out too fast, too honest. Bile strikes the back of my throat as my mind flickers through a series of memories that feel like glass shattering behind my eyes.
“I know you lied about your parents,” she says softly, her voice calm, almost eerily steady. “I didn’t care about it then, so I never questioned it. But now I know what happened.”
My lip trembles, and a jolt shoots through my entire body. My pulse races, thundering in my throat, urging me to rise, to escape this conversation.
And I hate it. I hate that I feel this way.
My parents were good people. They didn’t deserve any of this. There’s no reason for the chaos inside me, no justification for the fire that burns at the edges of my mind.
I am the way I am because The Order took them from me. I was meant to inherit, to lead, to build the legacy they left behind.
“You’re doing it again,” Estella’s voice floats to me, but I barely hear it. It feels like I’m being pulled from the deepest recesses of my brain, tugged between awareness and the fog that refuses to lift, dragging me back, forcing me to stay buried in myself.
A warm touch grazes my face, and I blink. Her features come into focus, wide, intense eyes staring at me like she’s peering straight into the fractures of my soul. She reads me as though I were an open book, her gaze illuminating the cracks, shining light into the shadows I keep hidden.
The sensation is sharp, unsettling, and yet—slowly, piece by piece—the weight pressing on me begins to ease, the boulder on my chest fracturing, crumbling.
Her thumbs sweep across my cheeks, soft and grounding, the only anchor keeping me tethered to this world. “Now I see it,” she murmurs. “You didn’t become this way because you woke up one day and decided you’re not normal, Dante. Tell me…whatdid they do to you?”
A hard swallow travels down my throat. “There was… noise. Always,” I choke out, my vision blurring. Panic coils through me, an invisible fire licking at my veins, burning me alive.
Shard by jagged shard, the memories claw their way to the surface. They slice into my palms, spilling my blood into the murky light, dripping into the stained glass of recollection, hot and sticky with despair.
“Who?”
A fragmented image ignites in my mind. Estella’s face fades into the background as the memories take center stage, polaroids of anguish assembling themselves in my mind’s eye. Their edges are burned, smelling of helplessness, smoke, and despair.
“My father,” I rasp. The words scrape across my tongue like acid. My skin tingles, my body recoiling instinctively as if speaking it aloud conjures the monster once more.
Estella doesn’t push. Her thumbs remain on my cheeks, tracing slow, soothing circles. Quietly, she probes, “Was it the noise, or what cameafterit?”
I exhale sharply through my nose, my temples aching as if the act of remembering is physically unspooling me. It feels like we’re feeding something dark and hungry within me—a creature roused by my own memories, thriving on the despair that lingers in the corners of my mind.
“I don’t think I remember,” I whisper, shaking my head. “But maybe the quiet. The quiet meant giving in… giving in to how bad it would be after.”
I do not know if the words make sense, but they keep spilling out of me, tense yet strangely fluid. Each one feels like I am peeling away the top layer of my own skin, exposing myself to something bitter and cold.
Hell is not fire. It’sice.
The ice that settled after he finished what he did, after the last sparks from his burns went silent and left only the hollow chill behind. The kind of cold that clung to me for years, long after the noise stopped.
“And now you make the choice,” she says quietly. “You control every sound and every movement so you never have to wait for the quiet again.”
I nod, unable to find a single word of my own. She speaks for me, lifting the sentences off my tongue because she knows how hard it is for me to give them shape. She threads my pain together with hers, stitching two broken histories into something that can breathe.
She has lived through it too.
My chest rises sharply, the memories burning through my lungs. They never left me. I shoved them deep into some forgotten corner of my mind and let delusion wrap itself around the truth. I changed my purpose over and over, hoping it would erase them.
It never did.
“But I miss them,” I whisper. The sound breaks against the stillness of the room. Candle shadows sway on the walls, their flicker echoing the small flame inside me that refuses to die out.
The confession is only half real. I do not feel longing, not in the way I claim, yet there is still a faint glow in the darkness,something that makes me think I should keep going, keep avenging them. I do not know why that ember refuses to go out.
