“You don’t missthem, Dante,” she answers, her voice steady and soft. “You miss the comfort that came with their abuse. If someone is locked in a dark basement for long enough, the light outside becomes terrifying. It shapes them. It becomes their world, even if it is wrong. The dark becomes the safest place they know. Because it is familiar. Because it is all they ever had.”
“I remember one of the days when I didn’t want him to find me,” I begin, the words sliding out with a clarity that feels unnatural. They come easily, as if they were always meant to be told exactly like this, without resistance, without fear.
I don’t knowwhyit happens, but I just want to share this with her. To let those jagged fragments rise to the surface, no matter how agonizing it feels to speak them aloud. It is as if the pieces finally clawed their way free, and all I can do is offer them to her.
“I was looking out the window, terrified he would come back, and I didn’t notice how far I’d leaned out. My hands slipped, and I fell,” I say, a humorless, brittle chuckle scraping its way out of my throat.
The moment I speak it, the memory sharpens, cruel and vivid, leaving a sour taste behind. Slowly, the pain resurges—the impact, the breath knocked from my lungs, the burning sting that flared across my back and palms when the shards of glass buried themselves in my skin.
It was winter. The snow did nothing to cool the panic that flooded me. I remember the ice beneath me pressing into my spine, unforgiving and frozen solid, chilling my skin seconds before the blood began to spread.
Her lips touch my arms, light as a ghost’s whisper, and then her hands follow, gentle and steady. She doesn’t say a word. Shedoesn’t need to. Her silence rings with understanding born from her own broken history.
We are two sides of the same coin, mirror images forged from splintered glass and old agony. Somehow, in each other, those shards stop cutting quite so deeply.
For a long while, neither of us moves. The air thickens around us, heavy with everything unspoken. Eventually, I exhale, a tremor caught in the sound, and something inside me breaks open. For once, I don’t try to force it back into place.
Estella rests her head against my chest, and I let her. No resistance. No plan. No instinct to seize control. Just her warmth pressed against the echo of what I’ve been remembering.
My vision blurs, and my eyelids grow heavy, irritation stinging at their edges as if someone shoved onions beneath them. A single tear escapes before I can swallow it back.
I don’t fully register the moment I break. I just do. And it is not the dramatic collapse people imagine when someone uncovers a truth like this about themselves.
For me, it is quiet. A hollow ache that has drained me for so long, I no longer have the strength to speak or shape my thoughts into anything that makes sense.
I feel raw, stripped of every defense I’ve ever built. The familiar shame follows quickly—the shame that always arrives when I lose control. But she keeps touching me, soft and steady, and I let my eyes drift shut, soaking in the warmth of her palms.
And I know that when morning comes, I won’t be the same man I was before tonight.
My heart pounds so violently it climbs up my throat, choking the air and making each breath a struggle. It stutters out of me like the faltering engine of some old, dying machine. Heat blooms across my body, roaring in waves of scorching warmth that leave blazing traces across my skin. I can’t see it, but I can feel every pulsing surge.
A shaky exhale quivers through me, shuddering from the deepest corners of my body. I try to look down, to lift my hands, to anchor myself—but paralysis grips me like an iron vice, coiling tight over every inch of me.
Zings of electric pain shoot through me, short-circuiting my brain, igniting scorching streaks of agony. Hot, sticky bloodbegins to stream down my skin, forming rivers that burn as they flow.
I try to blink, but darkness swallows everything. My bloodstream is flooded with adrenaline, my heart hammering against my ribs, yet I cannot locate the source of this chaotic torrent of feeling. Sweat breaks free, coating me entirely, mingling with the blood, and the scent rises to choke the air around me.
Panic claws up from my chest, making each breath shallow and ragged. I attempt to move, only to discover I am trapped in an invisible cage, its walls sealed tight with no doors, no escape. Something wet drips down my cheeks, and I flinch.
Tears?
I can’t allow them. I can’t be so weak.
My mouth opens in a silent scream, the soundless roar inside me rising. A ringing pulses through my skull, vibrations smashing against the walls of my mind,draining me, piece by piece. I want to crawl out of my own body just to stop it, to claw at my skin and tear it away. My nerves are taut, strings stretched to the breaking point, ready to snap.
My pulse thunders in my ears, drowning everything else. My vision narrows to a tunnel, and I teeter on the edge of blacking out under the weight of my own sensations.
This isn’t the kind of fear Estella ever elicited—none of the sharp, electric hunger she commanded with her blade, none of the searing traces of passion she left branded on my skin.
No, this is raw, untamed terror, the kind that consumes everything.
Sweat and blood pour over me in rivers, sliding across every inch of skin, and I gasp for air. My eyes snap wide as a face draws closer, its features blurred and indistinct, the outline of something menacing pressing at the edge of my perception.
I know who it is—somewhere deep in the back of my mind, the realization spins like a warning caught in a cyclone. But no matter how hard I reach for it, the face stays out of focus. I can’t shape the features, can’t force the blur to break apart long enough to form something real, something solid. It slips through my grasp again and again, taunting me.
A muffled voice drifts into my ears, threading through the ringing and the thunder of my pulse. I try to clamp my hands over my ears, to shut it out, to bury myself in silence, but the paralysis holds me still.
I can’t block it. I can’t escape it.
