"You're torturing yourself with hypotheticals."
He was right, but admitting it felt like failure too. Another mark in the wrong column. Can't die properly, can't process trauma properly, can't even obsess properly.
"I need to understand," I whispered. "The evidence says one thing, but my memories... He made me feel special. Chosen. How do I reconcile that with being just another number in a ledger?"
"Maybe he did think you were special. Maybe that's why you're still alive." Nathan pulled me against him, my back to his chest. "Abusers aren't cartoon villains. They can feel genuine affection for their victims while still being monsters."
The word hit like cold water. Abuser. I'd never used it before, never let it cross my lips in connection with Gabriel.
"He didn't abuse me," I said automatically, then heard how hollow it sounded. "I mean, he... What he did was..."
"What would you call it if you heard about someone else experiencing what you did?"
The question hung in the dark between us. What would I call it? If my neighbor told me someone had put an explosive collar on her, isolated her, controlled her every movement, programmed her to self-destruct when abandoned?
"Abuse," I admitted, the word scraping my throat raw. "I'd call it abuse."
Nathan's arms tightened around me, but he didn't speak. Didn't need to. The word settled into my bones, rearranging more furniture. Abuse. Abuser. Abused. Such simple syllables for such a complex reality.
"I should sleep," I said eventually.
"Should and will are different things."
"I'll have nightmares."
"Then I'll wake you up."
It sounded so simple when he said it. Like nightmares were just inconveniences to be managed rather than torture chambers I built for myself each night. But I was tired of fighting sleep, tired of losing to it anyway. I let him arrange us under covers, his warmth at my back like armor against the dark.
Sleep came like drowning, pulling me under into memories turned monstrous.
I was in the pink room again, but the walls breathed. In. Out. In. Out. Like being inside a living thing. Gabriel stood in the center, but wrong. His face kept shifting—sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, sometimes nothing but numbers where features should be.
"My special girl," he said, but his voice was a spreadsheet. "My greatest failure."
The collar around my neck wasn't metal. It was paper, covered in tiny writing. All the names of the dead girls. S-117. S-118. S-119. They whispered their stories as the paper tightened, cutting into skin.
"You were supposed to join us," they chorused. "Why didn't you die properly?"
I tried to explain, but my mouth was full of pills. White ones, blue ones, red ones. All the ways I should have ended it. Gabriel watched with clipboard in hand, making notes.
"Suboptimal outcome," he murmured. "Subject shows excessive survival instinct. Recommend increased conditioning."
The chair appeared—his favorite tool. But when I sat, it was made of bones. Other girls' bones. They held me in place while electricity coursed through, not physical but emotional. Pure distilled abandonment injected directly into my nervous system.
"This is love," Gabriel explained, increasing the voltage. "If you loved me properly, this would kill you."
I screamed, but it came out as laughter. High, bright, broken. The little girl voice he'd cultivated.
"Silly bunny," I heard myself say. "Death is for successful experiments."
The room filled with water then. Dark water full of floating papers. Case files. Death certificates. Love letters written in blood. I tried to swim, but the collar dragged me down. This is it, I thought. Finally doing it right.
But I couldn't sink. Kept bobbing to the surface no matter how hard I tried to drown. Gabriel shook his head, disappointed.
"Even your death is defective," he sighed, then started cutting. Not my skin. My shadow. Separating me from it with surgical precision. "Let's see if we can fix that."
I woke up swinging, fight response in full activation before consciousness caught up. Nathan caught my wrists, gentle but firm, already talking.
