The worst part came after.
Prime left me alone with Thad. His cousin. The man with the dead eyes who watched Prime saw off my ear like it was a TV show he wasn’t really paying attention to.
“I’ll be back,” Prime said. “Thad’s gonna watch you.”
And then he was gone.
And it was just me and Thad in that warehouse. Me tied to a chair, blood still leaking down my face, ear still throbbing where it used to be. Him standing in the corner, watching me like I was something he was deciding whether or not to eat.
At first he just stared. Minutes. Hours. I couldn’t tell anymore. Time had stopped meaning anything.
Then he walked over.
I don’t want to talk about what happened next.
I don’t want to remember the sounds he made. Grunting. Panting. This sick little laugh every time I tried to fight back, like my struggling was entertainment.
My mind left my body.
That’s the only way I can explain it. I floated up to the ceiling and watched from somewhere far away. Watched it happen to a girl who used to be me. A girl who used to believe in love. A girl who thought if she just loved hard enough, long enough, Prime would finally see her.
That girl died in that warehouse.
Thad killed her.
He did it more than once. I stopped counting after three. Stopped feeling anything at all. Just went somewhere deep inside myself where he couldn’t reach me and waited for it to be over.
By the time Prime came back, I couldn’t look at anyone. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t do nothing but curl into myself and pray for death.
And Prime? He ain’t notice shit. Ain’t ask what happened. Ain’t see nothing different about the woman he’d left versus the corpse he came back to.
Just traded me to my father like a broken toy he was done playing with.
That was five months ago.
Five months of rotting in this mansion while my body healed and my mind fell apart.
And then I found out about the baby.
I was scrolling through my phone one night—couldn’t sleep, never could anymore—when I saw it. Some society page posting photos from Sweet Zin before the grand opening. Prime standing behind Zainab, his hands wrapped around her stomach. Her stomach that was round. Swollen. PREGNANT.
I threw my phone so hard the screen shattered against the wall.
A baby. His baby. Growing inside HER.
While I was in that warehouse getting my ear sawed off and my body destroyed, she was out there getting pregnant with hischild. While Thad was ripping me apart, Prime was putting a baby in the woman who stole him from me.
The life that should’ve been MINE.
I bought a new phone the next day. And I went back to watching.
But different now. Obsessed now. I tracked her everywhere. I followed her to Target a few weeks ago. Watched her waddle through the baby section with that big swollen belly, touching little onesies and smiling at tiny socks like she deserved to be happy.
She bought a yellow blanket. Gender neutral. So she don’t know if it’s a boy or girl either.
But I could tell by how she was carrying—low and round—that it was probably a girl. Prime’s daughter. Growing inside a woman who wasn’t me.
I sat in my car in that parking lot and screamed until my throat was raw.
