That’s what eats at me the most. Not the lie. Not the sentence. Not the years stripped from my life and fed to this place.
It’s that she stood there and pretended I was nothing when I was fucking everything.
I slam my fist into the floor, pain cracking up my arm. It feels good. Honest. My knuckles throb, skin splitting, and I welcome it. Blood is easier to deal with than betrayal.
“I would’ve burned the world for you,” I snarl into the empty cell. “I would’ve killed for you and smiled while I did it. And you stood there and let them put me in a cage like I was disposable.”
My chest heaves. I press my forehead into my knees, teeth clenched so hard my jaw aches.
“You didn’t just lie,” I say, quieter now, deadlier. “You erased me.”
The noise in the block swells and fades. Someone shouts. Someone laughs. Someone cries. It all washes over me, meaningless.
None of them matter.
Only her.
I shift, dragging my back up the wall until I’m sitting again, spine straight, eyes burning. I pick up a letter from the middle of the pile. This one’s newer. The last one I sent before I stopped pretending she’d answer.
I know you’re wearing a ring.
My mouth twitches.
I remember writing that line, pen hovering for a long time before the ink touched the page. I remember the calm that settled over me when I finally wrote it down.
I knew.
I’d always know.
“You thought I wouldn’t find out?” I whisper, amusement threading through the anger. “You thought distance would protect you?”
I shake my head slowly.
“I see everything, Scarlett. Even from in here.”
I stand abruptly, the motion sharp enough to make my head spin. The cell feels too small. The walls too close. I pace once, twice, boots scraping, breath coming fast and heavy.
“I counted the days,” I tell the air, my hands flexing at my sides. “Every single fucking one. Not because I missed freedom. Because I missed you.”
Missed isn’t even the right word. Missed implies absence without ownership.
She was never absent from me.
She was everywhere. In my head. In my blood. In the way my body reacted when I imagined her mouth on someone else’s name.
The thought twists something ugly and hot in my gut.
“No one touches you,” I growl. “Not without paying.”
I stop pacing and stare at the bars, fingers curling around the cold metal. I lean my forehead against them, eyes shut, breath fogging the steel.
“You think I don’t know you’re unhappy,” I murmur. “You think I don’t hear it in the silence. In the way you disappeared from yourself.”
She built a life that doesn’t fit because she’s wearing it like penance.
Good.
She should suffer. Just a little. Just enough to remember what she did.
