The silence settled over us again, heavier this time, weighted with all the things left unsaid. I could feel exhaustion creeping in at the edges—my body’s way of trying to shut down, to escape the reality of the situation. My throat ached with a deep, persistent throb. My wrists burned where the cuffs had rubbed the skin raw, blood drying in dark streaks. Everything hurt.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to cry. Wanted to throw myself at him and claw his eyes out, to hurt him the way he’d hurt me.
Instead, I just sat there, staring at the cooling pasta on the plate between us, watching steam rise and dissipate into nothing.
He must have sensed that I was done talking, that whatever fragile truce we’d reached had run its course.
“Is there anything you’d like me to bring you?” His voice was careful, almost gentle. “Anything you’d like to eat?”
The question was so absurd, so mind-numbingly normal in the context of everything else, that I almost laughed. The urge bubbled up in my chest, hysterical and sharp-edged. Instead, I remained silent. Refused to give him anything—not my voice, not my cooperation, not even my anger anymore.
He waited for a response that didn’t come.
Finally, he sighed—a tired, defeated sound—and stood. The chair scraped against the concrete floor as he pushed it back.
His footsteps were slow on the stairs. At the top, he paused, and I thought he might say something else. Offer another apology that meant nothing, or make another empty gesture.
But he just left.
And I was alone again in the semi-darkness, with nothing but my thoughts and the phantom sensation of hands around my throat.
I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how he’d known exactly where to press, how he knew how much pressure to apply in order to choke me unconscious without crushing my windpipe.
Like he’d done it before.
Like he’d practiced on other people, learning it from experience.
The thought should have terrified me. But instead, it just made me angrier—that cold, burning rage that had nowhere to go, no outlet except to sit in my chest and fester like an infection.
I wasn’t going to give up. Wasn’t going to break.
He might have caught me, might have chained me in his basement, might have stolen my freedom.
But he hadn’t won.
Not yet.
14
Shay
Days continued to dissolve into one another.
Tom delivered meals three times a day.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
The rhythm should have helped me keep track, giving me something solid to hold onto. But the meals themselves had begun to blur together—the food cooling untouched on the plate, Tom’s increasingly desperate pleas forming a kind of white noise I’d learned to tune out.
There was a moth.
Small and brown, utterly unremarkable except for the fact that it had somehow found its way into this concrete tomb. I’d been watching it for what felt like hours, though that too was impossible to verify. It circled the single exposed bulb overhead in lazy, hypnotic loops—rising and descending in a pattern that should have been boring but wasn’t. Sometimes it would land on the rough concrete wall to rest, wings folded flat against its body. Then, after a few minutes of stillness, it would launch itself back into the air and resume its pointless orbit around the light.
I understood the impulse. The need to keep moving even when there was nowhere to go.
The moth never seemed to learn that the light would burn it if it got too close. Never adjusted its trajectory, never flew toward the shadows where it might actually be safe. It just kept circling, pulled by some primal instinct toward something that would eventually destroy it.
Stupid thing.
