She told me I’d be safe if I didn’t make a sound. She told me he’d take someone else if I was good enough. She told me she wouldn’t leave.
But she did.
The betrayal isn’t a sharp cut; it’s a slow rot. She left me in the quiet place. She walked out of the dark and left me to become a part of it. She forgot. She scrubbed the wax stains from her knees and the ash from her heart and left me to burn.
And now I have to keep her here.
Tight.
Caged.
Locked so deep she can’t crawl out of me again. I need her so close that our heartbeats lose their individual rhythm and become one singular, thundering pulse. I need her so trapped that her memories have nowhere to go but back to me.
The chain rattles when she shifts on my lap, a sharp, metallic bite that cuts through the hum of the surveillance monitors. The sound is a symphony. The weight of it soothes the buzzing in my teeth, the itch in my spine, the ache in the place where she leftme. The cold iron is the only thing that feels solid in a world built on her amnesia.
I bury my hand in her hair, the strands catching against the callouses of my palms, and press my lips to her temple. My skin feels like fire against hers.
“You won’t forget me this time.”
She shudders in my arms, a violent, full-body tremor that travels from her shoulders down to the tips of her toes.
Good.
She should feel me there. She should feel the weight of every second I spent waiting. She should feel me like I feel her—splintered across my ribs, stitched under my skin, carved between the cracks of the place I never crawled out of. I am the scar she can’t see, the shadow she can’t outrun.
The quiet place.
I drag my fingers down the chain, the links clinking in a slow, rhythmic count. Cold metal coiling in my palm like a sleeping snake.
“You promised you’d save me.” Her breath stutters against my neck, a warm, moist puff of air that makes my vision blur. “You promised.”
The words loop. They’ve always looped. In the basement. In the chapel. In the years of silence that followed. They are the only record of the girl she used to be.
They’ve always looped.
I can’t remember the first time I said them. Maybe I never stopped. Maybe my entire life has just been one long, exhaled breath of that broken promise.
I press my mouth to her pulse, soft, careful, tasting the salt of her skin and the frantic echo of the promise she forgot. It beats against my lips—save me, save me, save me.
I close my eyes.
And I see it.
The chapel door. The heavy oak, scarred with age. The one that never shut. The one that stood ajar like a mouth waiting to swallow us whole. The one I thought would save me if I closed it hard enough, if I threw my weight against it until my bones cracked.
But it never did. It never stayed closed. The world always found its way back in.
I see her.
Little hands. Small, pale, and dirt-smudged. Braiding my hair. Counting my breaths—one, two, three.Telling me to stay still. Telling me to be quiet. Telling me that if I disappeared into the floorboards, I’d be invisible.
I see the priest.
His shoes. Polished black leather that reflected the candlelight. His rosary. The clicking of the beads like a countdown.
I hear his voice telling me I was good when I stayed. I hear the way he praised my silence, the way he treated my terror like a gift.
I hear her voice telling me I’d be safe if I didn’t scream. Her voice was the only thing that kept me from shattering, and it was the very thing that bound me to the altar.
