I looked like something dragged from a grave.
Something left behind after violence had finished feeding.
But the physical filth wasn’t what shattered me.
It was the inside.
Every time I closed my eyes, the images returned without mercy.
Hargrove’s face.
The knife going in.
The wet sound.
His scream.
My own scream.
The way power had surged through my veins as I watched him suffer.
The way satisfaction had flooded me before guilt crushed it.
I had killed him.
And for a brief moment—I had liked it.
That realization haunted me more than the act itself.
What did that make me?
A monster?
Or someone pushed too far?
I swallowed hard.
I wasn’t just a woman who had taken a life.
I was a mother who had failed to protect her unborn child.
A wife who might never see her husband again.
A daughter whose own father had beaten life out of her baby.
The memories attacked in waves.
My father’s boot slamming into my stomach.
The brutal force.
The scream that tore from me.
The blood between my thighs hours later.
The violent, twisting agony in my core after my body was forced to expel what it wasn’t ready to lose.
The pain that burrowed deep into my pelvis — sharp, stabbing spasms that still stole my breath.
