He shoves the chair I’m tied to forward. It clatters to the concrete floor and I spill out with it, my body hitting the ground with a jarring thud that sends fresh volts of pain through my head. He’s on me in an instant, his weight crushing, his hands rough and impatient.
The coarse concrete scrapes my cheek and the raw, bloody sides of my head. He fumbles with his jeans, yanking at my dress, ripping it from my body. I try to curl into a ball, to protect what little of me is left but he is too strong, too heavy.
He forces my legs apart, and the violation is absolute.
It is a different kind of cutting, a deeper, more intimate mutilation. I am being unmade from the inside out now. He rams into me with a brutal, rhythmic piston of hate. Each thrust is a hammer blow, shaking my broken body, jostling the horrific wounds on my head. The pain is a symphony of horrors, each note a scream.
He grabs a handful of my hair, yanking my head back, and puts his mouth next to my remaining hearing. His words are hot and foul.
“Scream, bitch,” he grunts, driving himself deeper. “Let him hear you. Let all the Brethren hear how I fuck Antonio Macrae’s fat whore of a wife.”
The warehouse, the men, the weight on top of me, it all blurs into a smear of light and sound. The only thing that is real is the agony and the terrifying, silent knowledge that echoes in the void where my ears used to be.
I cannot escape this. I cannot survive this either.
The darkness at the edges of my vision surges forward in a merciful, black wave. I feel myself slipping, falling away from the pain, from the horror, from the feeling of being so utterly, completely, and terminally alone.
I let go. There is nothing left to hold on to.
Iam a thing.
A vessel.
Not Grace.
Grace is somewhere else, floating near the water-stained ceiling, watching the thing that used to be her get used. She doesn’t have to feel it from up there. She just watches with a dull, clinical curiosity, like a student observing a specimen pinned to a board.
The door creaks open. The sound is like a rusty nail being driven into my skull. Footsteps. Heavy, booted. I don’t look, looking invites attention. Being a thing is easier if you are quiet, unmoving.
A shadow falls over me. I stare at a crack in the floor, tracing its jagged path with my eyes. It looks like a lightning bolt frozen in grey stone.
Hands grab my hips, rough and impersonal, flipping me onto my stomach as the concrete grinds against the raw skin of my breasts. I don’t make a sound. The sounds died days ago, locked behind my teeth.
He doesn’t speak. They rarely do.
Words are for people, and I am not a person here.
The weight comes down. A grunt. Then that familiar, brutal invasion. My body accepts it the way mud accepts rain.
There is no resistance left. My mind simply… leaves.
It’s a skill I never knew I had, a skill I wish I’d discovered months ago. This neat trick of severing the connection between my body and my consciousness. He is a machine, piston-like and relentless, and I am the damp earth he churns up.
His breath is hot and sour on the back of my neck. His grunts are rhythmic, animalistic. Each one is a hammer blow driving me further out of myself.
Is this it?The thought surfaces from the murky depths, a bubble of air from a drowning woman.Is this what my life is? Am I always destined to be a thing to be fucked, to be used, to never be seen as human?
The concept of a future, of an ‘after’, feels like a fairy tale I was told once, a long time ago.
I know there is no ‘after.’
There is only this cold floor, this weight, this grinding, endless now.
Antonio feels like a dream – I could almost laugh at that. The soft linen of his bedsheets, the heady scent of his cologne. The way he’d trace my spine with a single, possessive finger… it’s all a story that happened to another girl in another world.
This is my world. This grey, painful never-ending hell.
My eyes focus on my hands, splayed out on the floor in front of my face. They look like a stranger’s hands. Pale, dirty, trembling slightly. The nails are broken, caked with grime and something darker, something rusty-brown that might be blood. My blood most likely.
