Without it, I was truly blind.
I stood. Not because I was obedient. Because the grip on my arm gave me no choice. He was already pulling me off the bench, andmy hip caught the edge of the piano as he did, a flare of pain blooming through my side.
"You're hurting me."
He didn't respond.
I was walked through the restaurant at a fast pace. My shoulder clipped a wall. My shin cracked against something metal—a table leg, maybe a stand—and I stumbled, and his hand tightened but he didn't slow down. Didn't adjust his pace. Didn't murmurwatch your steporchair to the leftor any of the small navigational corrections that had become second nature between us.
He was stripping my world down. Piece by piece. Taking my dignity.
I wanted to believe this was something else. A fight we'd have later, something I'd said or hadn't said, some new pressure from Viktor that had turned him cold and mechanical.
But my body knew. The animal part of me—the part that lived closer to the surface since the accident, the part that tracked danger by scent and sound and the weight of attention on my skin—that part was already screaming a warning in my head.
Something had broken between us.
The night air hit my face and I smelled asphalt and exhaust. A car door opened and I was shoved inside. My skull bounced off the frame as he pushed me in, and for a second the darkness behind my eyes went white with pain, sparks firing across the void like a faulty circuit board. I reached for the opposite door handle on instinct—escape, orientation, something to hold—and found it locked.
Child locks. The back doors didn't open from the inside.
Milo got in the passenger seat, which meant someone else was driving, but I didn't recognize anything about them. There were no distinct sounds or smells. It was eerie.
The car started, and we pulled out of the parking lot. I tried to track the turns. Left turn. Acceleration. Highway on-ramp maybe? The texture of the road changed beneath the tires, becoming smoother, the ambient noise opening up as the city fell away. We merged into traffic. Yes, we were on the highway.
The hum of other vehicles surrounded us, then thinned as we moved further from downtown.
"Where are we going?"
Silence.
"Milo. Talk to me."
Nothing. Just the road and the engine and his breathing, which was controlled in a way that frightened me more than the silence.
"Who's driving this car?"
More silence.
We drove for probably close to an hour before the highway ended and we turned onto a smaller road. It was rough and poorly maintained, the car bouncing over patches and potholes. Then gravel. The crunch of it under the tires was loud and uneven, and the car slowed to a crawl.
Then we stopped.
The driver killed the engine.
Silence rushed in. Not city silence, which was never truly silent. There was always a siren somewhere, always a bass line thumping from a passing car, always the low-frequency hum of so many people existing within earshot. This was different. This was empty. Open-air silence broken only by wind and insects and, somewhere distant, the wooden groan of a structure shifting in a breeze.
He opened my door and pulled me out.
The ground was uneven and my heels sank and twisted. I reached for his arm to steady myself, and he let me hold on just long enough to get my footing before pulling away.
He led me forward. Fifteen steps across the uneven ground, then a threshold metal, from the sound my shoes made crossing it—and the acoustics changed instantly. Sounds now bounced off distant walls and a low ceiling. An empty barn or warehouse, maybe? But where the hell would a warehouse be in the middle of nowhere?
But not entirely empty.
I heard him before I placed him. A shift of weight and the creak of a metal chair.
Then came the smell.
