The cruelest thing I ever carried was hope, a fragile, shining parasite that lived inside me even when everything else in my world had already begun to rot. Hope told me lies in a voice so sweet I wanted to believe it, lies that promised if I was quiet enough, obedient enough,lovelyenough, Viktor Shaw might let me be more than a body to be arranged, a mouth to be silenced, a girl to be owned.
For a time I clung to that small, poisonous flame because the wanting was all I had, but when it finally flickered out, when I understood there was nothing waiting for me beyond what I had, a strange relief filled the hollow it left behind. It was easier, somehow, tolet myself unravel when I no longer believed there was something better to weave myself into.
Misery became a rhythm I could sway to. Tragedy became the air I breathed. Survival was all that remained, and maybe that’s why I lost so much. I couldn’t see hope when it stared me in the face. I’d forgotten its shape, its light, and I took it for granted.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was fourteen when Viktor pulled me from the cages of girls in his basement, and he named me. Once he did, the name clung like a shroud I could never lift.Doll. Not Arden. Doll. He spoke it like a sacred thing, and the sound of it fastened itself to my skin until I could no longer separate where he ended and I began. He took me from the cages, from the comfort of the girls who are now all dead or sold, and he gave me a room.
His room.
A Doll doesn’t dream, doesn’t resist, doesn’t even breathe without permission; she is dressed and painted, lips powdered into silence, eyes polished until they shine like glass. Viktor delighted in reminding me of my eyes, I think purely because he could see the death in them—death of self, of fight—but still that slightcontrast of hope, the fucker. I still had it, and it was killing me, but I couldn’t let it go. Not then. Not yet.
Such big, beautiful grey eyes. Look how you die for me, my Doll, he said, as if he’d cut me from stone with his own hands, and carved me into a solid, dependable plaything. In time, I began to believe that’s all I was, because belief was easier than the agony of fighting. And so my body was not mine, my voice was not mine, even my reflection did not belong to me anymore. I was his creation, and he had named me well.
The boys, during that time, were being forged into something else entirely. They were beaten into blades, their scars carrying meaning that mine never could. Their pain made them useful. Mine made me beautiful. Where their knuckles split and bled, mine were brushed over with powder and gloss. Where they learned the art of killing, I learned the art of stillness. Their rage was given permission to sharpen into power; mine was swallowed whole, tied up in ribbons, hidden beneath the kind of rules that made obedience seem holy. They had freedom in their violence. I had only fragility; I was a centerpiece bound in porcelain, a fragile thing that Viktor handled not with care but with the intentionof proving how exquisite it would be when I finally shattered.
We all have our cages though, don’t we? I wasn’t unique in my suffering, and as much as I grew up wanting to fight like Viktor’s boys did, I know some parts of me were spared for not being allowed to do so.
Have you ever seen a boy bleed out, seconds from death, but there’s no light to dim from his eyes because it was taken long ago? Boys fighting like they’re already corpses. That was what I watched from Viktor’s lap and then the laps of Viktor’s friends. It took me years to even understandwhy. What were they fighting for? What was Viktor’s business? I had no concept of, “I’m trapped with an evil man”, because an evil man was all I’d known.
But things started to click when I was nearing my fifteenth birthday and was allowed to start helping with the cleaning. Normally, Viktor kept me away from everyone. He didn’t want me tainted. But as his business grew, he was too busy to visit me as often.
“You will help the other girls,” he told me. “But you will always return to my bedroom by nine p.m., Doll.”
I hated nine p.m., but I loved the hours before. In them, I met Leah.
Leah was older than me, but not so much that she looked like the women Viktor entertained before he came to me. She still had a girl’s face, though thinner, sharper, the bones of it carved by hunger and whatever quiet cruelties she had endured when she first came to Viktor’s estate. But she moved like someone who still had some bravery left, even when she laughed. That was what struck me first, her laugh. It came out of her throat like broken glass, jagged and shining, a sound thatwasdefiance. I didn’t trust her, not at first. I didn’t trust anyone, and I especially didn’t trust someone with a laugh like that. How could I? Defiance was pounded out of me. But she slipped her hand into mine one afternoon when I was carrying cleaned towels to the hall, Viktor’s friends peering from a parlor filled with cigar smoke, and whispered,“Don’t look at the men watching. Look at me.”
She was the first person to speak to me like I was something other than Viktor’s possession. She even called me Arden. The other girls were kind enough, but their kindness was worn thin, mechanical, like theywere offering scraps from a table they had already been starved from. Leah, though…Leah had fire in her, a hidden ember that hadn’t yet gone out. She talked to me in brisk whispers when Viktor wasn’t listening, told me things she wasn’t supposed to say. About the boys who were training in the courtyard. About the women who came and went in the night. About the money, the power, the whispers that spread through Viktor’s halls like smoke. She gave me pieces of the world he had locked away from me, until my head was full of questions I couldn’t ask out loud.
We would sit on the floor scrubbing, side by side, and she’d nudge me with her elbow when my hands slowed, grinning. I didn’t know why, but I liked that shecouldgrin. Sometimes I wondered if she had guessed at the girl beneath the Doll Viktor made me into, if she could see the cracks. She never asked, though. She just held my gaze, daring me to remember I was alive.
Leah was dangerous that way. Dangerous because she reminded me of the shape of hope, just when I thought I had finally forgotten it.
Viktor noticed how close we became, and he made Leah the official Handler of the Doll. She dressed me,bathed me, painted my face and braided my hair. She became the sister I could curl against at night, bleeding from between my legs; the ride or die who took beatings with a smile.
“Always show your teeth, Arden,” she told me. “Always.”
She became my everything, and Viktor knew it. He was…an evil man but a smart man. He knew, as most adults do, that my problem years laid ahead, not behind. He knew I was entering womanhood, that my hormones would rage, and in turn, my questions would become more aggressive. He knew that very soon, I wouldn’t remain complacent without leverage.
Leah was a weapon against me, and I didn’t understand that until it was too late. If I misbehaved, chose autonomy in any way, Leah sported a new bruise. I was to remain Viktor’s Doll, or my hope suffered the price. That was Viktor. He was manipulative, intelligent, the worst mix of all humanity had to offer; and as I was allowed, with Leah handling me, to explore more of his estate, I learned its halls reflected exactly what kind of monster owned me.
Viktor’s wealth was built on the boredom of the wealthier.
There were rooms decorated to impress, halls built to hide, and corners thatsmelledof corrupt money. It was that musk of forced sex and the sweat of children, or the metallic tang of blood and the nose-burning sting of bleach. I fucking hated it, still do. I go to sleep now and smell it, lingering, pressing in,choking.
The house was a contradiction. Chandeliers glittered above parlors that reeked of cigars and brandy, while just a hallway away the air soured with mildew and unwashed linens, the kind of filth no amount of scrubbing could ever fully erase. The walls carried it all, the laughter of Viktor’s guests echoing down the same corridors where girls wept.
Every space had a purpose, every purpose held cruelty. Even the gardens seemed complicit, flowers clipped into shapes too precise to be natural, hedges standing like guards. Nothing was wild there. Nothing was free.
The courtyard, however, was a masterpiece in Viktor’s duality, a bright, hard space where boys ran drills beneath the open sky and learned thecadence of muscle and obedience; they practiced with switchblades, machetes, baseball bats with nails hammered in. Dead bodies littered the roses. Blood stained the cobblestone. Viktor’s guests watched in pristine white suits and flowing white dresses beneath the umbrellas of stained-glass tables. They kicked their designer-clad feet in impatience, waiting until only one boy remained; then they bid, either to set him against a fresh batch of children or to take him away.
I still remember that first day I saw the courtyard and witnessed Rafe Creed. I remember how he fought with a brutality that could only be bestowed upon a boy who’d witnessed death at least a hundred times. He never hesitated, barely broke a sweat, and now, as I’m older and can finally confess this story, I know Rafe believed in those moments that he wasn’t killing those boys; he was setting them free. He won so that others never, ever had to face the prize.
At fourteen, I looked at him, only sixteen, and saw Viktor’s pride. Rafe Creed was the exact manifestation of everything Viktor believed in. He natural selection, brutal efficiency, and entertainment, while I was…the opposite. Then Rafe was sold to the woman in the white linen dotted with yellow flowers, and as he passed Leah and I, I saw nothing in his eyes. Absolutely nothing.
Just like mine.
