They're not wrong.
I used to believe I could play this game and win. That if I was smart enough, careful enough, I could use the same tricks men like him use.
But you can only outsmart monsters until they decide they like the taste of you.
I stare down at my hands. Beautifully manicured and utterly useless. They don't look like the hands of someone who's killed before—or the hands of someone who once carried terrible secrets through customs without blinking.
The old clock ticks again.
Midnight.
My stomach grumbles.
I'm halfway down the stairs when I hear the familiar chime followed by the front door opening.
He wasn't supposed to be back yet.
Footsteps echo, steady and unhurried.
I begin to creep backward, pretending I don't hear the sound of his shoes clicking on the hard floor, counting them the same way a condemned person counts seconds. My heart climbs into mythroat, and no matter what I tell myself, I can't stop the fear from seeping into my veins.
A single floorboard creaks beneath me, and the footsteps stop.
I hold my breath, praying he'll keep walking and go to his office.
But I'm not so lucky. He saves the gentle nights for when he's done being vicious elsewhere, and I hate that I can tell the difference.
My chest tightens, but I push the discomfort down before it becomes visible. Fear gets noticed within these walls.
The last time one of the housekeepers forgot to bring in a letter, she was gone by morning. No one ever said her name again.
That's how he runs his kingdom.
No yelling. No chaos. Just silence and absence.
He erases people as if they never existed in the first place.
I used to daydream about fighting back—taking him out with all the training I'd learned over the years.
Those days are gone.
Now I dream about disappearing. Vanishing with Hale and never looking back.
In the good dreams, we escape and start over. Just a woman and her boy disappearing into the kind of peace you only find after you've crawled out of hell.
In the bad ones, I'm cornered, sitting across from him and knowing exactly what comes next.
When I'm sure he's not coming upstairs tonight, I move back to my room and shut the door quietly. The lock doesn't matter—it's symbolic at best—but I turn it anyway. My body slides down the panel until I'm sitting on the cold floor, my spine pressed against the wood.
I stare into the void until it starts to stare back.
In this house, I'm less than nothing. A possession dressed up to look like devotion. I can't save anyone here, including myself, but I have to try because Hale deserves a world that isn't built on violence and silence.
Every time I look at him, I see his real father.
And every time that face flashes in my mind, my heart aches traitorously, like it still believes in possibilities and a future that doesn't exist.
I'll never have the life I once dared to dream of.
