The room beyond was pitch black, the kind of dark that eats sound and reason.
I hesitated, every primal instinct screaming to turn back, but Caiden’s silhouette filled the threshold.
He stepped inside, then waited, daring me.
I followed, because I couldn’t let him have the last word.
He let the door fall shut.
The blackness was absolute, the kind that presses in on your bones and makes you doubt the shape of your own limbs.
I reached out, groped for the wall, and found only a chill that ran straight to the marrow.
I could hear him breathing, slow and deliberate. Then he laughed, low and cruel, the sound bouncing crazy off the stone.
“Freaked out yet?” he whispered.
“Hardly,” I lied. My voice skittered along the walls, thin as moth wings. I pressed myself into the thick black, willing my body to freeze, to become an animal at rest so he couldn’t taste my dread.
“Sure you’re not broken?” he crooned. The darkness amplified every scrape and whisper, made his words crawl under my skin like centipedes. “You’re shivering.”
“Maybe there’s a draft.”
His footsteps echoed, three—no, four—paces away, then circled behind me.
With no sight, every sense sharpened; I could feel the displacement of air as he drew near, the faint electricity of him, the way the room seemed to pulse with his orbit.
I remembered being six, hiding in a closet when my mother raged through the house, the pitch black womb both sanctuary and executioner.
Here, the dark was not empty: it was inhabited, predatory.
He moved closer, presence like a shifting draft in the void. “You ever wonder what hell feels like?” he murmured, the words cutting from somewhere behind my left shoulder. “Not the Sunday school version. The real one.”
His breath was damp and sour, clouds of it blooming against my neck.
I tried to steady my voice, but it trembled into the void. “Sure. Hell is being trapped withsomeone you hate.”
His laugh slithered over my skin. “But you didn’t run. You followed me in. Makes you wonder which of us is more fucked up. Your self-worth must be pretty damn low.”
I swallowed the bile, refusing to give him the sound of fear. I didn’t have an answer for him. I didn’t even know why I followed him.
Maybe I do have low-self worth.
Of course I did. Years of being neglected by my mother, and tortured by Caiden, it did some terrible things to me.
Footsteps, quick and predatory, then his hand braced the wall right beside my head. I could feel the heat of him even through the cold, the pressure of his chest hovering just out of collision range.
I imagined Caiden’s hands around my throat, like a noose, his thumbs digging into the soft shelf beneath my jaw, pinning my voice inside my throat.
The image sickened me, not because I thought he would, but because I half-wished he’d try.
At least then I’d have a reason to see myself as a survivor instead of just a scavenger.
He slammed his fist against the wall, the bang echoing like a gunshot.
I flinched, barely, but still didn’t give him what he wanted.
“You’re such a little masochist,” he snarled. “You’d rather take a beating than admit you’re scared.”
