He took a deep breath, his gaze distant yet piercing. “I’ve carried resentment like a burden for so long, letting it shape my perception of you. But watching you suffer like this, it’s shattering me and my hatred is losing power over me.” A raw honesty colored his voice, revealing a vulnerability he had long hidden. “I’m grappling with fucked up things, trying to untangle this mess in my mind. Everything is so fucking blurred.”
“Thank you for telling me that.”
A whisper, faint and trembling, was all I could manage. His confession, soft and gentle like a lullaby, calmed the turbulent storm raging in my heart.
“It was pretty fucking hard. But I’m not exactly thinking clearly in here being sleep-deprived and malnourished.”
I blinked, processing his words. “So, did you mean what you just said?”
A beat of silence lingered between us.
“Yeah, I did. I know that.”
That was all I needed, and it made me want to cry.
Tears welled up, one by one, then streamed down my face. They poured forth, burning like acid against my skin. Everything that had been building inside of me flooded over.
The pain, the misery, the exhaustion burst forth, uncontrolled, a raw andvisceral cry.
Every sob was humiliating. I tried to swallow them, to let the tears trickle back down my throat and drown the thing inside me that still cared, but I couldn’t.
I pressed my forehead to the cold glass, feeling my teeth chatter as the violence of my crying shook me. It was a child’s cry, animal and shuddering, the kind you hope will never be heard by another living soul.
I hated myself for it, and I hated Caiden for being there to witness it. I hated the world for making us its playthings.
I pressed my fists to my eyes, hard enough to color the world with starbursts, and tried to carve out a space in my head where I could be numb again.
But the numbness was gone, it had been replaced by this raw, weeping nerve that stretched from skin to bone.
I cried until my lungs ached, until the noise of it drowned out the low, grating hum of the man’s generator somewhere overhead.
Until nothing existed but the sound of my own undoing.
It left me emptied, wrung out like a sponge, and when I finally looked up, Caiden was staring at me through the glass, his face slack with defeat.
For the longest time, we just watched each other. There weren’t any words left, nothing to say that hadn’t already been scraped out of us.
We were past blame, past apology, past anger.
All that remained was the shared humiliation of being turned into shivering, broken things, and the knowledge that it had taken this much suffering to finally strip us down to that.
It made it worse, somehow, to have no enemy to punch, only the echo of your own hate.
THE PRESENT
CAIDEN
There was nothing left except the dark.
It pressed up against my skin, breathing with me, getting in the cracks between my ribs and winding tighter with every exhale.
Maybe it had always been there, even before this place. Before Colorado, before the glass, before the bastard who called himself our keeper. Maybe the darkness was waiting for someone like me. Someone who deserved a cage.
But there were worse things than dark. Like the way the cold worked into your bones so deep you forgot what it meant to be warm. Or the way the glass between me and Amelia caught the light, turned her face into a ghost in the reflection if you looked at it just so. Or the way the bastard upstairs could come down at any moment, split the silence wide open with his voice, his boots, whatever sick game he had that day.
Tonight, even the shadows felt brittle. Like they’d break if you moved too fast.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The urge was always the same. Put my fist through the glass, bleed out if I had to, just as long as I could reach her. But the cage was smarter than I was. The cage always won.
