The word rattled around my skull.
Was that what I was? Was that why I stayed in rooms with people who hated me, why I followed him down the stairwell and into this coffin of a room?
Maybe. Maybe I was just sick enough to like the attention, even if it meant being chewed up and spit out.
“You’re projecting,” I said, voice barely a whisper. “You want me scared because you’re terrified of being alone with yourself.”
I heard him move, the air shifting as he paced the small box of darkness. Suddenly, his hand found my shoulder, heavy, not painful, but enough to root me in place.
I flinched, but he didn’t let go.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, but the words rang hollow.
We stood, two satellites locked in orbit, neither willing to break the pull.
“God, you’re a freak,” he said, the words trembling with something rawer than anger. “Anyone else would be pissing themselves right now.”
I remembered, in that instant, crouching in a closet while my mother’s boyfriend slammed her through drywall, the sound of violence both muffled and amplified by the dark. How I’d pressed my palms over my mouth so hard my teeth left blood in the skin, just so I wouldn’t make a sound. How I’d become a ghost, and how that had saved me.
“I’ve met worse monsters than you,” I said, voice flat.
“I’m the worst kind of fucking monster you’ll ever meet. Believe me.”
He inched closer. I felt his breath first, then the heat of his body, then the fine tremor of his hands as they landed on either side of my head, pinning me without touch.
It was so black I could feel my pupils flaring, the useless straining for light.
Time had no measure in that dark room, maybe a minute, maybe an hour. I only knew that every inch of my skin felt peeled and raw, exposed to the wet rot of history oozing through the stones.
“Get away from me,” I hissed.
He let out a snort, but didn’t budge. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” The chill between us vibrated, a dark, pulsing thing, his silhouette looming blacker than everything else. “Make a scene, Amelia. Scream. See if anyone comes.”
I refused him, even as my lungs fluttered and a new, deeper panic wormed through my veins. Not fear of him, but the sudden, suffocating certainty that I’d always end up like this, trapped in a box with someone who wanted to see how much damage I could take before I broke.
I’d been screaming for years, and nothing ever came except more dark.
“Knew it. No fight left in you.”
The hands left the wall, but I could hear him circling, a wolf in a pen, waiting to lunge if I dared run. “You want to know what my dad does to me when Ican’t fight back?”
No. I didn’t want to know.
But I pictured it anyway, in full high-def misery: the bruises, the raw-throated mornings, the way his voice sometimes hit the exact same pitch as my mother’s boyfriends when the violence was just getting started.
Misery recognizes itself, even in people you hate.
He didn’t say it, but I could taste it in the air: the memory of pain, the slow drip of it, how it seeps out and stains every inch of your life. I hated him for making me feel it. I hated myself for understanding.
My body was lit up with static, every nerve jangling. “Open the door,” I said.
He stood unmoving, his shape a hulking smear in the void. “Bet you can’t even find it,” he whispered. “You’d die in here, you know. They used to bury the weak ones in the walls.”
I almost believed him.
I pressed my back to the wall and tried to slow my breathing, but every gulp of air was thick with mildew and dread.
Caiden’s steps whispered over the floorboards, circling so close I could have spit and hit him.
