Time slipped sideways down here. It wasn’t measured in sunsets or meals. It was measured in how often he came down the stairs. In how many times the light flickered. In the way my body started to feel like it belonged to the basement. Like the damp had crawled into my bones and planted roots.
I sat with my back against the wire, knees bent, forearms resting on them, head tipped forward like I was trying to keep my thoughts from spilling out. The shirt on my skin was stiff with sweat and grime. My knuckles were split again. I kept reopening the cuts without meaning to, picking at the scabs when the anger got too loud. It was something to control. Something to ruin that wasn’t her.
Amelia sat across the cage. She’d been quieter since I openedmy mouth. Since I said the thing I shouldn’t have said. The thing that made my skin crawl with regret every time I replayed it.
Craving.
I wanted the old distance. The old hatred. The simplicity of it. Hate was easy. Hate was a script my father wrote and made me memorize. Hate gave me somewhere to put the chaos.
This was messy and vulnerable. This was me handing her a weapon and pretending it wouldn’t hurt when she used it.
I stared at the glass until my eyes burned. It had smudges from our palms. Old prints layered over new ones. Evidence of proximity without touch.
Close enough to see the exhaustion in her face. The crack in her lower lip. The bruise blooming along her jawline from where he’d grabbed her too hard. Close enough to watch her breathe, to count each rise and fall like it mattered, like her lungs were the only thing keeping mine working.
Not close enough to fix a damn thing.
The bulb flickered. Buzzed. Steadied.
My jaw clenched.
I’d started hating the light almost as much as the dark. The light meant visibility. Surveillance. Being watched. It meant he could come down at any second and see us exactly like this.
The dark was worse, though.
The dark made my mind loud.
In the dark, the basement didn’t just feel like a cage. It felt like my childhood house. The hallway. The heaviness in the walls. The certainty that footsteps meant impact.
I could handle a lot of things. Cold. Hunger. Pain.
But the sound of a man moving above me made something primal wake up under my ribs.
A part of me that wanted to become the weapon my father always said I was.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, hard enough to see sparks.
Amelia shifted on the other side of the glass. A small movement, careful, like even changing position cost her something. Her shoulder slid higher against the wall. She dragged a hand over her face, palm trembling.
She was slipping. Not physically. Not yet.
But I could see it in her eyes, in the way she stared through the floor like she was already gone somewhere else. Helplessness wasn’t loud with her. It was quiet. It was a slow surrender. It was her trying to shrink so the pain couldn’t find her.
I hated it. I hated watching it. I hated that I couldn’t reach across the glass and grab her shoulders and shake her back to life. I hated that the thought of touching her made my throat go dry.
Because that’s what craving was, wasn’t it. A need so immense it buried you.
I stared at her hair, at the curve of her neck, and I remembered being fourteen and seeing that same curve when she bent over her locker. I remembered the sudden punch in my gut, the heat, the confusion. I remembered how I’d turned that confusion into cruelty because my father’s voice lived in my skull like a parasite.
Hate her. Hurt her. Make her pay. For your mother leaving. For Judy. For everything.
My father had died a few months after graduation. Alcohol poisoning. Like the bottle finally got tired of pretending it wasn’t killing him and just did it outright.
I’d thought I’d feel relief. I’d expected freedom. What I got was a ghost. What I got was his voice still running my life, still deciding what I was allowed to feel. What I was allowed to want.
Even dead, he’d owned me.
I dug my fingernails into my palm until pain flared and grounded me.
