“Don’t.”
“Please—”
“Don’t fucking beg.” That nearly comes out as a shout.
I hate that too.
I hate all of this.
I pull her to the radiator and she resists just enough to remind me she’s still Ayla. Still fire under all this fear. Weak right now, shaking, crying, but not gone.
It makes this worse.
It makes everything worse.
I bind her wrists to the pipe, secure enough that she can’t run, careful despite myself with the raw skin Gabriel already tore open.
When I step back, she looks at me like I’ve become exactly the monster everyone warned her I was.
Maybe I have.
I brace one hand on the wall bending till we’re face to face and finally force myself to say it.
The truth.
“Torturing you will destroy me.” My voice is wrecked. Rough. Barely held together. “Do you understand that?”
Her breath catches.
“Do you get it?” I ask. “Do you see the position you put me in?”
“Yes,” she whispers, voice shaking. “But I know—”
“You should have told me.”
The words come out hard enough to cut.
“You had ample fucking time to tell me,” I say. “Every time I saw bruises on you. Every time I asked you who did it. Every time you looked me in the face and lied.”
Her shoulders hitch. “I couldn’t.”
“You could have.”
“It would have ended up like this anyway,” she says, and her voice frays on the last word. Her eyes flick down to the rope around her wrists, then back to me. “Me tied to something and you having to—”
She cuts herself off.
Can’t say it.
My jaw flexes.
“Kill you,” I finish for her.
She flinches.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yes. It would have ended like this every single time.”
Her face crumples harder, and I have to look away for half a second because I can’t fucking stand it.
