The floor drops out beneath memory.
My mother on stained carpet.
My mother folded over the edge of a bed.
My mother’s lips blue while I shook her hard enough to leave marks.
Men standing over her deciding, casually, whether she was worth the inconvenience of saving.
The count between breaths.
The obscene silence after one exhale, when the whole world narrows to whether another inhale is coming.
The Handler grinds my face harder into the floor, forcing me to keep looking.
“Don’t,” I sob. “Please don’t-”
But this is exactly what he wants.
Not merely pain. Not merely terror. Repetition. Reflection. The old horror dragged forward into the present and made to wear a different face. He wants me pinned inside the oldest wound I own, wants me forced to watch someone I love slide toward stillness while my body is held down useless beneath him. He wants the lesson to be perfect.
Silas sways where he kneels.
Then all at once the strength drains out of him, his body tipping into the carpet.
Everything in the room stops being itself.
The lamp, the wallpaper, the bed, the bathroom, the Handler’s weight on my back, none of it is a room anymore. It is every place I have ever stood helpless while someone I loved moved one breath closer to leaving. Every cheap apartment. Every motel. Every shut bathroom door. Every floor where panic became prayer because prayer was the only thing left.
Silas is trying to breathe.
That is somehow the cruelest part. He is still here enough to struggle. Chest lifting too little. Falling too long. Fingers twitching against the carpet in small, helpless protests. Pupils drawn wrong, tiny under the motel light. Color draining from his face beneath the cuts, the bruises, the blood. The wound in his side seeping darker into the fabric. One leg jerking once, weakly, as though his body itself objects to what is happening but cannot stop it.
“Silas!”
Now the scream tears out of me without shape, without pride, without anything left in it but need.
“Look at me. Please. Please look at me-”
His gaze drags toward me.
For one unbearable second, recognition returns. Not fully. Not cleanly. Enough. Enough that it lands like hope.
He sees me.
Then the focus slips.
Too fast. Far too fast.
Behind me, the Handler adjusts his weight as calmly as a man settling in to watch a program he’s waited all night for. His hand strokes once over the back of my head in a mockery of gentleness so revolting bile surges hot into my throat.
“This,” he says softly, almost kindly, “is what happens when boys mistake devotion for protection.”
Everything left in me fights him. Nails rip at the carpet. Knees scrape raw trying to find leverage. My lungs burn. The motel floor shreds skin from my cheek as he presses down harder, forcing my face into it until pain becomes heat, then numbness.
Silas’s breaths are growing farther apart.
That rhythm is engraved too deeply into me to mistake.
