I refuse to give him that power over me again.
Especially since he’s never earned it in the first place.
And yet inside I’m crumbling because every night, I dream of my mother.
Sometimes she’s laughing, her head thrown back in delight, the sunlight catching in her hair and coloring it in strands of gold. The light behind her is summer warm, the same kind she carried with her into every room, every hug, every whispered bedtime story.
But the dreams never stay that way. The warmth is always stolen. The laughter always fades into sinister sounds. Her face twists mid-smile into a scream, and then everything goes black, a scream frozen in time that doesn’t stop until I wake up.
It echoes. It burrows deep into me until that’s all I can hear.
I can’t unsee the ledger.
The neat columns, the date, the clinical language that reduced a woman’s life to a transaction. I can’t unknow the truth of what my father did, can’t pretend it was a misunderstanding or a cruel coincidence or a lie told by men who profit from destroying families. I can’t unhear Sasha’s voice either as it replays in my mind again and again until the words lose meaning.
I only pulled the trigger your father loaded.
The sentence loops endlessly, a blade sliding along the same raw place inside me until I want to claw it out. Sometimes, I imagine smashing my head against the nearest wall just to make it stop, just to fracture the thought into something more manageable.
I tell myself I should hate him.
Iwantto hate him.
Yet deep down in a place I don’t want to examine too closely, I know I don’t. Not fully. Not in the righteous way that would make this easier to survive. The hatred tangles with something else, something messy and unwanted and terrifying in its persistence.
Confusion.
He wasn’t the one who ordered it. He didn’t sit behind a desk and decide my mother was expendable. He didn’t sign her death away with the same hands that tucked me into bed and told me to study hard and smile for cameras. He executed the order, yes, but the command came from the man who raised me. The man who kissed my forehead goodnight, who sold me long before I ever realized I was being priced.
My father is the real monster.
Knowing that should bring clarity. It should give my grief a direction, a target to latch onto. Instead, it fractures everything further. Because if he is the villain, then what does that make the man who held me while I shook apart in the dark nights ago?
The memory of Sasha’s arms around me intrudes without warning.
The way his chest rose and fell beneath my cheek, steady and unyielding, grounding me when I felt like I was slipping out ofmy own body. The heat of him that had been solid and real, cutting through the storm outside and the one raging inside my head. His voice murmuring my name like an anchor.
It’s me. You’re safe.
I should despise him for that moment and for the audacity of offering comfort when he is the reason my world shattered to pieces in the first place. But that memory doesn’t sting the way the others do. It doesn’t curdle and turn sharp. It lingers, warm and insidious, creeping under my skin like a fever I can’t sweat out. It follows me into the waking hours, coils around my heart when the nights stretch too long and the silence presses in.
I hate myself for remembering how he felt.
For remembering the scent of him—tobacco and cedar and something clean beneath it like winter air. For remembering how his heartbeat slowly pulled mine into rhythm, how my shaking eased without his ever asking me to stop. I hate that my body responded before my mind could catch up, that some primitive part of me recognized shelter where logic screamed danger.
That’s the worst part of all.
Not the betrayal.
Not even the truth.
It’s the fact that when everything in me was breaking, I found solace in the arms of the man who helped destroy my life, and a part of me is still aching for that warmth even now.
It makes the need for answers burn hotter until it feels like it’s eating me alive from the inside out.
Not Sasha’s half-truths delivered in that calm, lethal tone of his, stripped of anything resembling mercy. And not the pity either from those fleeting looks I catch in Lev’s eyes when he thinks I’m not paying attention, when his jaw tightens just a fraction too much before he looks away.
Sympathy is just another cage, softer but no less confining.
