It hit my eyes like fire had been poured straight into them. My vision exploded into white, then red, then nothing but chaos. My lungs seized, breath catching halfway in like my body had forgotten how to function. For a second, everything broke. My grip loosened, my balance shifted, but that was all they needed. Hands everywhere suddenly, real force. Arms locking around mine, dragging me back, pulling me off him while I crashed against it, still trying tofinish it.
My body didn’t want to stop, itwouldn’t.It took all of them. Multiple hands forcing my arms behind my back, something biting into my wrists, metal, tight enough to cut into skin already torn open.
My chest heaved, lungs dragging in air that burned all the way down, eyes still on fire, vision barely there. They draggedme away, my feet barely touching the ground, boots scraping, shoulders jerking as they forced me forward down the corridor, alarms still screaming, voice overlapping, everything too loud and too bright and too much. And him, I caught one last glimpse, on the ground, not moving right. Blood pooled under his head, spreading slowly across the concrete, and I couldn’t help myself, so I laughed.
They shoved me into a cell, isolated, again. The door slammed shut behind me, echoing hard enough to vibrate through the walls, and just like that, it was quiet again, but this time… the quiet feltalive.
The Counterpart
Chapter 45
The cell had a way of pressing itself into you the longer you stayed in it. The walls were stained in uneven patches, old water damage spreading like something alive, the concrete floor scratched up from years of restless pacing, dragging, something harder to name. The mattress beneath me was thin enough that I could feel the metal frame through it if I laid the wrong way, and the air… it always smelled faintly of rust and something sour that never fully left. There was a mirror above the sink. Polished steel, warped just enough that it didn’t reflect you right. I avoided looking at it, not because I was afraid of what I’d see, because I already knew.
It was night, or what passed for night in a place where time didn’t really move forward, it just sat there with you. I’d been lying on my back, one arm folded under my head, staring at the ceiling where the light flickered just enough to make it feel like something was wrong with my eyes. Sleep had been close, but not the kind that gives you rest, just the kind where your body gives up before your mind does.
I could’ve sworn I’d seen a small black spider in there at some point, but before I realized it, it was gone. And no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find it again. I was right on the edge of falling asleep when I heard it, a sound that didn’t belong. A slow, dragging scrape against the concrete.
My body reacted before my mind caught up. I turned my head toward the corner, and for a second I didn’t understand what I was looking at. He was just… there, sitting like he had every right to be. Back against the wall, arms resting loosely over his knees, head tilted like he’d been watching me for a while already and was only now letting me notice.
Zwierek.
It didn’t make sense, it couldn’t, every part of me knew that. The door had been locked, I hadn’t heard it open, no footsteps, nothing. And still, there he was. For a second, I just stared at him, trying to force reality to line up with what I was seeing, trying to find the gap in it. There wasn’t one. He just sat there, like this was normal. LikeIwas the one out of place.
My hands curled into the thin fabric of the mattress. I pushed myself up slowly, every muscle already tight, already ready. My mind ran through it fast. How the fuck did he get in? How long had he been there? Why hadn’t I heard – no. No, that wasn’t the thought that stuck.
I should have finished it.
I sat up fully now, feet hitting the cold floor, not taking my eyes off him for a second.
“What…”My voice came out rough, unused, dragged out of somewhere deeper than it should have been. I swallowed, jaw tightening.“What the fuck are you doing here?”
My pulse was loud enough in my ears to drown out everything else.
“How did you get in?”
Nothing, he just kept looking at me, like he was waiting, like this was part of something I hadn’t caught up to yet. And something about that, that fucking calm, it made something inside me shift, uncomfortable. Like a thought I didn’t want to have was starting to form anyway. I took a step toward him, just one, testing out the distance.
“I’m not asking again.”My voice dropped lower this time.“Answer me.”
The silence didn’t sit right. Like the air in the cell had shifted into something heavier, something that didn’t belong to the room I’d been locked inside for months. Even the flicker from the ceiling light seemed slower now, like it was struggling to cut throughwhatever the fuck had just settled between us. And he was still just fucking sitting there. Just watching me like this was normal, like I was the one acting strange.
There’s a point, right before something breaks loose, where your body knows before your mind catches up. Mine had already decided. Every muscle pulled tight, jaw locked so hard I could feel it in my temples, hand curling and uncurling like they needed something to crush just to stay grounded. I had never been built for gentleness. There was never a version of me that existed without tension locked into my body and violence standing close enough to breathe down my neck. Even as a kid, it was always survival, always teeth bared, always making sure no one ever got the chance to hurt me first. If they were afraid of me, they couldn’t touch me. That’s how it worked, that’s how italwaysworked. And yet, standing there, staring at him sitting in that corner like he’d grown out of the fucking concrete, something felt off. Not him, me. Something in me wasn’t lining up. Like a screw had come loose somewhere deep in my head and now everything was just wrong. Like I was standing half a step outside myself watching it happen instead of being in it.
“Rowan…”
My name didn’t sound right coming out of his mouth, not like that, not here.
“I’m always where you are.”
His head tilted, like he was studying me, waiting for something to fall into place.“You haven’t figured that out yet?”
No answer came out of me. My head kept circling the words without managing to fully understand them, and for a second, a real fucking second, I thought maybe this was what losing your mind actually felt like. Like everything that had been building inside me for years had finally hit all at once and torn something open beyond repair.
“No.”The word came out under my breath, more to myself than him.
No.
This wasn’t real, it couldn’t be.
