Inevitable Endings (The Beginnings Duet #2)

Prologue

The Body Remembers Everything

Isabella

I do not remember the first time I was unloved.

But my body does.

My pain wasn’t punishment for my stepfather; it was entertainment.

When he locked the door, it was never for hours. It was for days. I’d drink from the leak in the wall, chew on my sleeve when I was starving. The body adapts. It learns to find pattern in chaos.

And no one came.

Not my mother. Not neighbors. Not God.

One person came, the Devil .

I have the symptoms of a haunted girl.

I am hypervigilant. Codependent. Self-erasing. Rage-filled and shut down, all in the same breath.

I don’t sleep. I shut off. I don’t eat. I forget to.

Touch feels like invasion.

Love feels like surgery.

So when I met him, when I met the man with the bloodstained hands and dead eyes and a voice like a gunshot, it didn’t scare me.

It calmed me.

Because I knew a man like that would never lie about who he was. He wouldn’t smile while setting the fire. He’d burn the world in front of me and hand me the match.

And that felt like the closest thing to love I’d ever known.

He was violent. Cruel. Unforgiving.

And I clung to him like salvation.

Because the first rule of trauma-bonding is this: you don’t fall in love with safety, you fall in love with what feels familiar.

And pain was my mother tongue.

With him, I didn’t have to lie.

I could be the worst version of myself, and he’d still want more .

Because he wasn’t afraid of the devil inside me.

He just wanted to know her name.

I never wanted gentle. Gentle didn’t feed me when I was starving. Gentle didn’t carry me out of the basement. Gentle never stood between me and the fist.

I used to hurt myself just to feel control. Not because I wanted to die, because I wanted to remember I was still the one holding the blade. Because sometimes, choosing your pain feels like freedom.

I developed rituals. Counted floor tiles to pass the time. Held my breath under blankets until I passed out. Taught myself to dislocate emotionally during ‘punishment,’ so I could leave the body behind. The body became an object. A house I visited when necessary. But never where I lived.

He didn’t want a sanitized version of my pain. He wanted the truth in its rawest form. The cracked bone. The unfiltered nightmare. The parts that made most people recoil, he kissed those first.

He didn’t pity me.

He recognized me.

And that did more for my healing than any therapist ever could.

We didn’t fall in love in the usual way, he stole me. Trapped me into a cell, locked the door and watched through a camera in the corner.

And when the door opened, he was there.

Standing in the doorway like a god of war.

Unmoved by my fear.

That’s the kind of man he was, he understood fear on a molecular level.

He knew how to make me doubt my own breath.

He never needed to yell. Never needed to hit.

He could just lean against a wall in absolute silence and make me sweat. Make me question if my heart was beating too loud. If he could hear it.

He controlled me with stillness. With that pause before the gesture. With the way he looked at me like he already knew my next ten moves, and how I’d fail every single one. He didn’t need threats. He was the threat. His presence said enough.

Just being in the same room as him made the air heavier.

Like I was constantly being measured and always coming up short.

He could sit there, silent and still, watching me unravel without lifting a finger, and somehow I’d still find myself whispering ‘‘I’m sorry’’ —for sins I haven’t even committed.

And that terrified me.

But it also turned me on.

Because fear and desire speak the same language. They run on the same current. They bloom in the same twisted part of the nervous system.