Chapter 22 Dante #3
A warm touch grazes my face, and I blink. Her features come into focus, wide, intense eyes staring at me like she’s peering straight into the fractures of my soul. She reads me as though I were an open book, her gaze illuminating the cracks, shining light into the shadows I keep hidden.
The sensation is sharp, unsettling, and yet—slowly, piece by piece—the weight pressing on me begins to ease, the boulder on my chest fracturing, crumbling.
Her thumbs sweep across my cheeks, soft and grounding, the only anchor keeping me tethered to this world. “Now I see it,” she murmurs. “You didn’t become this way because you woke up one day and decided you’re not normal, Dante. Tell me… what did they do to you?”
A hard swallow travels down my throat. “There was… noise. Always,” I choke out, my vision blurring. Panic coils through me, an invisible fire licking at my veins, burning me alive.
Shard by jagged shard, the memories claw their way to the surface. They slice into my palms, spilling my blood into the murky light, dripping into the stained glass of recollection, hot and sticky with despair.
“Who?”
A fragmented image ignites in my mind. Estella’s face fades into the background as the memories take center stage, polaroids of anguish assembling themselves in my mind’s eye. Their edges are burned, smelling of helplessness, smoke, and despair.
“My father,” I rasp. The words scrape across my tongue like acid. My skin tingles, my body recoiling instinctively as if speaking it aloud conjures the monster once more.
Estella doesn’t push. Her thumbs remain on my cheeks, tracing slow, soothing circles. Quietly, she probes, “Was it the noise, or what came after it?”
I exhale sharply through my nose, my temples aching as if the act of remembering is physically unspooling me. It feels like we’re feeding something dark and hungry within me—a creature roused by my own memories, thriving on the despair that lingers in the corners of my mind.
“I don’t think I remember,” I whisper, shaking my head. “But maybe the quiet. The quiet meant giving in… giving in to how bad it would be after.”
I do not know if the words make sense, but they keep spilling out of me, tense yet strangely fluid. Each one feels like I am peeling away the top layer of my own skin, exposing myself to something bitter and cold.
Hell is not fire. It’s ice.
The ice that settled after he finished what he did, after the last sparks from his burns went silent and left only the hollow chill behind. The kind of cold that clung to me for years, long after the noise stopped.
“And now you make the choice,” she says quietly. “You control every sound and every movement so you never have to wait for the quiet again.”
I nod, unable to find a single word of my own. She speaks for me, lifting the sentences off my tongue because she knows how hard it is for me to give them shape. She threads my pain together with hers, stitching two broken histories into something that can breathe.
She has lived through it too.
My chest rises sharply, the memories burning through my lungs. They never left me. I shoved them deep into some forgotten corner of my mind and let delusion wrap itself around the truth. I changed my purpose over and over, hoping it would erase them.
It never did.
“But I miss them,” I whisper. The sound breaks against the stillness of the room. Candle shadows sway on the walls, their flicker echoing the small flame inside me that refuses to die out.
The confession is only half real. I do not feel longing, not in the way I claim, yet there is still a faint glow in the darkness, something that makes me think I should keep going, keep avenging them. I do not know why that ember refuses to go out.
“You don’t miss them, Dante,” she answers, her voice steady and soft.
“You miss the comfort that came with their abuse. If someone is locked in a dark basement for long enough, the light outside becomes terrifying. It shapes them. It becomes their world, even if it is wrong. The dark becomes the safest place they know. Because it is familiar. Because it is all they ever had.”
“I remember one of the days when I didn’t want him to find me,” I begin, the words sliding out with a clarity that feels unnatural. They come easily, as if they were always meant to be told exactly like this, without resistance, without fear.
I don’t know why it happens, but I just want to share this with her. To let those jagged fragments rise to the surface, no matter how agonizing it feels to speak them aloud. It is as if the pieces finally clawed their way free, and all I can do is offer them to her.
“I was looking out the window, terrified he would come back, and I didn’t notice how far I’d leaned out. My hands slipped, and I fell,” I say, a humorless, brittle chuckle scraping its way out of my throat.
The moment I speak it, the memory sharpens, cruel and vivid, leaving a sour taste behind. Slowly, the pain resurges—the impact, the breath knocked from my lungs, the burning sting that flared across my back and palms when the shards of glass buried themselves in my skin.
It was winter. The snow did nothing to cool the panic that flooded me. I remember the ice beneath me pressing into my spine, unforgiving and frozen solid, chilling my skin seconds before the blood began to spread.
Her lips touch my arms, light as a ghost’s whisper, and then her hands follow, gentle and steady. She doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t need to. Her silence rings with understanding born from her own broken history.
We are two sides of the same coin, mirror images forged from splintered glass and old agony. Somehow, in each other, those shards stop cutting quite so deeply.
For a long while, neither of us moves. The air thickens around us, heavy with everything unspoken. Eventually, I exhale, a tremor caught in the sound, and something inside me breaks open. For once, I don’t try to force it back into place.
Estella rests her head against my chest, and I let her. No resistance. No plan. No instinct to seize control. Just her warmth pressed against the echo of what I’ve been remembering.
My vision blurs, and my eyelids grow heavy, irritation stinging at their edges as if someone shoved onions beneath them. A single tear escapes before I can swallow it back.
I don’t fully register the moment I break. I just do. And it is not the dramatic collapse people imagine when someone uncovers a truth like this about themselves.
For me, it is quiet. A hollow ache that has drained me for so long, I no longer have the strength to speak or shape my thoughts into anything that makes sense.
I feel raw, stripped of every defense I’ve ever built. The familiar shame follows quickly—the shame that always arrives when I lose control. But she keeps touching me, soft and steady, and I let my eyes drift shut, soaking in the warmth of her palms.
And I know that when morning comes, I won’t be the same man I was before tonight.