Chapter 76 Grace
Iam a thing.
A vessel.
Not Grace.
Grace is somewhere else, floating near the water-stained ceiling, watching the thing that used to be her get used. She doesn’t have to feel it from up there. She just watches with a dull, clinical curiosity, like a student observing a specimen pinned to a board.
The door creaks open. The sound is like a rusty nail being driven into my skull. Footsteps. Heavy, booted. I don’t look, looking invites attention. Being a thing is easier if you are quiet, unmoving.
A shadow falls over me. I stare at a crack in the floor, tracing its jagged path with my eyes. It looks like a lightning bolt frozen in grey stone.
Hands grab my hips, rough and impersonal, flipping me onto my stomach as the concrete grinds against the raw skin of my breasts. I don’t make a sound. The sounds died days ago, locked behind my teeth.
He doesn’t speak. They rarely do.
Words are for people, and I am not a person here.
The weight comes down. A grunt. Then that familiar, brutal invasion. My body accepts it the way mud accepts rain.
There is no resistance left. My mind simply… leaves.
It’s a skill I never knew I had, a skill I wish I’d discovered months ago. This neat trick of severing the connection between my body and my consciousness. He is a machine, piston-like and relentless, and I am the damp earth he churns up.
His breath is hot and sour on the back of my neck. His grunts are rhythmic, animalistic. Each one is a hammer blow driving me further out of myself.
Is this it? The thought surfaces from the murky depths, a bubble of air from a drowning woman. Is this what my life is? Am I always destined to be a thing to be fucked, to be used, to never be seen as human?
The concept of a future, of an ‘after’, feels like a fairy tale I was told once, a long time ago.
I know there is no ‘after.’
There is only this cold floor, this weight, this grinding, endless now.
Antonio feels like a dream – I could almost laugh at that. The soft linen of his bedsheets, the heady scent of his cologne. The way he’d trace my spine with a single, possessive finger… it’s all a story that happened to another girl in another world.
This is my world. This grey, painful never-ending hell.
My eyes focus on my hands, splayed out on the floor in front of my face. They look like a stranger’s hands. Pale, dirty, trembling slightly. The nails are broken, caked with grime and something darker, something rusty-brown that might be blood. My blood most likely.
Antonio would not like this, the floating, detached part of me observes.
He likes everything perfect. Polished. He would hate these broken nails.
The absurdity of the thought is so vast it almost pulls me back into my body.
Almost. But then the man on top of me groans, a particularly guttural sound, and I’m shoved back into the void.
His rhythm falters, growing frantic. His grunts become words, hissed into the skin of my shoulder.
“Take it, you bitch. Take it. Antonio’s fat little wife. Think he’ll even want you back now you’re a filthy, used-up hole?”
The words are meant to cut, to degrade. They just… are. They’re sounds. Empty noises from an empty man. He shudders, a final, violent convulsion, and I feel the hot, wet seed spill deep inside. A final mark of his ownership. A signature on my ruin.
He collapses on me for a moment, his full weight driving the last of the stagnant air from my lungs, then pushes himself off. The cold air rushes over my wet back. A boot connects with my thigh, not a hard kick, just a dismissive nudge, like a man kicking a sack of garbage to see if it’s full.
“Your turn,” he says to someone by the door. “She’s still warm.”
The door opens and closes. His footsteps fade.
Silence. For three heartbeats. Four. A precious, fleeting gift.
Then, new footsteps. Lighter. A different scent, cigarettes and vodka. He stops beside me. I keep my eyes on the lightning bolt crack.
“Quite the setup you got here, princess,” a new voice says. It’s younger, with a cruel, mocking lilt. He’s talking to the other man, still lingering in the doorway. “Compliant little thing, isn’t she?”
“Doesn’t make a peep. Like fucking a doll.”
They both laugh, and the sound is uglier than the violence. It slithers into my ears and coils in my stomach. The door shuts again, leaving me alone with the new one.
I hear the rustle of denim, the clink of a belt buckle. My body knows the drill. It braces itself, with a clench of muscles I can no longer control. He drops to his knees behind me. His hands are on me, repositioning, adjusting my hips to his liking.
He leans down, his breath warm against my ear. “You always this quiet for him?” he whispers. The question is intimate, vile. “When Antonio fucks you, do you just lie there like a dead fish? Or do you make pretty noises so he thinks you’re enjoying it?”
The sound of his name on this man’s lips is the first thing that truly pierces the fog. It’s a violation worse than the rest.
A sound tries to escape my throat, a protest, a sob, something. It comes out as a dry, ragged click.
He mistakes it for an answer. He laughs again, a short, nasty bark. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. All the same.”
There is no preamble. No slow build. He rams into me with a force that steals what little breath I have. It’s different. Sharper. A white-hot lance of pain that cuts through the numbness and pins me firmly, horribly, back inside my own skin.
I am here.
I am Grace.
And I am being torn apart.
He sets a brutal pace, each thrust a punishment.
The pain is blinding, all-consuming. I can’t dissociate from it.
It is everything. My universe shrinks to this single, excruciating point.
My fingers claw at the concrete, my broken nails scraping, trying to find purchase on nothing.
A high, thin whine is coming from somewhere.
It takes me a moment to realize it’s from me.
He’s panting, cursing, fuelled by my involuntary sounds of agony. It’s over quickly. With a final, deep snarl he stills, shuddering.
Then, silence. His weight shifts. He pulls out.
And the world suddenly stops.
A sharp, startled intake of breath from above me. “Christ…”
I feel it before I understand it. A warmth. A sudden, shocking gush of heat flooding out of me, spreading over my thighs, pooling on the cold concrete beneath me. It’s too much. Too hot. Too fast.
He scrambles back, and I hear the scuff of his boots on the floor. I manage to turn my head, just a fraction.
He’s staring down between my legs, his face pale, his eyes wide with something that isn’t cruelty or lust, but pure alarm. The blood is stark against the grey floor. Not a trickle. It’s a flow. Dark, almost black in the dim light.
He says nothing. He doesn’t kick me, he doesn’t sneer. He just stares for one more horrified second, fumbles with his belt buckle, and practically runs for the door. It slams shut behind him, the lock clicking into place with a finality that echoes in the sudden silence.
Alone.
The only sound is the soft, steady drip of my life onto the floor.
The warmth is everywhere now, a sticky, spreading shame. I don’t move, I can’t. I am hollowed out. Empty.
A single, hot tear escapes my eye and traces a path through the grime on my temple. It is the last warm thing I feel.
The blood trickles on.
And I wait for the quiet to take me.