Chapter 1
Eight months later...
I stand in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in the bathroom, water sliding down my naked frame like it’s trying to erase something that can’t be undone.
My vacant eyes trace the deep scars etched across my skin, raised and permanent.
They’re visible proof of what happened, but they’re not the worst of it. The worst is what can’t be seen. The quiet, isolated depression that no reflection will ever fully capture.
Eight months… eight exhausting fucking months of physical therapy. Of learning how to move again through a body that no longer feels like it belongs to me. A body I no longer want. Of forcing myself upright when everything inside me wanted to collapse.
And still… I’m not better. I’ll never be better. Some wounds don’t heal, they simply learn how to keep bleeding silently, so the rest of the world doesn’t have to watch.
Law has never comforted me—not once.
He didn’t hold me while I screamed for the baby I never got to meet.
He never even acknowledged that I had been carrying his child when he let them almost kill me.
He never gave a shit about the trauma I’ve faced because multiple men viciously gang raped me in our home in front of him.
He simply discarded it—the same way he’s trying to slowly discard me.
He moves through this house like a ghost who owns everything, ignoring my existence until the rare moments he decides to remind me I’m still his property.
He never fails to tell me the next time I try to leave him, they won’t find a body, only pieces. And even then, even whilst I’m decaying in the dirt, I’ll never truly be rid of him.
I gaze at the stranger in the mirror—the abused woman with dead eyes and a ruined body—and feel nothing but a deep, aching emptiness.
I am a mother to a child who never drew its first breath, a prisoner in the home of the man who planned and killed it. And every single fucking day, I wake up and wonder why I am still fighting to survive in a world that ended for me years ago.
From the day my mother died, I have been fed nothing but abuse—served up for men’s bizarre amusement, their disturbing fantasies, and their sick sense of greed.
I once believed suffering was deserved—that it was a debt paid back in full, that people always reaped what they sowed. But the world has taught me a far crueler truth…
It’s always the innocent who bleed the deepest.
We keep reaching for the light with trembling hands, holding onto its fading warmth like drowning souls bargaining for air that will never last.
But even after the darkness devoured everything—my body, my baby, and my faith in anything good—I’m still here, living each day by some punishing persistence.
Still here… but gone inside.
It feels like a sluggish corrosion, eating away at whatever fragments of me are left, until I’m not sure what remains is still a person at all.
Abuse has become my unwanted home, and I don’t want to be here anymore.
I want to slip into the quiet, somewhere soft and everlasting. I hate myself with every breath I take. It clings to me, constant and suffocating, as though I’ve been made to carry it in my lungs.
I can’t eat anymore without smelling raw meat on my father’s skin—that same sick, metallic stench rising from every plate like a ghost that refuses to stay buried.
I can’t drink without tasting vodka flooding my insides again, burning, choking, and drowning me in the memory of being raped while their laughter rings in my ears.
And I can’t close my eyes without feeling their hands everywhere. Rough, ravenous, and cruel, sliding inside me, ripping, tearing, and pulling my baby out in chunks while I screamed.
This body is no longer mine, it’s a crime scene and a graveyard—a living monument to everything they stole, every scar they left behind, and every piece of me that never made it back.
But this suffering I deserve to carry because I allowed it. I chose to stay. I cluelessly and willingly fell into his trap like a lamb scenting the slaughterhouse and calling it my home.
My stupid trust wove the noose, and my naive love rooted the tree in which I stood beneath, never realizing I was offering my own heart to the hangman.
The only way to make this right is to disappear and end it. To let my soul unravel and drift toward the only pure thing I have ever touched in this cursed life.
My baby is waiting somewhere beyond this hell, innocent and untouched by the monsters I brought it to.
I need to die—not as escape, but as self-punishment. Just a final, quiet apology to the child whose heartbeat I failed to protect.
With a hollow look in my eyes, I snatch the pills off the counter and twist the lid off. While staring at myself, I pour a generous amount in my scarred hand.
Lifting one, I push it down the back of my throat before swallowing it dry.
Then another.
Then another.
Suddenly, a loud knock rattles the door, the handle twisting violently. The noise startles me, and the bottle slips from my grasp, pills scattering across the floor, skittering in every direction.
“Blaire!”
Law’s voice booms from the other side of the door.
Shit. He can’t see me doing this—he’ll steal that right away from me as well.
My heart lurches into my throat as I drop to my knees, frantically gathering them while his pounding continues.
“BLAIRE!”
“Just a minute!”
My hands shake so badly I can barely close my fingers around them. I scoop up as many as I can find and shove them back into the bottle, twisting the lid on.
The banging grows louder, then the entire door shudders from Law slamming his shoulder into it. A sharp crack splits through the room as the lock finally begins to give way.
Panic surges through me as I place the pills into the cabinet, and just as the lock finally gives way, and the door bursts open, I snatch a black towel from the rail to cover the front of my naked body.
Keeping my eyes lowered, I wrap it around myself, but the weight of his glare is enough to make every muscle in my body ache.
He scans the bathroom, and my pulse spikes. When his gaze lands on something on the floor, my eyes flutter shut instinctively, my body bracing for the blow that never comes.
“We’re expecting visitors for dinner.” He asserts and my stomach twists. “Get yourself looking classy.”
I nod silently and go to slip past him, anything to get away from his overwhelming presence. But he steps directly into my path, and my face collides with his hard chest.
Immediately freezing on the spot, my eyes slowly trail upward until my head tilts back and they find his.
His dark gaze drags over mine, slow and predatory, like a shark circling blood in the water, hunting for the flicker of fear he craves.
His hands rise, fingers sliding beneath the bust of my towel, and my body locks rigid, every muscle screaming in protest as he yanks the fabric open in one brutal tug.
Then, his feral eyes drop instantly, seemingly devouring my heaving breasts.
He steps forward, crowding me against the wall, his mouth ghosting over mine.
“I can’t get it out of my sick head, you know?” The heat from his mouth slithers over my lips, reeking of whiskey and something darker.
“The way your tight little asshole flowered open like a pretty pink rose while those bastards raped it raw. Stretching you, ruining you, and turning that hole into a slack, gaping cum-dump.”
My brows pinch together, hot tears stinging the corners of my eyes as shame floods my chest.
His voice drops lower, dripping with depraved hunger, pupils blown wide.
“How that greedy cunt of yours swallowed his whole fist like a starving, sloppy glove—sucking him in, clenching and fluttering like a desperate slut begging for more abuse.”
I breathe heavily through tight teeth, utterly disgusted.
“I want to do that to you, Blaire. I want to ram my arm deep into your shithole, right up to the fucking elbow. Feel your guts squeezing around me while I fist-fuck your ruined ass.”
His gaze pins me in place, heavy and deranged, as the horrific promise spills from his lips.
“Maybe one day I’ll do it,” he rasps. “Then reward you by pumping another child inside you.”
My stomach churns violently, bile burning the back of my throat. I’ve never heard his mouth this vile, this completely unhinged. He’s usually so cold and controlled. And somehow, this feels so much worse.
Rage surges through me, and with a sharp, desperate yank I rip the towel from his grasp and clutch it against my naked body.
“Never,” I seethe, my voice shaking with fury and hurt. “would I let you touch me again. I don’t want a fucking thing from you—especially not that. I hate every single thing about you, and you don’t deserve that privilege. Not that I can even have children anymore anyway. Thanks to you.”
His jaw clenches, the muscle flexing hard, and his gaze drops to my trembling lips.
“You fucking stole that from me, Law,” I spit. “You killed the only baby we could have ever had.”
I watch anger pool in his eyes like black tar.
“They told me I’ll never feel pleasure again,” I force out with spite. “My pussy is mutilated. My clit is gone. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
Despite the rage I feel pouring out of him, I continue.
“Besides,” I bite out. “I’ve had better sex with my own silence than with abusive motherfuckers who refused to see me as a real human being.”
He grinds his teeth and presses them harshly against my mouth.
“I don’t give a single fuck about your pleasure, you useless bitch,” he snarls, the words oozing disdain and cruelty. “I only care about MINE.”
I shake my head twice, utterly repulsed by him, tucking the towel back around my body, shielding my breasts as best I can.
Without breaking eye contact, I slip past him, pulse thumping wildly in my ears.
At first, he stays rooted in the same spot, letting me go. But then I hear it—his heavy footsteps following me quickly into the bedroom.
A deep, icy fright scurries up my spine, and I spin around.
I catch his eyes, fierce and burning with pure rage, before his knuckles crack across my cheek in a cruel backhand. The slap is brutal, the sound piercing.