Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
The sun was too soft.
It filtered through the window like warm breath, touching the bed where I lay with the kind of light that was supposed to feel comforting.
It didn’t.
It felt like trespass.
Like light that didn’t know me. That hadn’t watched me bleed on stone or kneel for something bigger than mercy. It felt foreign, like it had never seen a girl wrecked by a vow, had never heard a name moaned into sacred silence.
The sheets beneath me were linen. Clean. Smelling faintly of lavender and earth and everything I had once been told a girl should want. But my body ached for cold. For stone. For the scratch of wool against bruises and the weight of his breath against my spine.
I rolled onto my side. The movement felt wrong.
My legs didn’t protest.
My thighs didn’t burn.
My core didn’t pulse from being full.
And that emptiness felt worse than pain.
I pressed my face into the pillow and inhaled.
It smelled like dust.
Like air that had never held his silence.
I stayed there a long time.
Not crying.
Not sleeping.
Just trying to remember what it felt like to belong to someone who knew how to hold my ruin like it was sacred.
The woman who took me in said nothing when I didn’t come to breakfast.
She knocked once.
Left a bowl of soup.
A piece of bread.
A ribbon tied loosely around the edge of a folded note with nothing written inside.
Not red.
Not stained.
Just clean.
That was the part that broke me.
I untied it and set it on the floor like it burned.
Then I drank the soup.
It was warm.
But not sacred.
It didn’t taste like silence soaked in restraint.
It didn’t carry the weight of his breath.
It filled my stomach.
But not the ache.
I chewed the bread slowly. It was soft in the center. Crisp at the edges. The kind of food that means survival.
But I didn’t want survival.
I wanted something brutal.
Something holy.
Something that left a mark.
I stared out the window for a long time after that.
The grass moved in soft waves.
The sky bled blue and gold.
Birds called each other by names I no longer remembered.
And all of it felt like a world that belonged to someone else.
Because the only thing I remembered was him.
His hands. His mouth. The way he looked at me when I said don’t stop. The way he pressed my wrists together like they were scripture. The way his silence bent time.
The way I left him kneeling, and he didn’t rise.
I pressed my hand to my chest.
Felt the hollow shape where his name used to sit.
It wasn’t grief.
It was starvation.
Of a different kind.
The kind that lived in the wrists.
In the hips.
In the place behind the ribs where breath turns into prayer.
And I hated it.
Because I was full of air.
And none of it tasted like him.
I curled around the ache.
Not to sleep.
To remember.
Because the last time I was truly still—he was the weight beside me.
And now I was weightless.
And it was unbearable.
The mirror in the room was small.
Cracked.
Nailed to the wall like an afterthought.
I stared too long.
The reflection looked like me.
But it didn’t feel like me.
This version of me had soft skin and clean hair and steady breath.
But no bruises.
No scripture.
No bite marks shaped like belonging.
This wasn’t the girl who had bled on stone and been called sacred for it.
This was someone new.
Someone gentled.
Someone lost .
I pulled the shirt over my head.
Let it fall to the floor.
I stood naked in the middle of the room, waiting to feel something.
I pressed my fingers to my breasts.
To the inside of my wrists.
To the place between my thighs.
Nothing.
No shiver.
No ache.
No heat.
And that scared me more than anything.
Because it meant I was already forgetting what it felt like to be his.
I bathed in the basin. The water was scented with lavender and rosemary.
It made me want to cry.
Because he had never used perfume.
Only silence.
Only fire.
Only the cloth he wrung with purpose.
And it had been enough.
I dressed again. Slowly.
Every stitch of fabric a betrayal.
The clothes were too soft.
Nothing clung. Nothing scratched.
Nothing reminded me of the weight I used to carry.
I walked outside.
Let my feet touch earth.
It didn’t hurt.
And I hated that.
Because pain was proof.
And this?—
This was forgetting.
I stood in the sun until my skin itched.
I watched a woman hang laundry. Her skirt danced in the wind.
She didn’t see me.
No one did.
And maybe that was worse than being rejected.
Because in that chapel, every gasp was holy.
Every moan, memorized.
Every bruise, remembered.
But here?
Here, I was just a girl with a quiet mouth and no vow to hold it open.
I touched the place between my legs.
Found only absence.
Closed my eyes.
Whispered his name.
The wind didn’t carry it.
Because he wasn’t here to hear it.
And the silence?
It wasn’t sacred anymore.
It was empty .
I forgot what day it was.
Not because I lost track.
Because time had stopped mattering the moment I left his hands.
I touched the ribbon more often than I meant to.
I slept with it beneath my pillow.
Folded across my chest like a prayer that refused to die.
I didn’t speak his name aloud.
Because it tasted too much like a vow I had broken.
The woman left food.
She warmed water.
She was kind.
But kindness isn’t the same as being kept .
And I had been kept.
I stopped eating.
Not to punish myself.
Because the fruit had no bruise.
The bread had no salt.
The soup had no silence in it.
And I missed the ache.
I missed the way he tied my wrists.
The way he watched me breathe like it meant something.
The way he worshipped me in stillness.
The way he wrecked me with reverence.
One night, I tried to sleep again in that bed.
I woke with my hand between my legs.
His name on my tongue.
I came.
Quietly.
And I cried.
Because he wasn’t there to hold it.
Because he wasn’t watching.
Because I had left.
And he had let me.
I stood at the door the next morning.
Ribbon in hand.
Barefoot.
And ready.
Not for forgiveness.
Not for rescue.
But for ruin.
Because I was done pretending I could be whole without the hands that had hollowed me.
I walked.
Back toward the stone.
Back toward the man who tied silence into my skin like scripture.
Because he was the only vow I had ever meant.
And I needed to be ruined by him again.