Chapter 64I’ll Ruin You Gently
I’ll Ruin You Gently
Aslanov
My hands cover hers.
Fingers wrapped around the steel of the gun, adjusting the angle, steadying the weight. She exhales, slow and controlled, but I feel the tremor beneath her skin. Not fear. Something else. Anticipation. Awareness. The kind that lingers just under the surface, sharp as glass and just as dangerous.
“Not like that,” I murmur, my mouth close to her ear. “You’re too stiff. Relax.”
“I am relaxed,” she replies, but her voice betrays her.
I let out a soft breath that brushes the side of her throat.
Her shoulders draw tighter. It’s cold out here, just past the tree line behind the house.
The wind cuts through the woods in low, broken howls, but the air is clean— free .
I haven’t smelled anything like this in months.
The crisp bite of pine. Damp earth. Morning frost.
And her.
“I said relax,” I repeat, lowering my voice. She swallows.
We’re both standing in the clearing, maybe twenty paces from the thick trunk of an old elm. That’s her target. The red mark I painted there an hour ago has already started to bleed into the bark. She hasn’t hit it once. Yet.
I press her hands lower by an inch, shift her elbow back toward her ribs.
“Like this,” I say, curling my palm over her knuckles. “Let the weight settle. Feel the gun become part of you.”
She doesn’t speak, but I feel her breathing change. Slower. Deeper. She’s trying to match mine.
The gun is steady now. Her body’s warm beneath the thin black fleece she’s wearing, but I can still feel the way her muscles stay on edge when I’m close like this. I don’t touch her more than I need to, but every inch of her is alert. Tensed like a wire.
The side of my body brushes hers as I align her aim.
I’m in a training suit; black, fitted, nothing fancy.
Functional. It clings to the places where the bruises used to live, but they’ve faded now, slowly turning yellow.
I take the pills. Every day. And they help.
Not just with the sleep, but with the remembering.
Or the not remembering. I take them for her.
I take them to be safe, to be safe around her.
The scar between my brows has gone less red, less prominent. Almost looks like it was always part of me.
Just like this.
Being out here. With her. Free.
“Breathe in,” I whisper. “Hold it.”
She does.
My finger slips over hers.
“Now—squeeze. Don’t yank.”
We pull the trigger together. The sound rips through the trees like a crack of thunder, echoing out into the morning fog. The recoil makes her jump slightly, but I’m behind her, steadying her spine, keeping her upright.
The bullet sinks into the bark, a little high, a little left. Not the center, but not a miss either.
She turns her head slightly, eyes flicking up to meet mine. There’s a question behind them. And something else.
“That was you,” she says.
“No,” I reply, low. “That was you. You just needed a hand.”
She looks at me for a long moment, as if searching for something beneath my skin.
She won’t find what used to be there.
I am not the man I was before her anymore, although I could become him again when they touch what’s mine now.
The man who held her captive in this house is dead. But the bones are still mine. The memory. The instinct.
And now I look at her, steady, strong, sharpened into something new, and I wonder if this is what survival looks like. Not a return. Not a redemption.
A rebirth.
She is the strongest person I know.
She raises the gun again, this time without my hand on hers. Her stance isn’t perfect. Her form still needs work. But she holds it like it belongs to her now.
I watch her shoulders square, her eyes narrow, her breath steady.
Then she fires.
And hits closer to the center this time.
A quiet smile ghosts across her mouth.
“You learning fast,” I say.
“You’re a decent teacher.”
There’s something in the way she says it. Like she knows it wasn’t always teaching between us. Sometimes it was testing. Pushing. Breaking.
But not anymore.
Now we build.
I step back, just slightly, giving her space. The air bites at my skin through the fabric, but I don’t care. I like the cold. It makes me feel real. Alive.
And in this clearing, with her hands steady on the trigger, I feel something else too.
For the first time in a long, long time—
I feel proud.
Not of myself. Of her.
Of the way she came apart and put herself back together without asking permission. Of the woman standing in front of me now, unafraid of her shadow.
She fires again.
This time, she hits the mark.
Dead center.
The wine bottle is empty, the vodka in my glass long forgotten. While healing I shouldn’t drink, but I’ve never been one to follow the rules.
The old wood creaks beneath us as we settle into the wide chair on the porch tucked against the wall, half shielded from the wind.
The forest spreads out in front of us like a secret too big to hold, shadows stretching, the sky turning dusky blue at the edges.
I sit first, wrapping the heavy blanket around my shoulders, and then she follows, without hesitation this time, sliding into my lap like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
She curls into me, knees drawn up between us, her bare thighs brushing my legs, and the blanket drapes over both of us now.
My arms lock around her without thought.
It should feel too intimate. Too much. But it doesn’t.
It feels necessary. Like something our bodies remembered before our minds could.
Her head rests against my chest, and I can feel her heartbeat through the cotton of my shirt. Slow. Steady. I want to memorize it.
We stay like that for a while. My hands tracing lazy circles across her back beneath the blanket. She smells like soap and cold air and something distinctly her. It undoes me slowly. More than pain. More than torture.
I rest my chin against the top of her head.
“Why me?” she whispers.
I blink. “What do you mean?”
She leans back slightly, just enough to look at me, the weight of her eyes pinning me in place. “You could’ve picked anyone. To take. To hold. To punish. Why me?”
My jaw clenches. Not in anger— shame.
“I didn’t pick you,” I say.
“I was escaping,” I continue. “Nothing about it was clean. It was blood and calculation. And when I saw you, standing there on your bare feet and nothing but glass in your eyes...”
I let the sentence hang. Her expression doesn’t waver, but her body stills, every breath, every twitch of muscle. She’s listening with everything she has.
“I felt like playing with you,” I finish.
Her eyes flash, something electric behind them, but she doesn’t pull away.
“You looked breakable,” I murmur. “So I broke you.”
Her throat works, a small motion. The only one she lets herself show.
“But I was wrong.”
My hand rises, slowly, and I trace her collarbone with the back of my fingers. Light. Careful. Reverent. “I wasn’t attracted to you because you looked breakable. You were a mirror.”
“A mirror?” she breathes.
I nod. “You reminded me of the boy I buried to become what I am. You reminded me of before—before I belonged to men with blood on their cuffs and promises in their lies. And I hated you for it.”
She doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink, but I feel it; the stillness of prey that knows it’s staring into the mouth of the wolf, and chooses to stay anyway.
“I couldn’t stand your crying,” I admit, voice low, almost too quiet to be heard. “So I turned the volume off on the camera.”
Her breath catches.
“I would sit in the control room at night, watching you through the screen. Pacing. Screaming. Losing pieces of yourself. I’d mute it like I was silencing something in me, too. Like if I didn’t hear it, I wouldn’t feel it.”
I drag my knuckles along the edge of her jaw now, slow and reverent. “But I did.”
Her lips part, the weight of my confession falling heavy between us. She should run. I wouldn’t stop her. But I know by now she won’t run.
“I kept coming downstairs,” I go on. “You thought it was to interrogate you. To punish. To toy.”
A cruel smirk pulls at the corner of my mouth.
“It wasn’t.”
Her brows tighten slightly.
“I came in so many times because I had no one else,” I say. “You were my only constant. My only voice in the silence. You didn’t talk to me, not really. But you looked at me. Like you hated me. Like I mattered enough to hate.”
Her jaw tightens now. I watch it move under the pad of my finger.
“I enjoyed having you in my house,” I admit. “I enjoyed controlling you. Knowing you couldn’t leave. Knowing you were mine , even if it was by force.”
There’s no apology in my voice. No shame now. Just truth.
“I watched you when you had night terrors,” I say, the wind howling around the house.
Her lips part, a breath escaping, but I press on.
“Then I’d go upstairs and have my own.”
Something flashes in her eyes now. Memories.
“I resonated with you,” I whisper. “From the first moment. Because you were trapped long before I ever put you in that cell.”
Her body trembles in my lap, but she doesn’t leave it.
“I cared about you,” I say, voice raw. “Since day one. In my own sick, stunted ways. You were my entertainment, yes. But also my reminder. That something human still existed in the shell I’d become.”
She lets her eyes close, just for a moment. Her breath stutters when she opens them again.
“You wanted me to break,” she says, quietly.
“I needed you to,” I answer. “Because if you didn’t, what did that make me? If you could survive me, endure me, see me, then I couldn’t hide from what I was anymore.”
Her breath is shaky, lips parted like she wants to speak but doesn’t trust what might come out. She’s still in my lap, but I can feel the way her body coils beneath mine—not to flee. To feel . Every word like a blade, every admission like a bruise she leans into instead of away from.