Chapter 127
Mireya
The Torment
The morning air is cold. October is coming, and so is winter here in Seraphin Bay.
I had to come back to St. Ellesta today as new students arrived to get my yearbook. After this I need to pick up Milo from Edna’s and bring him back with me. He’ll stay with us until we have to leave.
I think I needed to see this place one last time before everything changes. I spent an entire year here, and somehow it feels like a lifetime ago and yesterday at the same time.
In two days, we’re leaving. And I’m terrified. I should feel excited, lighter even. Maybe I do, somewhere underneath the exhaustion.
Sometimes I still catch myself thinking that I’ll wake up and discover I never made it this far, that all of this was just another thing I imagined while trying to survive.
But it’s true, and we’re leaving.
I reach my car, the yearbook tucked beneath my arm, and unlock the door.
“Raven hair.” I freeze. That voice. I know that voice. My hand stills on the door handle as every muscle of my body locks. “Where do you think you’re going?”
A hand closes around my arm, and everything happens too fast. The yearbook slips from my hands and hits the pavement.
I’m about to turn around and push him away, when something covers my mouth.
“You’ve been really bad, time for you to explain yourself,” he whispers.
And then, everything goes black.
Play - Under by Alex Hepburn
I'm awoken to the feeling of something tight circled around my wrists, the feeling is sharp and it twists like stinging nettles. I try to pull away but I can't.
The memories come back as flashes. The parking lot. The car. The voice.
Raven hair.
My eyes snap open. The ceiling above me is unfinished and cracked at some parts, stained with dark patches. A single light hangs up there but it’s blurry.
I pull harder against the restraints, but nothing happens.
No…I’m not going to panic.
Footsteps approach and I tilt my head to see his face. A man steps into my vision. I don’t know him. But something in me recognizes him immediately. He stops a foot away, not speaking, only with a disgusting smile plastered on his lips.
I pull against the chains until my wrists sting. “Let me go.”
He still says nothing.
“Let me fucking go!” I yell louder.
Still nothing from him. He watches me, curious, but I know it’s him. For years I tried to see his face, to know the person behind my scars, behind my abuse, and now he’s in front of me, but he doesn’t want to talk.
I laugh, shaking my head, before staring him down. “I’ll fucking kill you if you ever let me out of this chair!”
Still no reply.
“Fuck you,” I spit.
He tilts his head, proud of himself and talks finally, “There she is.” That voice… It makes me want to throw up. “This is not very polite of you.”
“You fucking coward…” I whisper.
His smile deepens as he reaches toward my face. I spit on him immediately after. And it only makes his grin widens. “Still angry,” he murmurs and my skin crawls. “You always were.”
I hate the tenderness in his voice more than anything.
“Who the fuck are you?”
He watches me for a long moment, his face still tilted toward me, as though he is studying a dead object.
“You should know.”
“I’ve never seen you before,” I reply quickly, confused. My head is still pounding and I can’t barely focus on anything but the rage.
His expression changes to something satisfied.
“No,” he says. “You’ve seen me, you simply never knew what you were looking at.”
He takes his time moving back closer, and every instinct in me screams to move away, even if I can’t. I press myself against the cold surface behind me.
“You know what I find fascinating about you, Mireya?” he asks.
“You spent years believing you were afraid of the wrong things.” I stare at him and he continues, “You were always looking for monsters in the most obvious places. Strangers who watched you too long, men who tried to seduce you, men in dark alleys.”
My chest tightens but I don’t know why. I don’t know what memory he has touched. I just know that I’m twelve years old again, then fifteen, then twenty, standing in rooms searching for him, hearing voices that sounded like him.
“Stop.”
He smiles. “You remember, don’t you?”
“Stop fucking talking.”
“You remember my voice.”
I shake my head, but the memories keep moving faster than I can push them away. He watches every change in my face and I want to stab him.
“I said, stop!”
Something almost amused flickers across his face. “You sound just like your mother.”
Everything inside me stills. The room is silent, my heartbeat is the only thing I can feel.
He takes another step forward to me and then the realization hits me.
I know. I know who’s in front of me. His voice, his scent.
This is the man who took my mother from me, the same man I’ve spent years imagining. My monster is also the chain poet.
The patterns, the photographs, the bodies, everything swirls in my head.
“No…”
His smile widens. “You wanted to know what he looked like, why he chose them…” he says. My hands shake, and I stare at him, unable to breathe. “You wanted to know why your mother was one of them.”
I shake my head, but memories are already coming apart inside me, the locked doors I built in my mind giving away.
His footsteps in my bedroom, my mother’s tears, that poor girl we found with Damien…
“You were always him,” I whisper.
He smiles again. “And you were always so clever.”
My eyes burn, “You killed me.”
“I taught you.”
The rage that comes after that is so violent I barely recognize it as mine. “You fucking destroyed me!”
My entire body is trembling now. I want to tear his face apart, I want to vomit. I want to wake up…I want my mom.
And then he says something that makes the world tilt all over again.
“You know, my son was always so fond of you. Ethan did talk about you the moment he met you at school. Raven hair.”
His son?
“Ethan wanted me to stop for years,” he continued, almost amused.
Ethan. Ethan ?
Ethan…Ethan…My friend.
“He spent a long time pretending he’s different from me. But you know what they say about blood.”
I can’t breathe.
“He’s just as sick as I am,” he adds, as the lights go out. “I thought he’d tell you eventually. I guess he didn’t. Did he play with you too? Because he loved to watch.”
A large projector hums to life in front of me. and suddenly a white flash booms onto the concrete wall. I don’t know what I’m looking at. Then there’s a girl, alive, terrified. Then another one, a woman crying as a person strangles her. Then another one again.
Different faces, different places, same camera angle, same pain.
“No…Stop this,” I say, voice breaking.
But it doesn't stop. The footage keeps changing. Chains around a woman’s neck. Someone is crying. A voice begging for someone to stop. Then another recording again.
I squeeze my eyes shut, yelling over and over again, “Turn it off.”
He doesn’t.
“Turn it fucking off!”
Nothing.
The images keep coming. A lot older. This time she’s drunk, saying incoherent things as he forces her to do something.
The next one appears. I know this room. My dorm. My bed. My own body curled beneath the blanket. I’m asleep. The image changes again. Another night. I’m crying in my sleep, and someone is touching me. Him.
I want to throw up.
The next one appears, the academy, then the rooftop, the classroom…My heart stops. Then I see him. Damien. His hands on me, his mouth against mine, and I can see the way I look at him afterward. The complete absence of fear.
“Your dad… your dad knew and he didn’t care, Raven hair,” he starts. “Because your mother was just like you, broken and scared. And she was easy to manipulate. One mistake was all it took for your father to see her in you and hate you for her own actions.”
Die. Die. Die.
“You realize how easy it was to torment you? To watch you exist and destroy every moment of joy because you, my beautiful pristine Raven hair, let another man have you.”
Die. Die. Die.
“Mister Porter, my son, your father, no one cared enough to stop us from meeting every fucking day of your life. And you had no clue…”
Die. Fast. Die. Now.
He finally speaks again, “I was always there, Mireya.”
The images keep flashing faster. Parties. Me naked. Hayzel…
“I used your friend to get to you. Used her in the filthiest way possible before visiting you every night she invited me in,” he spits.
Hayzel…the birthday attack…the dorm one.
“I thought you were mine.” Breathe Mireya. Breathe. “I thought you understood that.”
I can’t focus on anything. Images after images, videos after videos…Tears, blood, death, pain.
Women are never safe.
“And you, you let him make you love him. You let him ruin you.”
He reaches for something on the table and catches my arm. I don’t move, I don’t breathe. My eyes are fixed on the projector.
“You’ve spent your whole life trying to escape me.” Something cold touches my skin. “Let’s see where you go when you can’t escape yourself, Mireya.”
A needle breaks my skin, and he holds me until the pressure is gone.
The room begins to tilt. The images keep breaking apart, appearing and disappearing faster than I can close my eyes.
Woman. Bodies. People. Damien. Blood. Rain…
His voice. Mine.
Everything is blurry.
I try to focus on reality, but nothing makes sense.
Because now, I can’t tell which memories belong to me, and which one he has put inside my head.
“Close your eyes, Raven hair,” he whispers.
I reach for her, on the cliffs. But even she is beginning to disappear.