Chapter 6 #2
Whatever he was now, it wasn’t human. His eyes were empty, predatory, fixed on me like I was something to be taken, not a person.
“Let go,” I screamed. “Uncle—please—”
The word ‘uncle’ enraged him.
His hand came down hard across the side of my head. Pain exploded behind my eyes, bright and blinding, stars bursting across my vision.
I fought back with everything—scratching, kicking, twisting—desperate, terrified, refusing to lose myself like this. Refusing to become another story whispered about other girls.
The harder I fought, the harder he hit me.
Not my face.
My ears.
Again. And again.
Each blow landed with brutal precision, striking the sides of my head like a hammer against iron. A violent ringing flooded my skull, growing louder, deeper, unbearable—like a bell being struck too close, too hard.
I screamed, but my voice felt trapped inside me, swallowed by the walls, by the pain, by the growing roar in my head.
Something warm began to drip down my neck.
I didn’t understand it then.
Later, I would learn it was blood.
The world started to fade—not darkness, but sound. His breathing. His grunts. His voice. The room itself. Everything drained away until all that remained was a thick, suffocating silence that pressed in on me from all sides.
I clawed at him with what little strength I had left, tried to twist away, tried to make him see me, make him stop—but my body betrayed me. I was trapped inside it, screaming into a void that no longer answered back.
When it was over, the world was gone. Gone into a ringing void.
I lay there shaking, staring at the ceiling as dawn crept in, unable to hear his footsteps, his curses, even my own breathing.
That was the night I lost more than my innocence.
That was the night silence claimed me.
The next morning, I tried to speak. I tried to tell my aunt what had happened. My words were jagged, trembling shards of sound, broken by fear and shock. I stuttered, pleaded, clawed for her attention, for understanding.
She didn’t even pause.
The slap landed across my face like a thunderclap. My vision exploded white, my cheek burning with humiliation and pain.
“How dare you!” she hissed, each word drawn out, venom dripping from her tongue. “How dare you try to destroy my marriage! You’re jealous. Sick. Always needing attention!”
Her hands yanked my suitcase from the closet and hurled it onto the lawn like it was garbage.
“Get out.”
Just like that.
I gathered my luggage, hands trembling, tears streaming so freely it felt like my face might never be dry again.
No friend. No relative. Only the echo of those words chasing me down the stairs.
Months passed in survival mode.
Cheap, cramped rooms that smelled of mildew and despair.
Sleepless nights spent staring at cracked ceilings, listening to the silence pressing down on my chest, each breath a fight I was losing.
I had no one. No home. Only the memory of what I had lost—and the knowledge that the world would not stop to care.
I hurt myself just to feel something real, something I could control.
When a therapist offered free sessions, I thought maybe—just maybe—the world was giving something back.
I trusted him.
One afternoon, he offered me tea. I drank it, unaware it contained a substance that left me fully conscious yet completely paralyzed—aware of everything happening around me, but unable to move a single part of my body.
To my horror, my aunt’s husband appeared.
That monster.
I later learned he had conspired with the therapist to lure me—so he could have his way again.
My mind screamed, but my arms, legs, and even fingers refused to obey. I could see, hear, and feel everything... but I could do nothing.
The therapist stood in the corner, eyes averted, fingers worrying at his nails like a nervous child. He didn’t help. He didn’t stop anything. He didn’t even leave.
I remember staring at the ceiling, tears sliding into my hair, my body locked in place while something inside me shattered so completely it never fit back together again.
After that, I stopped believing in repair.
It was that second time that broke me completely. The first had stolen my hearing; this one stole my voice.
I don’t know what they put in my tea. I only know I was awake—aware—but trapped inside my own body. Unable to move. Unable to scream. Forced to witness what was happening without any power to stop it.
Whether it was the substance in my tea, or the unbearable terror of watching the one I trusted—my therapist—stand by as it happened again, I’ll never know. Maybe it was both. Maybe that combination of poison and horror is what finally broke me.
What I do know is this: when it was over, something inside me was permanently damaged.
My voice never came back the same.
At first, speaking felt like dragging broken glass through my throat. Then came the coughing—deep, violent fits that left blood on my palms.
Doctors said my vocal cords were injured, strained beyond recovery. Trauma, they called it. Shock layered on shock until the body simply gave up.
I was still alive.
But the girl who could speak freely was gone.
“Elena!”
Ruslan’s voice cut through the memories like a whip.
The present slammed back into place. Moonlight. Dirt. Graves.
Tears streamed down my face unchecked—I hadn’t even felt them start.
“Please,” I whispered, the word barely surviving the wreckage of my throat. “If that’s really my mother’s... don’t spill it. I beg you.”
He didn’t answer.
He lifted the urn higher.
“Watch.”
The tilt was slight. Casual. Cruel.
Ash spilled out in a thin, steady stream—soft gray powder drifting through the night air, catching the moonlight before settling into the dirt between the open graves.
Something inside me broke with a soundless snap.
The scream that tore out of me was raw and animal, shredding what little strength my voice had left. I dropped to my knees, hands clawing at my face, nails scraping skin as if I could tear the pain out by force.
My body folded in on itself, rocking hard, convulsing, forehead slamming into the dirt. Grit bit into my skin, but I welcomed it—the pain was something solid, something I could feel, something that wasn’t this.
“No—no—no—”
The sound tore out of me raw, broken, wrong.
I collapsed fully, curling into myself at the center of the circle, arms wrapped around my head as if I could shield her—shield us—even now.
My sobs came violent and uncontrollable, ripping through my ribs until they burned, until breathing felt like punishment.
I’d seen this before.
Loss reduced to something small.
Something spillable.
Something taken without permission.
My body didn’t know this was the present. It only knew violation.
The ashes darkened the soil.
My mother.
My safe place.
My only witness.
Gone—handled, scattered, erased—by a man driven by vengeance for a pregnant wife I had never harmed, a crime laid at my feet though my hands were clean.
Punished for something I did not do.
Condemned for a sin that was never mine.
“I hate this life!” I screamed into the earth, my voice shredding itself apart. “I regret the day I was born!”
The words weren’t just grief.
They were memory.
They were survival.
They were every time my body had learned the same lesson over and over—
That what I loved could be taken.
That my pain would be watched.
That no one would stop it.
And once again, I was on the ground, broken open, while the world stood and let it happen.
Ruslan’s shadow loomed over me.
“You killed my unborn child,” he said coldly. “You butchered an innocent woman. And you have the nerve to cry over spilled ash?”
I forced my head up.
My face was streaked with tears, dirt clinging to my skin, blood drying at the corner of my mouth.
“I didn’t,” I rasped.
His gaze pinned me in place.
“I’ve never been to Greece,” I said, each word dragged out like it weighed a ton. “Not once.”
Another tear slipped free. I stared at the gray dust scattered across the ground, wishing—praying—my mother could rise from it, wrap her arms around me, tell me I was safe.
“If she were alive...” My voice fractured. “She would’ve protected me. She would never have let them hurt me. The crash took her. The crash took everything.”
“Do not lie to me,” he said.
“I’m telling the truth,” I whispered, forcing the words past the fire in my throat. “I swear on her ashes.”
Silence stretched between us—heavy, dangerous.
He watched me for a long moment, something unreadable flickering behind the storm-gray of his eyes. Rage. Grief. Doubt, buried so deep it terrified him.
Then he turned away.
The graves waited—open mouths yawning beneath the moon.
And I knelt among them, broken and hollow, my mother’s remains scattered into foreign soil, waiting for the man who believed I was a monster to decide whether I would join her tonight.
Ruslan’s phone lit up in his hand.
The glow cut through the darkness like a blade. He glanced down once.
That was all it took.
His entire body locked—every line of him going rigid, as if something inside had snapped into place. The air around him shifted, thickened, turning sharp and dangerous.
When he lifted his gaze back to me, the gray storm I’d seen before was gone.
His eyes were black now. Not shadowed—emptied. Like something vital had burned out and left only scorched ruin behind.
“Elena had a sister,” he said. “That’s you?”
The words came slowly, deliberately, each one weighted. Not a question meant to be answered—an accusation spoken aloud to make it real. Like the first distant crack of thunder before the sky splits open.
I swallowed. My throat burned. My knees trembled, but I didn’t lower my eyes.
“Yes.”
He moved.
Not abruptly. Not in anger.
Deliberately.
Every movement was controlled, measured, terrifying in its restraint.
He straightened to his full height, shoulders rolling back, power radiating off him in suffocating waves.