Chapter 33 Samira
Samira
The world came back all at once. Not in fragments, and it was anything but gentle. It slammed into place like a door kicked open.
Light flooded my eyes—real light, sharp and unforgiving. Colour followed. Depth. Detail. The ceiling above me resolved into cracks and shadows I had traced a hundred times without seeing. The room snapped into focus so violently that it made me gasp.
I could see.
I could see.
And with it—everything else returned.
The illusion collapsed.
The night surged back without warning, without mercy, without pause.
A blade flashed in my mind—silver, slick, moving too fast to track. A scream tore out of someone’s throat, raw and terrified, before I realized it was my voice. Blood hit the ground in a wet, final splatter that turned my stomach.
A man’s throat was opened.
I saw it—the blade biting deep and clean, slicing through skin with horrifying ease. There was a brief resistance, then a wet give, like fabric tearing under strain. Bright red spilled instantly, flooding over the man’s collar, pouring down his chest in thick, unstoppable streams.
He tried to scream.
The sound caught halfway out, collapsed into a broken gurgle as air and blood fought for the same space. His hands flew to his neck, fingers slipping, slick and useless, eyes blown wide with the sudden understanding that this was it—that there was no stopping what had already been done.
His knees buckled.
The noise died first. Then his strength as his body slumped, heavy and uncoordinated, hitting the ground with a dull finality that echoed down the alley.
Marcello’s face filled my memory.
It wasn’t the face of the watchful man who had fed me soup with careful hands. Not the steady voice in the dark that had told me to breathe. Not the arms that held me through nightmares and promised—falsely or not—that everything would be okay.
This was someone else entirely.
This was a different version of Marcello, one who had stepped into that alley and turned it into a slaughterhouse.
He moved like a force of nature—efficient, merciless, inevitable. There was no hesitation in him. No pause to consider. No breath taken before the blade moved. His body already knew what to do, and it did it without asking permission from his conscience.
The knife flashed once, twice—quick, precise arcs that caught the light for a fraction of a second before disappearing back into shadow. Each movement was deliberate. Practised. Final. He closed distance without effort, invading space, ending resistance before it could form.
There was no shouting from him. No wasted motion. Just the sound of flesh giving way, of breath stolen mid-cry, of men realizing too late that they were no longer predators—they were on the other end of the assault.
Blood sprayed warm and sudden, misting his cheek, streaking his mouth, slicking his hands. He didn’t react or wipe it away. His eyes stayed locked, cold and unblinking, already moving on to the next target.
The alley smelled of iron and panic and something sharp and electric, like the air before a storm broke. Fear hung thick, almost visible, clinging to the walls as bodies crumpled and hit the ground with sickening weight.
One.
Then another.
Then another.
Each fall landed heavy. Final.
This was the man who had stood between me and the worst of humanity.
This was the monster who made sure none of those men walked away from that alley with breath in them.
I staggered in the memory, the ground tilting beneath me, the alley stretching and warping like it couldn’t decide what shape it wanted to be. My head swam. My stomach flipped. I couldn’t orient myself—couldn’t tell where the wall ended and my body began.
Then he was there.
Marcello turned toward me, already moving, closing the distance between us. His voice reached me before his face did, low and steady, cutting through the chaos of an alley swimming in blood.
“It’s okay.”
His words didn’t match the scene. They didn’t match the bodies on the ground, or the smell of blood and fear and something sharp buzzing in the air.
I shook my head. I didn’t want him to come any closer. He reached into his pocket, and something inside me screamed.
“No,” I whispered now, the word tearing out of my chest as the truth detonated all at once.
In the memory, I backed away without thinking.
My heel caught on uneven concrete and my spine slammed into the brick wall behind me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. The impact rattled through my bones, but I barely felt it over the rising panic.
I tried to make myself smaller. Invisible.
I flattened my back against the wall, pressing into the rough brick as if the building might swallow me if I pushed hard enough. My palms scraped against the surface behind me, searching for something—anything—that might open, break, disappear. But there was nowhere to go.
He kept coming.
His steps weren’t rushed. Each one landed with certainty against the concrete pavement of the alley. Tap. Tap. Tap. Controlled. Deliberate. Like he already knew exactly how this would end.
He wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t angry. There was no violence in his posture. But there was something far more terrifying than that. Confidence. The kind that indicated he had already decided what would happen next.
My chest tightened. My pulse thundered in my ears.
I remember shaking my head, though I don’t know if he could see it in the dark. My hands came up instinctively, palms out in front of me like they could hold him back. But he was already too close.
The memory fractured there for a moment—pieces of sensation instead of clear images.
His hand. Something thin and soft brushing against my lips. A strip. Pale. Almost weightless. Pressed against my tongue before I could understand what it was.
I remember the confusion first. The instinct to spit it out.
But his voice came again—low, steady, almost reassuring in a way that made my stomach twist.
“Trust me,” he said.
Like we knew each other. Like he had any right to say that word.
Trust.
He told me it would help. That was all. No explanation and no warning.
Then my body betrayed me.
It started almost immediately.
A strange heaviness spread through my arms, subtle at first—like fatigue settling into muscles after too much effort. Then it deepened.
My limbs began to drag. Each movement slowed, thick and sluggish, like someone had poured wet cement into my veins. My fingers tingled where they hovered uselessly between us, the sensation prickling under my skin before fading into numbness.
Heat bloomed in my chest, heavy and dense. It spread outward through my ribs and down into my stomach, pulling everything with it.
The alley began to soften around the edges.
At first I thought it was my eyes. Then I realized it was everything.
The sharp lines of the buildings blurred. Shadows smeared together. The light above the alley stretched strangely, like someone had dragged their fingers through wet paint.
Sound changed too. Footsteps echoed too long.
My own breathing felt distant, like it belonged to someone else standing across the street.
The ground beneath me tilted. I swear it did. The alley slid sideways, the world shifting on its axis like it had suddenly decided gravity was optional.
I reached for the wall behind me.
My fingers found brick, but even that felt wrong—too smooth, too far away.
I tried to speak. Tried to ask what he had given me. Tried to say no. But nothing came out.
My mouth opened. Air passed through. No sound followed.
Panic spiked hard enough to make my heart slam against my ribs.
For a second it felt like my entire body might explode from the pressure of it. But my body didn’t answer.
The fear was still there—I could feel it clawing at the inside of my chest, frantic and desperate—but it had nowhere to go.
My legs wouldn’t move. My hands wouldn’t close. My voice refused to exist.
I was trapped inside myself. Watching. Feeling. But unable to stop any of it.
That was when the realization hit me, cold and sharp.
He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t warned me. He hadn’t given me a choice as he drugged me.