Chapter 35 Samira
Samira
I had never been more aware of my body than I was in that moment.
Every sound felt too loud. Every shadow pressed too close. My keys were slick with sweat as I fumbled with them, breath coming too fast, too shallow. I hated how quickly I had gone from defiant to afraid, how fear slid under my skin like it had always been waiting there.
This was what vulnerability felt like when you could finally see it.
I was alone. Truly alone.
No Tone. No Marcello. No walls thick enough to keep the past out.
The street was too tranquil, the kind of calm that made your nerves crawl.
I walked faster, my senses stretched thin, counting doorways, windows, footsteps—anything that moved as I edged closer to the boarding house.
My sight was back now, fully and mercilessly, and for one cowardly second I wished it wasn’t.
Because it had been easier to be blind. Easier not to see fear staring back at me from every dark corner.
Seeing meant remembering.
Marcello’s hands lifting a spoon to my lips. His arms around me while I shook. His voice telling me I was safe.
Marcello’s face spattered with blood. Marcello pressing a strip to my tongue. Marcello deciding for me—again.
Kindness and cruelty braided together so tightly I no longer knew where one ended and the other began.
I didn’t know what I wanted.
But I knew what I didn’t.
I didn’t want to be owned. Or managed. Or made small again. I didn’t want safety that came with strings, or love that felt like a leash.
That was why I had come back here.
The boarding house was nothing special—one narrow hallway, peeling paint, a lock that stuck if you didn’t lift the handle just right. Ugly. Temporary. Forgettable. But it was mine, at least for now. And that was enough.
Marcello didn’t know where it was.
The thought steadied something in my chest. We had never talked about where I’d go once I was well enough to leave. We had both pretended that part didn’t exist.
I guess it had always been assumed I’d go back to my life. I just hadn’t expected to fall in love before I did.
Walking away from him had hurt more than leaving my country. More than surviving my marriage. More than starting over with nothing but fear and stubbornness to keep me upright. Leaving Marcello had felt like tearing something vital out of myself and choosing to bleed anyway.
But maybe this was the only ending that made sense.
Because if I’d been brave enough to walk away the first time—years ago, when it might have saved me—maybe my life would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have learned to mistake control for safety. Maybe love wouldn’t feel so much like pain.
I unlocked the door and slipped inside, carrying that thought with me.
Sometimes survival wasn’t about staying. Sometimes it was about leaving before the cost became unbearable.
I climbed the stairs slowly, each step too loud in my ears. I unlocked my room, slid inside, and closed the door with care.
Darkness met me.
I didn’t reach for the light. I stood there, letting my eyes adjust, counting heartbeats while the shadows softened. The edge of the bed. The desk. The pale curtains moving at the window.
Something felt wrong.
It was subtle. A weight where there shouldn’t have been one. Like a wrong note in a song I knew by heart.
My breath caught, sharp and painful.
Someone was sitting in the armchair.
The space they took up felt deliberate. Casual. Like they belonged there. Like they had been waiting.
My heart slammed against my ribs, wild and violent.
“Samira,” a voice crooned from the dark.
No.
No no no.
He leaned forward, and I caught his face.
Mikhail. Smiling. Patient.
My hand shook as I flicked the light on.
He sat there with his long legs crossed, relaxed and unhurried. His hands rested on the arms of the chair like it wasn’t a chair at all—but a throne. And he wore it like he’d always known it would be waiting for him.
“There you are,” he purred almost fondly. “I was beginning to think you’d lost your way.”
My stomach dropped, hollow and cold.
“How did you—” My voice broke. I forced it steady. “What are you doing here, Mikhail?”
He laughed, low and indulgent.
“Oh, sweetheart. I’ve come to take my wife home, of course.”
My pulse roared in my ears as I backed up, my spine hitting the door.
I had made a mistake. A terrible, unforgivable one.
“Did you really think you could escape me, malyshka?” He rose slowly. “You belong to me. You always did. All that running, all that hiding—it only made this reunion sweeter.”
Everything happened at once.
He lunged.
I screamed.
His hand clamped around my wrist, crushing, bone grinding against bone. Pain exploded up my arm, white and blinding. I fought on instinct—kicking, twisting, clawing at anything I could reach—but it didn’t matter.
He was stronger.
He had always been.
And my resistance barely slowed him down.
He slammed me back against the wall, the impact rattling my teeth and jarring the breath from my lungs.
Before I could drag in air, his forearm drove into my throat, crushing me there, pinning me upright like a specimen on display.
I gagged, choking, my pulse roaring so loudly it drowned out everything else.
The room collapsed around us.
There was nothing but his weight.
His heat.
His shadow swallowing mine.
His face was inches from mine now. I could smell him—stale sweat, something sour beneath it, something so horribly familiar it made my stomach twist. His mouth curved, not into a smile, but into something uglier. Something that fed on fear. That savored this.
“Did you miss me?” he sneered.
Mikhail’s hand closed around my arm like a vice.
His fingers dug deep, hard enough that my skin burned instantly, hard enough that pain flared bright and sharp through the fog of shock. For half a second, my mind tried to pretend it wasn’t happening—tried to name it as anything else.
A misunderstanding. A mistake or a correction.
Then he pulled, and my shoulder jerked, and the truth hit like a slap.
I fought.
Not gracefully. Not like the women in films who move like knives.
I fought like a trapped animal. Hard. Wild.
Ugly. My free hand clawed at his wrist, nails scraping, fingers slipping over his skin as sweat and panic made everything slick.
My legs kicked. My body twisted in frantic bursts, each movement clumsy because fear stole coordination and replaced it with raw, useless chaos.
I tried to plant my feet.
He dragged me anyway.
The room blurred. The edges of furniture smeared as I was hauled toward the door, my heels skidding over the floor like I wasn’t even attached to myself anymore—like my body had become something he owned, something he could reposition and take and fold into his plans.
“No—” I gasped.
The word tore my throat raw. It didn’t come out the way I wanted. It came out broken, strangled, like my voice had to fight its way up through my chest.
He laughed.
Low. Pleased. Like I’d just performed for him.
“That voice,” he hissed, and his grip tightened, a warning threaded into the pressure. “You found it again. I always did prefer your silence.”
My stomach dropped.
Not because of the words—because of how familiar they felt. Because something in me remembered being trained. Remembered learning which version of myself was safest to be. Small. Agreeable. Invisible.
I didn’t want to go back to being that woman.
The doorframe loomed.
I twisted and tried to slam my weight backward, to hook my hand on anything solid that could anchor me long enough to tear free.
My fingers caught nothing. His strength didn’t even shift.
He hauled me into the hallway, and the corridor spun around me as I stumbled. The lights were too bright, too white. The walls were too close. Doors flashed past in streaks of colour and shadow. My heart hammered so hard it hurt, each beat loud in my ears, drowning out thought.
I tried to scream again.
My mouth opened and the sound that came out was thin—wrong—like my throat didn’t recognize the shape of it anymore.
Someone shouted.
A woman’s voice—sharp, terrified. Mathilde, maybe. But it came from far away, warped and distant, as if I were already slipping out of this world and into another. Like my body was here, but my mind had started floating up and away to survive.
I dug my feet in again, desperate.
It didn’t matter.
Mikhail didn’t stop. He moved with calm certainty, like this was nothing more than an errand and he was merely collecting something that belonged to him and returning it to its rightful place.
Half-carried, half-thrown, I was dragged toward the stairs.
The moment my foot hit the first step wrong, I knew I was going down.
My hand shot out for the railing, fingers closing around it, and for one glorious heartbeat I thought I could hold. I thought I could make myself heavy enough that he couldn’t move me.
Then he yanked.
I lurched sideways. My shoulder smashed into the railing, and pain burst behind my eyes—white-hot, blinding. The shock of it stole my breath. My grip slipped. My vision pinwheeled.
The stairs became a tumble of angles.
I hit step after step in jolting impacts that rattled through my bones, the world reducing to sharp bursts of sensation and the thick, nauseating certainty that I couldn’t stop it.
He didn’t fall with me.
He controlled the descent, which was worse.
He kept one hand on me the entire time, guiding me like luggage, keeping me from breaking too visibly while still making sure I understood exactly how powerless I was.
At the bottom, the air changed.
Cold rushed over my skin, biting through my clothes, and my lungs seized like they didn’t know what to do with the outside. Night swallowed the edges of the property. The yard lights threw long shadows across the ground.
And there it was.
A dark van, waiting.
Its doors were open.
They looked like a mouth.
A throat.
Something ready to swallow me whole.
My body surged with one last frantic hope.
I dug my heels into the ground, twisting hard, trying to rip my arm out of his grip. Pain streaked up my nerves. My shoulder screamed. I didn’t care. I pulled until my muscles shook, until my skin felt like it would tear.
For half a second—half a second—I broke free.
The world snapped into razor focus.
I ran.
Barely thinking. Barely breathing. Just movement. Just away. My feet pounded the ground and the cold air burned my throat and I made it two steps—two desperate, beautiful steps—before his arm snaked around my waist.
It was a bodyhold. A trap.
The breath punched out of me, crushed under the force of it. My ribs screamed. My limbs flailed uselessly, striking air, my fingers clawing at nothing.
The world tilted.
Lifted.
Then flipped upside down.
For a terrifying heartbeat I was weightless—suspended between escape and capture—before he hurled me into the van.
Metal. Darkness. A hard, brutal impact that lit my skull up with stars.
My vision fractured.
Sound went strange—distant, muffled, as though someone had shoved cotton into my ears. The smell inside the van hit me next: rubber, oil, old sweat, something chemical and stale. My stomach lurched.
I tried to inhale and couldn’t.
My throat worked. My mouth opened. Nothing coherent came out. Just a broken sound that didn’t feel like mine.
Above me, Mikhail’s shadow filled the doorway.
His face was an outline against the light outside. I couldn’t read his eyes, but I didn’t need to. I could feel the satisfaction rolling off him like heat.
He’d caught me.
Again.
My limbs went heavy from the shock. My body’s last defence when my mind couldn’t find a way out.
The edges of the van softened. The ceiling bent. The open doors became a narrowing frame. Somewhere far away, someone shouted my name, or maybe I imagined it. Maybe my mind made it up to keep me from disappearing completely.
I tried to hold onto one thought—one single, stubborn thread.
I can’t let him take me back.
But the darkness came fast, thick and swallowing, and my body slipped under before I could fight it.
Then everything went dark.