Chapter 38 Samira
Samira
I woke up screaming.
The sound tore out of me before I knew where I was, before my mind could catch up to the reality my body already understood. My throat burned with it. My chest heaved, breath coming in sharp, panicked pulls that hurt almost as much as the memory clawing its way back.
The van was moving again.
The engine roared beneath me, too loud, too close, the vibration rattling through my bones and straight into my skull.
Every jolt of the road sent fresh pain blooming behind my eyes, a vicious, pulsing ache that made my vision blur at the edges.
I swallowed and tasted blood—coppery, thick—where I’d bitten my lip hard enough to split it.
I turned my head as much as the restraints would allow.
Mikhail was driving.
He took the corners too fast, too sharp, the van lurching violently from side to side. It wasn’t careless driving. It was deliberate. I knew that. He liked to call it teaching. Knocking sense into someone. Letting the body learn what the mind resisted.
The restraints dug into my wrists and ankles, unforgiving. Each sudden turn sent my weight slamming against them, pain shooting up my arms, my hips, my spine. I tried to curl in on myself, to shield what I could, but there was nowhere to go. No way to brace, and no way to soften the blows.
I knew bruises were already forming beneath my skin—dark, spreading blooms I wouldn’t see until later. If there was a later.
Mikhail’s methods were archaic. Barbaric. The kind of cruelty that didn’t rely on cleverness or tools, just repetition and certainty and the slow wearing down of resistance.
And they were effective.
To an extent.
What he hadn’t counted on—what he never counted on—was that I wasn’t the same woman I’d been back in Tunisia.
I wasn’t small anymore.
I wasn’t the mangled, controlled version of myself he’d shaped so deliberately. The one who flinched on command. The one who folded inward and learned silence as a survival skill. I wasn’t that weak, afraid, endlessly tormented woman anymore.
I was different now.
I’d seen another life. Touched it. Lived in it, even briefly. I’d stood in warmth and safety and realized—too late, maybe—that I was allowed to want more than survival.
Marcello.
His name surfaced unbidden, painful and vivid. His face filled my mind—the way he’d looked when I left him, pride and hurt tangled together, something unspoken sitting heavy between us. The soundless devastation he hadn’t tried to hide.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I never should have left him. The truth hit hard, merciless. I’d known it halfway to the boarding house, felt it settling in my chest like a warning I refused to listen to. I could have turned back. I should have turned back.
But stubbornness had wrapped around me instead, tight and suffocating, and I’d kept moving forward. Straight out of his arms. Straight into the hands of my eventual demise.
If only I’d gone back. If only I hadn’t left. I wouldn’t be here now.
The thought twisted, sharp and cruel—but it didn’t hold. It fractured under the weight of another truth.
Maybe I would have brought Mikhail straight to Marcello’s door.
The idea made my stomach churn.
How unfair would that have been?
Marcello didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve to have my past tear through his life, didn’t deserve to be dragged into another war born of my mistakes and secrets. I’d already brought enough darkness into his world.
Monsters.
That was all I seemed to carry with me. Monsters behind me. Monsters chasing me. Monsters waiting in the shadows, eager to remind me that escape always came at a cost.
The van took another sharp turn, throwing me sideways, pain flaring bright and hot.
I gasped, breath tearing out of me—but beneath the fear, beneath the pain, something else stirred.
Not surrender.
Resolve.
I wasn’t the woman Mikhail remembered.
And whether he realized it yet or not, that was going to matter.
When the van finally stopped, the sudden silence was almost worse than the noise.
The engine cut. The vibration died. My ears rang in the absence of sound, my body still braced for motion that didn’t come.
Then the doors opened.
Metal shrieked as light tore into the van, harsh and unforgiving. I blinked hard, vision swimming, and through the glare I saw him.
Mikhail stood there smiling.
His eyes were alive with something wrong—too focused, too alert, like a man who had been waiting patiently for this exact moment. The kind of unhinged that didn’t need to shout to be dangerous.
“My beautiful Samira,” he whispered cheerfully. “It was always going g to end like this.”
Panic climbed my throat, sharp and suffocating, squeezing the air from my lungs.
“Let me go,” I whispered.
The words felt ridiculous the moment they left my mouth. Too small. Too hopeful.
He laughed, amused.
“Oh, no, sweetheart,” he softened, like he was correcting a child who hadn’t understood the rules. “There’s only one way you ever leave me—” He tilted his head, considering the thought. “When you’re dead and cold, and even then, I will still find ways to break you.”
The sentence settled over me slowly, methodically.
A verdict.
My chest tightened. My heart began to pound so hard it hurt.
Then he started talking.
“How many men, Samira?” he asked lightly, almost conversational. “How many have had you in the year we’ve been apart?” He glanced at me sideways, eyes flicking over my face, my body, cataloguing reactions. “Were they better than me? Kinder?”
His voice dipped, sharpened.
“Did they make you forget who you belong to?”
My head shook on instinct, tears burning fast and hot, blurring everything. “I don’t belong to anyone.”
The smile vanished. That was not the right thing to say.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he snapped, the calm cracking just enough to show the steel beneath. His fist slammed into the side of the van, the sound explosive in the confined space. “You belong to me.”
He leaned closer, voice dropping, deliberate and intimate.
“You will always belong to me.”
Mikhail snapped the restraints at my wrists, and my arms flew free without warning, slamming painfully against the metal walls as they dropped through empty air. The sudden lack of resistance sent a jolt of shock through me—I barely had time to gasp before he was already moving again.
He crouched, cut through the ties at my ankles with quick, efficient motions, and then his hands were on me.
Hard.
Final.
He grabbed me and yanked me out of the van without ceremony, fingers digging into my arms with bruising force. I didn’t step down. I didn’t brace. I was thrown.
The ground rushed up too fast.
My knees buckled the instant I hit, shoes skidding uselessly as I crashed into dirt and stone.
Pain flared sharp and blinding, tearing the breath from my lungs in a harsh, helpless sound.
Gravel bit into my skin. Cold seeped through my clothes.
For a split second, the world narrowed to nothing but impact and shock and the sickening certainty that I was completely at his mercy.
I barely had time to gasp before his grip tightened and he hauled me upright again.
Dragged me.
Across the earth like I weighed nothing.
Gravel tore into my hands as I clawed uselessly at the ground. Dirt packed under my nails. I tried to dig my heels in, tried to slow him, tried to make myself heavy.
But it didn’t work. He was stronger. More focused.
And face to face with a monster who knew exactly what he was doing, I realized with sickening clarity that brute force had never been his weapon.
Control was. And he had it.
Then I heard it.
Water.
Not close enough to see yet, but close enough that the sound curled in my stomach and twisted something deep and primal. Moving water. Heavy. Relentless.
My stomach dropped. My heart slammed into a frantic gallop. This—this was not good.
“No,” I sobbed, the word tearing out of me, raw and useless. “Please. Don’t.”
He smiled.
Not wide. Not cruel in the obvious way. Worse than that—slow, knowing, almost fond. Like this was a memory he’d been saving.
“I remember how much you hate the water,” he stated softly, as if we were sharing something intimate. “How you used to freeze when we got too close. How your whole body would lock up.” His eyes gleamed. “You’d shake so badly you couldn’t hide it.”
My chest tightened. The air felt thin.
“I thought,” he continued, his voice gentle and deliberate, “we should end things somewhere meaningful.”
I shook my head, tears blinding me, feet scrambling uselessly against the dirt. “Please,” I whispered again, even though I knew it didn’t matter.
“This is mercy.” He was almost reverent now. “I won’t let the world break you, Samira. That honor is mine, and mine alone.”
Behind him, the creek roared—dark, swollen, hungry. The sound crawled over my skin, dragging every buried fear back into the light. It was louder than my breathing. Louder than my heart.
He reached for me again, fingers closing, already dragging me toward the water that had haunted me for as long as I could remember.
And somewhere beneath the terror—beneath the panic clawing at my throat—one thought took hold.
Small.
Stubborn.
Unkillable.
I had survived before.
I would survive again.
Even if this monster believed otherwise.