Chapter 3 The Past #3
“Hardly,” I lied. My voice skittered along the walls, thin as moth wings. I pressed myself into the thick black, willing my body to freeze, to become an animal at rest so he couldn’t taste my dread.
“Sure you’re not broken?” he crooned. The darkness amplified every scrape and whisper, made his words crawl under my skin like centipedes. “You’re shivering.”
“Maybe there’s a draft.”
His footsteps echoed, three—no, four—paces away, then circled behind me.
With no sight, every sense sharpened; I could feel the displacement of air as he drew near, the faint electricity of him, the way the room seemed to pulse with his orbit.
I remembered being six, hiding in a closet when my mother raged through the house, the pitch black womb both sanctuary and executioner.
Here, the dark was not empty: it was inhabited, predatory.
He moved closer, presence like a shifting draft in the void. “You ever wonder what hell feels like?” he murmured, the words cutting from somewhere behind my left shoulder. “Not the Sunday school version. The real one.”
His breath was damp and sour, clouds of it blooming against my neck.
I tried to steady my voice, but it trembled into the void. “Sure. Hell is being trapped with someone you hate.”
His laugh slithered over my skin. “But you didn’t run. You followed me in. Makes you wonder which of us is more fucked up. Your self-worth must be pretty damn low.”
I swallowed the bile, refusing to give him the sound of fear. I didn’t have an answer for him. I didn’t even know why I followed him.
Maybe I do have low-self worth.
Of course I did. Years of being neglected by my mother, and tortured by Caiden, it did some terrible things to me.
Footsteps, quick and predatory, then his hand braced the wall right beside my head. I could feel the heat of him even through the cold, the pressure of his chest hovering just out of collision range.
I imagined Caiden’s hands around my throat, like a noose, his thumbs digging into the soft shelf beneath my jaw, pinning my voice inside my throat.
The image sickened me, not because I thought he would, but because I half-wished he’d try.
At least then I’d have a reason to see myself as a survivor instead of just a scavenger.
He slammed his fist against the wall, the bang echoing like a gunshot.
I flinched, barely, but still didn’t give him what he wanted.
“You’re such a little masochist,” he snarled. “You’d rather take a beating than admit you’re scared.”
The word rattled around my skull.
Was that what I was? Was that why I stayed in rooms with people who hated me, why I followed him down the stairwell and into this coffin of a room?
Maybe. Maybe I was just sick enough to like the attention, even if it meant being chewed up and spit out.
“You’re projecting,” I said, voice barely a whisper. “You want me scared because you’re terrified of being alone with yourself.”
I heard him move, the air shifting as he paced the small box of darkness. Suddenly, his hand found my shoulder, heavy, not painful, but enough to root me in place.
I flinched, but he didn’t let go.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, but the words rang hollow.
We stood, two satellites locked in orbit, neither willing to break the pull.
“God, you’re a freak,” he said, the words trembling with something rawer than anger. “Anyone else would be pissing themselves right now.”
I remembered, in that instant, crouching in a closet while my mother’s boyfriend slammed her through drywall, the sound of violence both muffled and amplified by the dark.
How I’d pressed my palms over my mouth so hard my teeth left blood in the skin, just so I wouldn’t make a sound.
How I’d become a ghost, and how that had saved me.
“I’ve met worse monsters than you,” I said, voice flat.
“I’m the worst kind of fucking monster you’ll ever meet. Believe me.”
He inched closer. I felt his breath first, then the heat of his body, then the fine tremor of his hands as they landed on either side of my head, pinning me without touch.
It was so black I could feel my pupils flaring, the useless straining for light.
Time had no measure in that dark room, maybe a minute, maybe an hour. I only knew that every inch of my skin felt peeled and raw, exposed to the wet rot of history oozing through the stones.
“Get away from me,” I hissed.
He let out a snort, but didn’t budge. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” The chill between us vibrated, a dark, pulsing thing, his silhouette looming blacker than everything else. “Make a scene, Amelia. Scream. See if anyone comes.”
I refused him, even as my lungs fluttered and a new, deeper panic wormed through my veins. Not fear of him, but the sudden, suffocating certainty that I’d always end up like this, trapped in a box with someone who wanted to see how much damage I could take before I broke.
I’d been screaming for years, and nothing ever came except more dark.
“Knew it. No fight left in you.”
The hands left the wall, but I could hear him circling, a wolf in a pen, waiting to lunge if I dared run. “You want to know what my dad does to me when I can’t fight back?”
No. I didn’t want to know.
But I pictured it anyway, in full high-def misery: the bruises, the raw-throated mornings, the way his voice sometimes hit the exact same pitch as my mother’s boyfriends when the violence was just getting started.
Misery recognizes itself, even in people you hate.
He didn’t say it, but I could taste it in the air: the memory of pain, the slow drip of it, how it seeps out and stains every inch of your life. I hated him for making me feel it. I hated myself for understanding.
My body was lit up with static, every nerve jangling. “Open the door,” I said.
He stood unmoving, his shape a hulking smear in the void. “Bet you can’t even find it,” he whispered. “You’d die in here, you know. They used to bury the weak ones in the walls.”
I almost believed him.
I pressed my back to the wall and tried to slow my breathing, but every gulp of air was thick with mildew and dread.
Caiden’s steps whispered over the floorboards, circling so close I could have spit and hit him.
My hands fumbled at the wall behind me, searching blindly for seams or latches, anything that might break the spell of his darkness.
He let me grope around, savoring it, his own breathing settling into a predator’s hush. “You remind me of a mouse, you know that?” he murmured, voice syrup-thick and hateful. “Scurry, scurry. But there’s nowhere for you to go. Not this time.”
The air in the blackness started to thicken, a velvet sack pulled over my head, suffocating and absolute.
I could hear my own heart, roaring in my ears, and it told me I was prey.
This was what he wanted: to see what shape my terror would take when no one was watching. The horror wasn't that he might hurt me, but that I might beg him not to.
I let myself slide to the floor, knees curling tight to my chest. I wouldn’t give him tears, but the tremor in my arms said enough.
He prowled the small perimeter, boots dragging over the planks, every so often pausing to let the silence press harder.
He crouched, I could feel the heat of him, the animal patience of a true sadist. “You know, I could keep you here all day.” His breath soured the air. “No one would care. Not even your own goddamn family.”
“My family’s garbage,” I said, hating him for making me say it. “But at least I’m not a copy of my father, like you are.”
He went still. I heard him exhale, long and hollow.
“Shut up,” he said, voice stripped of affect. “You don’t have a right to talk about him. About me.”
“Then let me out,” I said, louder, more desperate than intended.
My hand scraped the wall for anything. Nail, knob, even a splinter to dig under my skin so I had pain I owned, not pain he gave.
He didn’t move. “Make me.”
Hatred and terror warred inside my chest, a chemical cocktail. I rose, fists balled, pushing blindly along the edges with my knuckles.
I moved along the frozen plaster, splinters raking my fingertips, and the panic at my throat threatened to choke me.
I remembered the way my mother used to pace outside my childhood closet, her voice a low, hungry croak, waiting for me to come out so she could finish the fight. I’d lasted hours that way, feeding off the darkness until it tasted like home.
This dark was worse. There was no promise of morning, just Caiden, circling, hungry to see me crumble.
I could hear him crouch, knees popping, the hiss of his exhale close enough that I imagined his lips at my ear. “You’re not even worth hating, you know that? You think you matter, but you’re a nothing. You’re a ghost.”
I flinched at the word. “You’re wrong,” I said, but the syllables wavered, thin as thread.
He crawled closer, boots scuffing, then crouched, so close that his heat pressed against my side. “Ghosts don’t feel pain,” he whispered. “But I know you do.” And his fingers brushed my wrist, deliberate, not gentle.
“Let me go,” I rasped, voice cracking. “Let me go, Caiden. I fucking mean it.”
He didn’t answer. He just stared, his face inches from mine, a mask of hate and hunger and something so lonely it hurt to witness.
I tried to wrench free, but his grip was iron. Rage and shame and terror carved me open.
I pictured the bus, the empty house, the way my mother flinched from noise.
Nobody came for me, not really.
But I screamed anyway, a wild, animal sound that tore my throat raw and bounced crazed through the black.
The scream was a mix of a shriek and words. A chant of “let me go, let me go, let me go, leave me alone.”
He flinched. Not much, but enough. “Jesus, Amelia,” he breathed, and his grip loosened just a millimeter.
“Is this what you want?” I gasped, eyes leaking hot tears I refused to let fall. “You want to see me break? You want to feel like a man? Go ahead, hit me. Do it.”
His hands trembled. He released me, like I’d turned to fire.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, but his voice was so small I almost missed it.