Chapter 50 The Present
THE PRESENT
CAIDEN
The drip of water somewhere in the basement sounded like a countdown. The buzz of the bulb overhead sounded like a nerve being rubbed raw. Even my own breathing felt loud, like the walls were listening for it.
I hated that the wire let me see everything while trapping me anyway. See the concrete. See the stairs. See the dark mouth of the doorway above. See the stains I kept refusing to stare at long enough to understand.
The visibility was its own cruelty. A reminder that freedom was right there, just out of reach, like a fucking taunt.
Time slipped sideways down here. It wasn’t measured in sunsets or meals. It was measured in how often he came down the stairs. In how many times the light flickered. In the way my body started to feel like it belonged to the basement. Like the damp had crawled into my bones and planted roots.
I sat with my back against the wire, knees bent, forearms resting on them, head tipped forward like I was trying to keep my thoughts from spilling out.
The shirt on my skin was stiff with sweat and grime.
My knuckles were split again. I kept reopening the cuts without meaning to, picking at the scabs when the anger got too loud.
It was something to control. Something to ruin that wasn’t her.
Amelia sat across the cage. She’d been quieter since I opened my mouth. Since I said the thing I shouldn’t have said. The thing that made my skin crawl with regret every time I replayed it.
Craving.
I wanted the old distance. The old hatred. The simplicity of it. Hate was easy. Hate was a script my father wrote and made me memorize. Hate gave me somewhere to put the chaos.
This was messy and vulnerable. This was me handing her a weapon and pretending it wouldn’t hurt when she used it.
I stared at the glass until my eyes burned. It had smudges from our palms. Old prints layered over new ones. Evidence of proximity without touch.
Close enough to see the exhaustion in her face. The crack in her lower lip. The bruise blooming along her jawline from where he’d grabbed her too hard. Close enough to watch her breathe, to count each rise and fall like it mattered, like her lungs were the only thing keeping mine working.
Not close enough to fix a damn thing.
The bulb flickered. Buzzed. Steadied.
My jaw clenched.
I’d started hating the light almost as much as the dark. The light meant visibility. Surveillance. Being watched. It meant he could come down at any second and see us exactly like this.
The dark was worse, though.
The dark made my mind loud.
In the dark, the basement didn’t just feel like a cage. It felt like my childhood house. The hallway. The heaviness in the walls. The certainty that footsteps meant impact.
I could handle a lot of things. Cold. Hunger. Pain.
But the sound of a man moving above me made something primal wake up under my ribs.
A part of me that wanted to become the weapon my father always said I was.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, hard enough to see sparks.
Amelia shifted on the other side of the glass. A small movement, careful, like even changing position cost her something. Her shoulder slid higher against the wall. She dragged a hand over her face, palm trembling.
She was slipping. Not physically. Not yet.
But I could see it in her eyes, in the way she stared through the floor like she was already gone somewhere else. Helplessness wasn’t loud with her. It was quiet. It was a slow surrender. It was her trying to shrink so the pain couldn’t find her.
I hated it. I hated watching it. I hated that I couldn’t reach across the glass and grab her shoulders and shake her back to life. I hated that the thought of touching her made my throat go dry.
Because that’s what craving was, wasn’t it. A need so immense it buried you.
I stared at her hair, at the curve of her neck, and I remembered being fourteen and seeing that same curve when she bent over her locker.
I remembered the sudden punch in my gut, the heat, the confusion.
I remembered how I’d turned that confusion into cruelty because my father’s voice lived in my skull like a parasite.
Hate her. Hurt her. Make her pay. For your mother leaving. For Judy. For everything.
My father had died a few months after graduation. Alcohol poisoning. Like the bottle finally got tired of pretending it wasn’t killing him and just did it outright.
I’d thought I’d feel relief. I’d expected freedom. What I got was a ghost. What I got was his voice still running my life, still deciding what I was allowed to feel. What I was allowed to want.
Even dead, he’d owned me.
I dug my fingernails into my palm until pain flared and grounded me.
My muscles tightened on instinct. I sat up straighter, shoulders rolling back, face smoothing into the dead calm I wore like armor. If he wanted fear, he wasn’t getting it from my expression. He could earn it the hard way.
Amelia’s voice came muffled through the glass. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tone was thin with exhaustion. She was trying to speak like she didn’t care.
Like she hadn’t been reduced to a shaking animal in a cage.
I leaned closer to the glass, not because I wanted conversation, but because ignoring her felt dangerous. Not for her. For me. For whatever was building inside my chest.
“What?” I said flatly.
Her eyes flicked up, annoyed that I’d responded at all. She said something again, clearer this time, still muffled but readable.
“Do you think he’s coming back?”
She was trying to plan. Trying to anchor herself to something predictable. She needed an answer to cling to.
I didn’t have one.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Her jaw clenched. She snapped back, words blurred by the barrier but obvious in shape.
“You never know anything.”
I leaned in closer, my breath fogging the glass. “None of us know anything,” I said, harsher than necessary. “That’s the point.”
I shifted away from the glass, needing space that didn’t exist. “Don’t fucking look at me like that,” I muttered.
Her mouth parted. She looked like she wanted to argue, then thought better of it. She sank back against the wall, eyes dropping again.
Silence returned, heavy as wet cloth.
I stared at the concrete floor and let the darkness in my head creep forward anyway. It came whether I wanted it or not.
Images.
Pathosbury. The hallways. Her locker. Her face when I shoved her too hard and pretended it was an accident. The way her eyes would flare, defiant, even when she was scared.
Lillian.
Her laugh. Her hands on my shirt. The way she’d looked at me like I was something worth knowing, and I’d taken it because I was selfish and angry and starving for affection I didn’t know how to ask for.
Then the consequences. The spiral. The pregnancy. The way everything turned black and final.
The word suicide still didn’t feel real in my mouth. It felt like a story that belonged to someone else, something tragic you read about and put down.
Except it was welded into us.
Into Amelia. Into me.
I clenched my jaw until it ached, trying to grind down the guilt like it was bone. It didn’t go away. It never went away. It just waited.
My father’s voice crawled up from the pit of memory, thick with whiskey and contempt.
You ruin everything you touch.
I swallowed hard. I wanted to punch something. The wire. The wall. My own face. Instead, I sat still and let the rage boil, contained, because I’d learned early what happened when rage escaped.
People got hurt. Mostly the wrong people.
Amelia made a soft sound across the glass. Not a sob. Not a word. A sound like her breath caught on something sharp.
I looked up fast.
She was staring at the corner of the room, eyes wide and glassy, shoulders drawn tight.
Hallucinations. Again.
The basement loved those. It fed them. It cultivated them like mold.
I watched her for a long second, my chest tight, and told myself not to move. Not to react. If I reacted, it became real. If I reacted, he won.
Amelia whispered something to the corner, barely moving her lips.
My stomach turned.
I stood up, slow, controlled, because if I moved too quickly my body would show how scared I was that she was slipping. I stepped closer to the glass, staring hard at her until her eyes flicked to mine.
“Stop,” I said.
Her brows knitted together.
“Stop talking to whatever the fuck that is,” I said, voice low. “It isn’t real.”
Her eyes flashed with anger, immediate and defensive. “I know.”
“You don’t,” I snapped.
She sat up straighter, fury giving her a brief spine. “Don’t tell me what I know.”
I leaned forward until my forehead nearly touched the glass. “Then act like it,” I said.
Her lips pressed tight. Her eyes were wet with rage, not tears. “You don’t get to act like you care,” she said, slow and deliberate, like she wanted each word to land.
My stomach clenched.
There it was. The truth she kept throwing at me like a rock. I deserved it. I also hated it.
Because caring was not some noble thing I was choosing. It was a weakness that had crawled under my skin and made itself at home. It was a craving I hadn’t asked for, a hunger that made the rest of my hungers feel simple.
I forced my face colder. “I don’t care,” I lied.
Amelia stared at me like she wanted to believe it because believing it would hurt less. Then she looked away, shoulders slumping again.
The lie tasted like ash.
I backed away from the glass and sat down hard against the wire, letting my head hit it once. The impact sent a dull pain through my skull. It felt deserved. It felt like punishment.
A few days in this cage and I was unraveling. Not with tears. Not with dramatic speeches. With this quiet rot inside me, this slow realization that hatred had been my shield, and without it I didn’t know what the hell to do with what I felt.
What I’d always felt, buried under my father’s orders.
I remembered a night in high school, after practice, walking home alone.
I’d seen Amelia down the street under a streetlight, hair catching the glow, face tilted up like she was thinking about something far away. I’d stopped behind a tree like a creep and watched her for a long minute.
Not because I wanted to hurt her.
Because I wanted to walk up and say her name like it meant something.
Then I’d heard my father’s truck on the road and the spell broke, and I’d gone home and swallowed the longing like it was poison.
Craving. I’d always had it. I’d just been trained to translate it into cruelty.
Now the translation was failing. Now I was stuck in a cage with her and the old hate didn’t fit anymore, and the guilt was too big to hold, and the fear was so constant it made my teeth ache.
I stared at my hands.
These hands had shoved her. Grabbed her. Hurt her. These hands had touched her sister. These hands wanted to touch Amelia now, not even in some pretty fantasy, but in that raw desperate way that meant I needed proof she was still alive.
I hated myself for it. I hated myself for everything.
Amelia was turned away now, back to the corner, back to staring at nothing.
And I hated myself again.
I sat back down against the wire, head tipped forward, and let the darkness in my head roll closer. Let it remind me of everything I’d done. Everything I’d ruined. Let it whisper that this cage was my punishment.
The worst part was that a piece of me agreed.
If there was any justice in the world, Amelia would not be trapped in here with me. And if there was any justice in the world, the craving I admitted would die in my throat before it ever got the chance to become something real.
Justice was a fairytale.
This was just a basement. A cage. A glass wall. Two people slowly being stripped down to whatever they really were beneath hate, beneath guilt, beneath fear.
I stared at the barrier until my eyes blurred.
Then I closed them, not to sleep, but to hold myself still.
If I let the storm out, I would become my father. If I became my father, Amelia would not survive me even if she survived this.