Chapter Thirty-Two
Leona
The quiet didn’t help. I had thought it would.
That closing the door, putting wood and walls and distance between myself and everything outside, would settle the edge still sitting under my skin.
But the silence didn’t soften it. It amplified it.
My hand stayed on the door a second longer than necessary, my palm pressed flat against the wood like I needed the resistance of it, something solid, something unmoving.
My breathing hadn’t evened out yet. Not fully.
I focused on that first, on the rise and fall of my chest, on pulling the air in deeper and slower, forcing it into something steady.
It didn’t work. My lungs didn’t want to cooperate.
The inhale caught halfway, my chest tightening instead of expanding.
I pushed away from the door and moved farther into the room, my steps controlled, deliberate, like I could walk it off if I didn’t stop long enough for it to settle in.
“You’re fine,” I muttered under my breath.
The words felt thin. Not wrong. Just nowhere near enough.
I crossed the room, then turned and paced once, then again, my hands flexing at my sides, trying to shake off the residual tension still clinging to me like something physical.
It wasn’t him. Not exactly. Daan hadn’t touched me.
He hadn’t needed to. That was the part that wouldn’t let go.
My body didn’t care about the difference fast enough.
The memory didn’t need to be exact to be triggered.
I stopped near the edge of the bed, my breath catching again, sharper this time.
My chest tightened in a way that felt wrong, too fast, too shallow, too high.
I pulled in another breath, deeper this time, forcing it, but it hit resistance halfway in, my lungs refusing to open the way they should.
My pulse kicked harder. Louder. Too loud.
“Stop,” I said quietly. Not to anything outside.
To myself. My fingers curled, pressing into my palms as I stood there trying to anchor myself in something I could still control.
The room was the same. Nothing had changed.
The walls hadn’t moved. The door was closed.
No one was here. I was safe. I knew that.
My body didn’t. The pressure built quickly after that, not gradual, not subtle, but immediate, my chest constricting as my breath shortened further, my lungs pulling in air that didn’t feel like it was going anywhere.
My shoulders tensed. My posture tightened.
I tried to force it to slow down. It didn’t.
The next inhale came faster. Then the next one. Then faster still.
No. No, not this. I sucked in another breath and felt it catch high in my chest, thin and wrong.
My pulse was hammering now, so hard it felt like it had moved into my throat.
My hands started to tremble. I stared at them for a second like they belonged to someone else.
That was new. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I had just never looked directly at it before.
The room felt smaller. Not smaller, exactly.
Closer. The walls hadn’t moved, but something in me had, some private sense of distance and space and safety collapsing in on itself all at once until the air no longer felt like mine.
I reached for the bedpost and caught it hard enough to hurt, grounding myself in the contact, the solidness of it, the way it didn’t move no matter how much I needed it to.
“In,” I said under my breath. “In.” I pulled in another breath.
Too fast. It hit wrong again, catching high instead of settling low, my chest seizing around it.
“Out,” I tried. But it didn’t release cleanly.
It stuttered instead, broken and uneven, my lungs trying to work and failing, my body already convinced something worse was happening.
My other hand came up flat against my sternum like I could physically force it to open.
It didn’t. My fingers were shaking harder now.
My vision blurred at the edges. Not darkness.
Just a narrowing. The room was still there, but farther away and too close at the same time, as though I were looking at it through the wrong end of something.
My ears had started to fill with the sound of my own blood, the rush of it so loud it began to drown out everything else.
My knees weakened. Not all at once. Enough.
I sat before I lost the choice. The edge of the bed caught me harder than I meant it to.
I bent forward, one hand still gripping the mattress, the other pressed against my chest, trying to make myself smaller, tighter, easier to hold together.
“Breathe,” I whispered. It came out thin.
Wrong. My lungs dragged in another shallow inhale that never felt like it reached the bottom of me.
My fingers had started to tingle. That frightened me more than it should have.
My mouth felt dry. My heart was pounding too fast, too hard, every beat seeming to make the next breath worse.
I squeezed my eyes shut. That made it worse immediately.
No visual. No room. No fixed point. Only feeling.
Only pressure. Only the sick, rising certainty that something in me had broken open and was no longer listening.
I opened my eyes again too fast and the room lurched.
“I’m here,” I said, and the words came out barely above a breath.
“I’m here. Room. Bed. Door. Floor.” I forced myself to look.
The edge of the rug. The brass knob on the wardrobe.
The crack in the wood near the baseboard.
The lamp. The door. I clung to each one like it was a rung on something vertical and slippery.
“In,” I said again. My breath came too quickly.
I tried anyway. “Out.” It broke apart. My chest seized again, tighter now, and for one terrible second I was sure I was about to pass out or choke or die right there on the edge of the bed with no one knowing except the walls.
The thought made it spike worse. My whole body went colder.
Then hotter. A wave of dizziness rolled through me so suddenly I had to grab the mattress with both hands.
The room tilted. My pulse kicked harder.
My breathing turned jagged, each inhale too small, each exhale incomplete, panic feeding itself so fast I could no longer tell whether I was reacting to the fear or to the way my body had already lost control of itself.
Daan. Not the name. The space. The pressure.
The way he stepped closer and closer without touching me, until my body stopped believing the difference mattered.
And under that, Marius at the door. His hand near my jaw.
His mouth on mine. The choice in one. The theft in the other.
My body had known the difference. But not quickly enough.
That was what undid me. A broken sound caught in my throat.
Not a sob. Not a word. Something smaller and more humiliating.
I pressed one hand against my mouth, hard, like I could hold the panic inside if I pushed back against it physically enough.
It didn’t help. Nothing helped. The room kept narrowing. The air kept refusing to belong to me.
I bent forward farther, elbows braced on my thighs now, my head lowered because it felt like the only way not to float apart entirely.
My hair fell around my face. My breath came in frantic, shallow bursts.
My hands were trembling so badly now I couldn’t stop them even when I tried.
“No,” I said. The word came out ragged. “No. No. Here.” I forced myself to look at the floor.
The boards. The rug. The line where one shadow ended and the next began.
“Here,” I whispered again. “Now. Bed. Floor. Door. Lamp.” I repeated it because the words were something to do besides disappear.
Another breath. Still wrong. Another. Still too fast. But one of them went a little deeper than the rest. I held onto that like it mattered.
“In.” This time the breath made it lower, not all the way, but enough.
“Out.” It shuddered. Then broke freer than the last one.
I stayed bent over, fingers digging into the mattress so hard my knuckles hurt, and forced myself to do it again.
In. Out. Wrong, but less wrong. In. Out.
Still shaking. Still trapped in the echo of it. But less.
The edge of the panic didn’t vanish. It frayed.
It loosened one thread at a time, leaving me shaking and drenched in the aftermath of my own body.
My pulse was still too fast, but it had stopped trying to climb higher.
My chest still hurt, but it was beginning to open.
My vision had stopped narrowing. The room was coming back piece by piece instead of all at once.
I stayed where I was. Didn’t rush it. Didn’t pretend I was better before I was.
The attack passed the way it always did. Not clean. Not quick. But eventually.
I lifted my head slowly, my breathing still uneven but no longer fighting me with every inhale.
The tremor in my hands had eased enough that I could uncurl them from the mattress.
My chest still felt bruised from the inside.
My throat hurt. My body felt wrung out, stripped down to whatever was left after panic burned through every other layer first. I sat there and let the room become a room again.
The bed. The lamp. The closed door. The silence.
My gaze shifted toward the door without meaning to.
He hadn’t touched me. He hadn’t needed to.
That was what stayed. Not the words. Not even the fear.
The fact that my body had gone under before my mind could pull it back.
Anger rose after that. Slow at first, then hotter.
Cleaner than panic. Easier to hold. Because Marius had stood in my space and stopped.
He had pushed and controlled and followed and kissed me hard enough to leave my knees unsteady, and when I stepped back, he had let me have the distance.
He had made me choose the moment every second it existed.
Daan had done nothing but stand too close and make my body remember what it hated.
The difference between those two things should not have mattered as much as it did.
It did.
I closed my eyes for one second and pressed my hand flat to my sternum again, feeling the slower rhythm there now, the ache in my lungs, the leftover shake still moving through my arms. This couldn’t stay like this.
Not the fear. Not Daan. Not the fact that my body had reacted before I had words for why.
When I opened my eyes again, the room was still mine.
Barely.