Tahlia
There’s no sound.
Not the hum of cameras repositioning on their mounts. Not the subtle shift of air when he’s standing on the other side of the door, doing nothing and saying less. Not even the echo of his cruel laughter as it ghosts through the room like it used to.
Just silence.
Heavy. Suffocating. Alive.
I pace at first, arms folded, fingers digging into my ribs like I could hold myself together if I just pressed hard enough.
My breath claws at my throat, uneven and ugly, because it doesn’t make sense—he always comes.
After every scream, every curse, every shattered object I threw just to feel something real against my skin, he came. Smiling. Mocking. Touching.
But now he’s gone.
And the quiet isn’t peace. It’s punishment.
I stare at the mirror. The one I cracked. A spiderweb of destruction blooming from the place my necklace struck—delicate and wrong, like something beautiful bleeding beneath glass. My reflection is distorted, twisted into a dozen fragments of someone I barely recognise anymore.
A girl with bruises under her eyes that look more like war paint than weakness. A girl with blood in her smile. A girl who should hate him. Who does hate him.
But who also misses the sound of his boots outside the door.
I scream. Loud, raw, throat-burning. Just to fill the air with something that isn’t his absence.
Just to make sure I still exist, that my voice hasn’t been taken like everything else.
I throw a book next—then the tray, the mug, the chair.
But nothing breaks loud enough to satisfy the scream still chewing its way out of my lungs.
I want to break something permanent.
I want to break him.
And the worst part?
I want him to watch me do it.
I don’t know how long I’ve been lying on this floor.
The cold has seeped into my spine, a quiet, numbing ache that mirrors the one in my chest. The room is dim, painted in flickers of shadow from the fire he lit hours ago. It’s gone low now, just embers pulsing like a heartbeat that won’t quit. Won’t let me quit.
I drag my fingers across the cracked edge of the mirror I shattered—just to see something break when I couldn’t.
The glass is gone now. He took it. Of course he did.
Like he’s always watching. Always steps ahead.
Like he knew I’d stare into that jagged shard and wonder what it would take to make him sorry.
But he’s not sorry.
He’s patient.
And worse—he’s not coming.
I thought he would. After the necklace. After the screaming. After the silence. I thought he’d burst through that door and demand submission with that wicked smirk and voice like velvet laced in poison.
But there’s nothing. Just the fire. Just me. Just the weight of wanting something I swore I hated.
My body aches with confusion. My mind wants blood. My skin wants him.
I press my hand flat against the floor. It’s cold. So cold it reminds me I’m still here, still real, still trapped. I crawl to the wall where the camera blinks like an eye that never sleeps. I stare into it. Long. Hard. Until my vision blurs.
“You want a show?” I whisper. “Too fucking bad.”
Then I turn away, spine straightening, rage replacing the tears I almost let him see.
He won’t get my pain.
Not tonight.
Not until I make him bleed for it.
The fire crackles behind me like bones snapping under pressure, and I close my eyes, just for a second—just to shut him out.
But the past doesn’t need permission to break in.
It slips beneath my ribs like smoke, curling tight around memory until I’m not in the room anymore. I’m seventeen again. Rain soaking my hoodie. Shivering. Bleeding. Running.
That night.
The night everything cracked.
The alley behind The Thistle & Thorn bar was slick with oil and shadows, and I remember thinking—this is where girls like me disappear. And maybe that would’ve been mercy. Maybe the world would’ve been kinder if it just swallowed me whole. But instead, I found him.
Or maybe he found me.
A tall silhouette at the end of the alley, hat pulled low, coat sharp as razors. I thought he was a trick of the light at first—some story my trauma made up to keep me company as I bled from the gash in my thigh. But then he spoke.
“You look like something someone’s already tried to break.”
His voice had no warmth, no sympathy. Just curiosity. Like I was a puzzle he wanted to crack open. A shattered music box he could wind up just to hear the scream.
I remember snarling something back. Teeth bared, too wild to be scared. “Fuck off.”
He laughed.
That slow, dark sound. That sound that felt like ink spilling in my lungs.
“I think I’ll keep you.”
I didn’t know what it meant then. Just a line from a stranger. Just another man with god-complex eyes and hands that looked like they could rebuild or ruin anything they touched.
I never forgot the way he looked at me—like I was already his.
Even back then.
Even before I knew his name.
Even before I knew he was the one pulling all the strings.
Even before I realised the worst cage is the one you run into yourself.
The floor is cold, but it’s the kind of cold that settles into bone like regret.
My cheek presses to it, my breath fogging against the tile in soft, broken exhales.
There’s dried blood under my nails—mine, I think—and the remnants of a necklace chain twisted like a noose around my fingers.
The broken clasp digs into my palm. I don’t let go.
My thighs ache. Not from him, not from now—but from then.
And it hits me like a slammed door: the past never stays buried, it just waits until you’re too tired to keep shovelling dirt.
It starts with the smell. That thick, acidic burn of alcohol wipes and sweat and polished leather. My mother’s voice behind it, soft as silk and sharp as knives, whispering not to scream this time, because no one likes a girl who makes noise.
Then his voice—another man, wronger, older. Saying my name like it’s something filthy. My stomach clenches, and I claw at the floor because I can’t claw at him. Because I didn’t then.
He told me I was a fairy once. That fairies were made of light and air and silence. But all I remember is being small. And bleeding. And learning how to disappear without leaving the room.
The present pulls at me again—Hook’s voice from days ago, sneering in my head like a poison-tipped echo. “You want to be broken, little fairy. You want someone to see the ruin and say, mine.”
And I hate that he’s right. I hate that my body remembers his hands like a promise. I hate that the shame and the ache are starting to blend. That my survival looks more like surrender every day I stay.
But I don’t move.
I just breathe into the floor like maybe it’ll open up and swallow me whole.
I don’t know how long I lie there—minutes, hours, eternities. Grief warps time. So does guilt. And I have both wrapped around my throat like the chain I snapped in a fit of rage, the same way I used to snap rubber bands against my wrist just to feel something that made sense.
There’s a smear of blood on the wall where the necklace hit the mirror. The glass didn’t shatter like I wanted it to. It just cracked. A clean, precise fracture right down the middle.
Like me.
I laugh. Or maybe I sob. It comes out somewhere in between—raw and choked and too loud for the silence that’s wrapped around this room like insulation. He hasn’t come. I thought he would. I thought he’d storm in and punish me, rip apart what’s left just to feel it crumble in his hands.
But nothing.
And somehow, that’s worse because now I’m left with my own thoughts and they’re far crueller than he’s ever been.
I roll to my back. The ceiling is a pale grey, smooth and unblemished. The kind of sterile colour they paint asylum walls, not out of comfort—but control.
My arms are littered with tiny cuts and bruises. Marks from my own defiance, not his. But he’ll see them. He always sees. He watches like a god with blood on his hands and lust in his eyes. Watching me fall apart piece by piece, like it’s art.
And maybe it is.
Maybe I’m the performance. The tragic little fae girl unravelling in a cage she keeps insisting she can escape.
But I haven’t even tried the door.
Not in days.
There’s a part of me—a sick, broken, pathetic part—that doesn’t want to because when he comes back, when I see his shadow stretch across the threshold, when his voice curls around my name like it belongs to him… I forget how to hate him.
I forget how to breathe without waiting for him to fill my lungs.
My thighs squeeze together. Not from pain.
Fuck.
I press the heel of my palm into my eyes until stars burst behind them. Until I can’t see the reflection of what I’m becoming.
I’m not falling in love with him. It’s not that. It’s something darker. Something fouler. An infection. A rot that’s set in so deep I don’t even feel it anymore.
I want him to come back.
I want him to hurt me.
I want him to make it stop.
I close my eyes, but that doesn’t stop the visions. Doesn’t stop the way I see him in the cracks of the ceiling, in the silence between my heartbeats. He lingers in my blood now. A virus that spreads the moment I dare pretend I’m still whole.
The necklace sits where it fell—warped, tarnished, still humming with the heat of my fury. I think about picking it up. I think about throwing it harder this time, until the glass gives way and shatters like I did.
I don’t move because movement requires intention, and I don’t know what I want anymore.
Do I want to escape?
Or do I want him to catch me trying?
He’s rewired me. Remapped my wants. Traced new meaning into my pain like tattoos burnt into skin.
I can still feel his voice in my throat. Like I swallowed it.
That filthy, awful voice that haunts the space between silence and sin.
And it’s not just arousal—it’s need. It’s hunger sharpened on the edge of trauma. It’s the way I clench my fists because the alternative is touching myself to the memory of his breath on my neck.
He hasn’t touched me since.
But I feel owned.
Claimed.
Ruined in ways that feel permanent.
I roll to my knees and crawl to the cracked mirror.
The girl who stares back at me is thinner. Hollower. Wilder around the eyes. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days, and maybe she hasn’t. Not real sleep. Not the kind that heals.
And for a second, I hate her. I hate her for the way she looks like prey, for the way her lips are chapped from begging, for the way she still flinches at shadows, even though she knows who cast them.
And then—God help me—I press my forehead to the glass.
Because the monster who made her look this way is the same one I dream about.
I miss him.
I don’t know who I am when he’s not here to tell me.
Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I imagine him behind me, one hand on my throat, hook on my hip, whispering the kind of things that make me forget my own name.
You’re mine, little fairy. Even when I’m not touching you. Especially then.
A sob climbs up my throat. I swallow it.
No tears. Not for him. Not today.
Instead, I crawl to the edge of the bed, curling against the mattress like it still remembers his weight, his scent, his heat. My fingers dig into the sheets, pulling them tight, anchoring myself to the ghost of him.
I hate him.
I hate what he’s made me.
I hate the emptiness more.
And if he doesn’t come back soon, I might forget how to burn.