Tahlia
The scream burnt out of me hours ago, but the taste of it still lingers—iron and ash, like blood caught between my teeth, like I’ve been chewing on metal and sorrow.
My throat feels raw, stripped bare, vocal cords shredded into ribbons. My chest hollow, as if I coughed out the last piece of myself and left it bleeding on the cold marble floor for him to collect when he finally decides to come, when he finally deigns to acknowledge my existence.
The silence is heavier now, thick as tar, viscous and suffocating. It sticks to my skin like oil, clogs my ears with cotton and static, makes every breath sound wrong—too loud, too desperate, too alive in a room that feels like a tomb.
I lie in the bed I swore I wouldn’t touch again, the four-poster monstrosity with its carved posts and velvet canopy that probably costs more than a house.
Sheets twisted around my body like a straitjacket, like burial shrouds, Egyptian cotton gone damp and sour with sweat.
The fabric clings to my spine, cooling, making me shiver despite the fire still crackling in the ornate hearth across the room.
My fist is still clenched around the necklace, fingers cramped and aching. The chain cut deeper in my sleep—if I even slept, if unconsciousness counts as sleep when it’s thick with nightmares and his face.
When I uncurl my fingers, slowly, painfully, blood smears the charm like a blessing turned curse, like communion gone wrong. The silver is warm from my grip, sticky with crimson.
I thought the cage was steel.
But it’s paper.
Contracts. Pages yellowed with age and spotted with God knows what. My name written in ink that won’t wash off no matter how hard I scrape at my skin, no matter how many times I’ve tried to claw it away in the marble bathroom with its claw-foot tub and gold fixtures that mock me with their beauty.
Bought.
Placed.
Owned.
The words chase me, even in dreams. Especially in dreams, where they take shape and substance, where they become monsters with teeth. I see his handwriting in the dark behind my eyelids, scrawled across the sky, across my skin, across the mirror that cracks every time I look at it.
His voice murmurs the lines like scripture, low and reverent, like he believes them more than he believes in God. Like I’m his religion and he’s a zealot willing to burn the world.
I press my palm flat against the sheets.
They’re damp, soaked through in places. I don’t know if it’s sweat or blood or tears I don’t remember crying.
I don’t care. I drag my fingers through it anyway, paint it across my thigh, mark myself like he would’ve, claim the violence before he can.
Take back what’s mine, even if it’s just pain.
“Not yours,” I whisper into the darkness, but the word tastes like a lie, bitter on my tongue. The syllables feel wrong in my mouth, unconvincing even to me.
When I close my eyes, I still feel him. In the silence that presses against my eardrums like hands. In the red blink of the camera mounted in the corner behind the ornate moulding, its tiny light pulsing like a heartbeat.
In the air itself, thick with the ghost of smoke and dust and want that seeps through the floorboards from whatever room he’s in. He’s here even when he isn’t. Especially when he isn’t. His absence is a presence all its own, heavy and watching.
I hate him for it.
I hate that he doesn’t need chains any more.
I hate that he’s taught my body to kneel without asking, without force, without anything but the weight of his gaze through a lens.
The mirror watches me from the wall, an antique thing in a gilded frame that probably belonged to some dead aristocrat. The crack splits my reflection in two again, sharper this time, more jagged, like it’s grown overnight, spreading like veins through glass. Like it’s alive.
I crawl to it on shaking knees, silk nightgown clinging to my thighs, bare feet sliding on the polished hardwood floor that’s cold despite the fire. Press my fingertips to the fracture until glass bites, until thin lines of red bloom across my skin like ink blots.
Splinters.
That’s all I am now.
Shards of a girl who used to be whole. Fragments of someone who had a name before it became a signature on his documents.
And the worst part? I don’t even want to be whole any more. Whole girls are weak. Whole girls break easy.
I drag my bleeding fingers across the mirror, smearing the crack with streaks of crimson until both versions of me blur together, red-eyed and ruined, twin monsters in the firelight.
My chest heaves, my throat tight with something that might be sobs or might be laughter, but I smile at her anyway—the broken girl staring back, the one who looks like she’s been living in hell and learning to love it.
“Do you see it now?” I whisper to her. To me. To him, wherever he is in this labyrinth of stone and shadow. “You don’t own me. Not if I can break myself first. Not if I destroy what you want before you can take it.”
The glass doesn’t answer. Of course it doesn’t. Glass is honest that way. But the silence does, heavy and thick, pressing in from all sides.
Somewhere behind the walls—behind the faded wallpaper with its pattern of roses and thorns, behind the plaster and stone and centuries of secrets—I swear I hear the faintest hum.
Like static. Like breathing. Like the mechanical whisper of surveillance equipment running through wires embedded in walls that have witnessed worse than me.
Like him, listening, watching, waiting for me to break in exactly the way he wants.
And I laugh again. Low. Hollow.
Splintered like the glass beneath my fingers.
Because maybe that’s what survival is now—not fighting the cage, not screaming at locked doors or throwing myself against walls that won’t budge. But learning how to make the cage bleed. Learning how to cut it from the inside out.
The laugh won’t stop.
It crawls out of me like a curse, jagged and ugly, the sound of glass breaking in a throat that doesn’t know how to sing any more, that’s forgotten what music sounds like.
My forehead rests against the crack, cool and sharp, and I push harder until I feel it bite, until pain blooms bright and real and mine. The sting is small, insignificant, but it makes me real. Proves I still exist in a way that matters.
Blood beads where the glass kisses skin, a line of crimson pearls across my brow.
I smear it across the surface with the heel of my hand, painting over my reflection until I don’t look like a girl any more.
Until I look like something monstrous, something that belongs in fairy tales told to frighten children. Something he made.
The necklace chain dangles from my other fist, swinging lazy arcs against the mirror, catching firelight.
I let it hit once. Twice. The clink echoes like the clock I destroyed days ago—smashed it against the wall until time meant nothing—a reminder of time I don’t have, time I don’t own, time that belongs to him like everything else.
I swing harder. The charm snaps against the crack, splitting the fracture wider, a spiderweb stretching across my reflection like lightning frozen in glass.
My face breaks into pieces—eyes scattered across the surface, mouth split between different versions of me, blood dripping down both halves until I can’t tell which side of me is smiling and which side is sobbing, which side is sane and which side drowned weeks ago.
“Come on,” I whisper to the silence, voice hoarse and cracking. To him. To the ghost in the walls, the monster who lives in the spaces between breaths. “Don’t you want to watch me ruin myself? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
The red light in the corner doesn’t blink faster. The lens doesn’t move. The silence doesn’t shift, doesn’t crack, doesn’t give me anything. He doesn’t come.
I slam the necklace again. Again. The chain cuts my palm deeper, blood slick now, slipping, staining the glass until the whole surface glows crimson in the firelight, until it looks like something sacrificial.
The mirror trembles in its gilded frame but doesn’t fall, held fast by screws driven deep into stone walls.
I laugh harder. Hysterical. Splintered. The sound scrapes my throat raw, shreds whatever’s left of my voice, but I don’t stop. Can’t stop.
I claw at the crack with my nails, desperate to force it wider, desperate to see something finally break the way I have.
Shards catch my skin, slice thin ribbons across my fingers, my wrists, my forearms, but I press harder, harder, until every touch leaves streaks of red across the glass like war paint.
The girl staring back is a monster now. Hair wild and matted, eyes bloodshot and feral, lips twisted into something that might be a smile or might be a snarl, chin smeared in crimson like she’s been feeding.
She looks like she’s been feeding on rage and silence for days, sustaining herself on fury and spite.
She looks like Hook’s creation. His masterpiece of ruin.
I slam my fist into the mirror. Once. Twice.
A scream tears loose with it, raw and high and hollow, ripping through the room and echoing off the vaulted ceiling.
The glass shatters finally, exploding outwards, raining down in glittering knives that catch the firelight as they fall, beautiful and deadly.
Pain blooms across my knuckles, bright and alive and so beautifully real. Blood drips down my arm in thick rivulets, painting lines across pale skin.
I collapse to my knees in the wreckage, breath shuddering, chest heaving, surrounded by shattered glass and my own destruction.
The shards glitter around me like stars scattered across the dark hardwood floor, like diamonds, like promises that cut.
I pick one up—a particularly vicious piece, long and sharp and perfect—press it flat to my throat.
Cold. Sharp. Promising an end, promising silence, promising freedom from this endless game.
The silence leans closer, listening, waiting, holding its breath.
I press harder. A bead of blood wells where glass kisses skin, warm against the cold edge. My pulse hammers against the blade, screaming to be opened, begging for release, for an ending I can choose.
And then—I stop.
Because that would give him what he wants. That would be the easy way, the clean way, the way that makes me nothing but a tragedy he can mourn.
Death isn’t rebellion. It’s surrender. It’s letting him win.
And I’m not done yet.
I drop the shard. It splinters further against the floor, joining the constellation of my ruin, adding another star to the wreckage.
My laugh dies in my chest, leaving only silence, heavy and raw, but this time it feels different.
Not punishment. Not absence. Not the weight of his control pressing down on me.
War.
I press both hands to the blood-smeared floor and crawl back to the bed, leaving crimson prints behind me like signatures on a contract I never signed, like evidence of a crime still in progress.
My body aches, muscles screaming, my skin stings from a hundred tiny cuts, but my eyes burn bright with something new. Something sharp.
He’ll see it when he comes.
He’ll see what I made of his cage.
He’ll see what I became without him, what his absence created.
And he’ll bleed for it.
I curl into the sheets, broken glass still glittering at the edge of the mattress like a border between his world and mine, necklace clutched in my fist—a weapon now, not a gift—blood drying sticky between my fingers, under my nails, in the creases of my palms.
“Your move, Hook,” I whisper into the darkness, into the camera, into the silence that carries my words to him wherever he is watching from.
And then I close my eyes.
Not to sleep.
To sharpen.