Chapter 21
ALOIS
The sour scent clung to the back of my throat alive with teeth and claws shredding the tender flesh beneath. Breathing was work—dragging air through something that had already been turned to ribbons.
The stench rotted at the edges, soaking into fabric and skin alike—every crack, every crevasse. Sweat that had dried and stale. Something metallic underneath it all. Old. Stale. Like anger that had been left out too long and seeped into the space.
Bare feet pressed into icy floorboards, the chill scaling straight up through bone, locking into place like it belonged there. The room stretched wrong around me. Too wide in the wrong places. Too tight where it mattered.
The room wouldn’t hold still.
It stretched too far behind him. Folded in too tight around me. Corners shifting when I wasn’t looking at them, like they didn’t want to be seen.
And him—never just there.
He changed the room when he entered it. Shifted the air, bent it around himself until everything else had to adjust. The walls felt farther away and closer at the same time, like they were trying to decide if they should hold or give.
Even the floor seemed to harden under his weight, as if it understood something I didn’t yet have words for.
I felt him before I saw him. A pressure behind my ribs. A pull low in my chest that made me straighten without thinking, made my hands still at my sides, made something inside me sharpen and reach at the same time.
He was closer now, close enough that I could feel the heat of him and the wrongness of it, the way it crowded into space that should have been mine, the way it pressed against my skin without ever touching me in the ways that mattered.
He was never close when I needed him, never when I stood in doorways too long or lingered at the edge of rooms, waiting for him to notice, waiting for something as small as a glance to mean more than it did.
Never when I did something right—when I thought I had done something right—and held onto that fragile, flickering hope that maybe this time it would matter, that maybe this time he would see me and something in his expression would shift.
That kind of closeness didn’t exist, not for me, not in any way I could reach, and I had learned that slowly, in pieces I didn’t know I was collecting, in the quiet corrections that shaped how I stood, how I breathed, how I made myself smaller so I wouldn’t take up space I wasn’t allowed to fill.
I kept my eyes down because it was safer that way, because survival had rules even if no one had ever said them out loud, and I had memorized them all the same—don’t look too long, don’t look like you’re waiting, don’t let it show that you need anything at all.
Need was dangerous. Need made things worse. I understood that in the way children understand things they were never taught, through repetition and consequence and the steady tightening of something inside their chest every time they got it wrong.
But wanting was different, quieter—it slipped between the cracks if I held it carefully enough, something that didn’t have to be seen to exist, and I let it stay, just a little, just enough to keep trying, enough to make me lift my head again even when I knew better, even when I knew exactly how this would end.
I looked up.
I couldn’t stop myself.
And every time, some part of me believed it might be different. That if I caught him at the right moment—if I stood still enough, if I didn’t say the wrong thing, if I didn’t move too fast or too slow—he might look at me like I mattered.
Not through me. Not past me.
At me.
I was twelve. And I didn’t know any other way to love him. Didn’t know there was supposed to be another way.
My tiny rib cage tightened as I shifted my weight forward without thinking, the cold biting sharper into my heels.
“Papa—” The word slipped out before I could stop it. Too soft. Too small. It felt wrong the second it existed.
Everything stilled. The kind of stillness that listened for mistakes. I felt it settle over my shoulders, across my chest, pressing in until I couldn’t tell if I was breathing or drowning.
I shouldn’t have said it. Too late.
“I—” My voice caught, snagging on something in my throat that refused to let it pass cleanly, and I forced it out anyway. “I scored.”
The words left me and failed in the same breath, collapsing somewhere in the space between us before they could reach him, sinking out of sight with a heaviness that settled low and refused to lift.
I felt it happen, the quiet death of them, the way they ceased to exist the moment they were no longer mine, and still I stood there, waiting, because that was the part I didn’t know how to stop.
Waiting stretched inside me, long and unbroken, a held breath that never released, a fragile thread pulled tighter with every second he didn’t answer.
It hurt in a way that didn’t have a name yet, a slow tightening that lived behind my ribs and refused to ease, and something in me—small, stubborn, still reaching—insisted there was another way through it.
Try again. The thought rose without permission, instinctive and immediate, and I moved with it, a single step forward that felt larger than it should have, the cold biting sharper into the soles of my feet, driving upward until it rooted me in place and held me there.
“Coach said—”
The shift came before the words could finish.
It moved through the room without sound, a distortion that folded the space in on itself, tightening the air until there was nothing left to stand inside.
He was closer. Not by steps I could follow, not by motion I could see—just closer, filling the distance completely, leaving no room for anything that had existed there a second before.
Everything in me stilled.
The air turned heavy, wrong in a way that pressed against my lungs and demanded stillness in return, and I felt the moment lock into place around us, sealing itself shut with a finality I understood without ever being taught.
The space collapsed without warning, folding inward until there wasn’t enough room left to stand inside my own body.
His presence filled everything, pressing in from all sides, leaving no air that didn’t belong to him.
The smell hit harder—hot breath, sour and thick, too close, too real—filling my lungs before I could stop it, settling there, heavy and wrong.
I swallowed it down on instinct, throat burning, my body locking in place before I had to tell it to.
My fingers coiled at my sides, nails pressing into my palms, sharp enough to anchor me, not sharp enough to stop anything that was already happening.
I lifted my head.
I shouldn’t have.
His eyes met mine without resistance, without reaction, without anything I could take hold of and turn into something better.
There was no anger there, no sharp edge I could work around, no opening I could step into and fix.
Anger I understood. Anger had shape. Anger meant I had done something. This—this was absence.
My tiny rib cage tightened, the pressure building slow and deep until I couldn’t tell if I was breathing or if something inside me had started to give way.
I tried again anyway.
Because I didn’t know how not to.
“I played good,” I stammered, the words spilling faster, uneven. “Coach said I—I can do it again. I can be better. I can—”
The effort collapsed under its own weight.
There was nowhere for it to land.
He didn’t interrupt.
Didn’t engage.
He looked through me, past me.
The silence stretched until it filled every part of me, until it pressed against the inside of my ribs and demanded something in return. My throat tightened around it, the words forming before I could stop them, before I could decide if they were allowed to exist.
“Do you—” My voice faltered, catching on the blade’s edge of my father’s eyes snapping to mine. I swallowed hard, forcing it through, because stopping now would make it worse, because not asking would leave it there, unfinished, waiting. “Do you love me?”
The question left me and hung there, thin and unprotected, something small placed in a space that had never been built to hold it. For a second—just one—everything stilled around it. Suspended in a silence that didn’t bend.
I felt it then, before he said anything. The answer.
His hand lifted, not to touch, not to reach, just to exist between us, a quiet boundary drawn without explanation, a line I had already crossed by asking.
“You don’t deserve my love.”
My lungs seized, the breath tearing halfway in before it locked, caught as if the space inside me had never learned how to open fully in the first place, as if it had been built too small and never corrected.
I came up hard into it, dragged forward by a body that had outgrown the moment it was still trapped inside, ribs expanding against memory that refused to release its hold.
I wasn’t fully awake.
I wasn’t out.
For a second—stretched and suspended—I was still there, still standing on cold floorboards that no longer existed, still twelve, still waiting, the question sitting raw and exposed in my throat with nowhere to go, no movement allowed.
It lived in the dark corner of my heart like it had never left, like it had never stopped asking, like it had been carried forward intact, growing with me without ever changing shape.
My lungs pulled for air that wasn’t sour, wasn’t stale, wasn’t already used up before it reached me, but the instinct stayed the same—tight, controlled, careful not to take more than I was allowed, careful not to draw attention to the fact that I needed it at all.
There was no clean break between then and now, no line I could step across and leave it behind, just the echo of it still thundering inside my mind.