Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
THEA
For the first time in my life, I’m choosing myself, and yet it feels like the cost is more significant than any of the other momentous moments I should have done so.
I didn’t choose myself when I stayed in a loveless marriage.
I didn’t choose myself when my baby girl was born sleeping.
Instead, I kept begging for something, anything, to fill the hollow and make it all make sense, to tell me I was still worthy of being chosen.
Because if I wasn’t chosen to be a wife to a husband who loved her and if I wasn’t chosen to be a mother, what was I worthy of?
I bent until I broke, then called it resilience.
I silenced my own needs and called it love.
I stayed where it hurt because leaving felt like a failure until there was nothing left for me to lose.
But choosing myself now? It doesn’t feel triumphant, and why should it?
I’ve been assaulted, bruised, and broken in a way beyond what any human should be.
Choosing to do so now, when I finally have someone who wants me feels like grief.
Not because I don’t have anything, but because I do.
And he wants me to stand on the outside of it.
He didn’t say anything after I last spoke, and I didn’t try to convince him to.
My words needed no explanation even though it felt like a knife digging into my chest as I spoke them.
Now, we sit across from one another in the living room.
Dylan, Fletcher, and Claire have rejoined us as we discuss the events and our next steps.
Nathan wants to relocate Claire and I, and naturally Fletcher agrees, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t stop them from finding us even if we tried.
They’re going to be out for blood now. More than they were.
“Let me be the bait.” Claire’s words stop everyone, and the only sound in the room is of our breathing.
“I’m sorry…what?” Nathan chokes.
Claire is quiet for a moment before she speaks again. “Let me be the bait. Let me go somewhere in public that I know he frequents.”
I’m about to protest before Fletcher puts his hand up to silence me. “Let her speak, she’s been through just as much if not more than any of us in this room. If she has a plan, she deserves to be heard out.”
“But she’s a child!” Nathan retorts.
“A child?” she repeats, tilting her head. “Is that what you think I am?”
“Claire—” I start, but she doesn’t even look at me.
“No.” Her voice hardens, something unbreakable threading through it. “You don’t get to call me that after what he made me survive.”
The room stills and Nathan’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out this time. I feel like we’ve been in this place before, but it feels like she’s about to open up even more than she has.
She stands up and takes a step forward, her shoulders squared even though her hands are shaking at her sides.
“Children don’t learn how to read the sound of a lock turning and know exactly how many seconds they have to hide something.
Children don’t memorize exit routes in rooms they’re not supposed to leave.
They aren’t supposed to get put in front of strangers to be tested, to see if I might say the wrong thing.
To see if I smiled when I was supposed to or if I looked at someone too long.
Children aren’t supposed to be trained to speak or when to stay quiet or how to make more people comfortable.
We aren’t asked to be brought into a world that wishes to do us harm.
Children don’t walk around every day knowing someone out there is hunting them because they took something he wants back.
Nathan’s jaw tightens. “Claire, you don’t have to—”
“I do.” She cuts in, sharper now. “Because you keep acting like I don’t understand the risk.
” Fletcher hasn’t moved. He’s watching her like every word matters.
And Dylan is squeezing his shoulder with a mix of fear and awe in her eyes.
“I had to learn how to disappear while standing right in front of someone. How to make myself smaller. Quieter. Easier to control. I learned how to listen through walls. How to tell who was coming by the way their footsteps sounded. How long I had before a door opened. Before I had to be…whatever they needed me to be. Children don’t deserve to be manipulated by being offered the one thing that should have come naturally from their parents.
Because that manipulation eventually turns into isolation.
And by the time I realized it, I didn’t have any other choice left but to run. ”
Her voice drops again, quiet and exhausted.
“He doesn’t lose things. Not people. Not objects. Not mistakes. So when I took that USB and ran, that wasn’t just an escape. It was a challenge.”
Nathan drags a hand over his mouth, pale now. “Claire, he’s not going to just try to take you back.”
“I know,” she says. “He’s going to make an example out of me.”
The words hit like a physical blow, so much that I bend over and try to catch my breath from the implication.
“He won’t need to get close. He’ll watch first. He always does. He won’t grab me in an alley; he wouldn’t risk the scene. He’ll talk to me first like nothing’s changed and like he’s still that version of himself. But that’s where we’ll win. ”
Fletcher finally shifts. “Because you know his patterns.”
“Because I was his pattern,” she corrects.
I break my silence. “You’re asking us to put you right back in his line of sight, something he won’t let his guard down on again. He is going to use anything he can now to control you.”
“Yes,” she says simply.
“And you think it won’t be worse than last time?” I press.
Her lips press into a thin line. “It will.”
The honesty of it knocks the air itself out of the room. “Or maybe it won’t. But I know what it looks like now,” she adds. “I know how it feels when it starts working. I know the moment when he thinks he has me again. And that’s when you take him.”
“I don’t like this.” Nathan shakes his head.
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it.
It’s happening. I can see now everything you have all risked and I know it might not all be for me, but for the first time it feels like I have a family again.
I know I’m no longer alone, and while I still have a long way to go, and I know I’m not the most…
extroverted person, this is where I want to be.
He made me survive him once, I can survive him long enough for you to end it.
I’m the one thing he thinks still belongs to him,” she says.
“And the one thing he’ll get careless for. ”
She left no room for argument, even though all of us continued to protest her.
But that protesting eventually started to turn into a plan, and by midnight we had contacted Dyer to inform him of it.
Of course he was adamant about keeping Claire out of the line of fire and just about threatened everything in the book to Fletcher and Nathan, but they stood fast. I could understand where she was coming from.
She had lost so much and wasn’t even a quarter of the way through her life.
It makes sense that she would want revenge on the one person she felt was responsible for nearly ruining it.
After all, both Dylan and I have been placed in the same situation, so I didn’t feel like I had much room to talk.
How could I tell her what to do just because she’s a minor.
Now I stand outside on the back porch, looking up at the clear sky, when I’m interrupted by the door opening behind me. I know it’s Dylan before she reaches me and a part of me dreads the conversation I know she wants to have.
“How do you do it?” I ask, not needing to explain what I mean.
She’s quiet, and I feel a random guilt from knowing this will bring up horrible memories for her after she’s fought so hard. “I didn’t want to for a long time…I thought of all the different ways I would kill myself. Kill Fletcher.”
Her words tug at my heart like a string on a violin as she opens up to me for the first time since she was taken.
She had mentioned things here and there but I never bothered to push her, knowing she would tell me in her own time.
“Kill Fletcher? But you seemed so…” Solid isn’t the right word, but it’s the only one that comes to mind as I think of how he was there for her every second of every day.
“I know. The war between my mind and heart made everything confusing. There were moments I blamed him, as much as I know it wasn’t his fault.
Callum was the one who got me into that mess, but finding out that Fletcher was involved in that kind of work made me feel like he should’ve protected me more.
Even though we could have never expected Callum to betray me the way he did.
But at the same time, it was his job to figure those things out, he just did too late.
” She shrugs. “I guess I just had to decide if I was willing to let them take one more thing from me.”
I nod, contemplating her words; the way they resonate with how I’m feeling now. “Does it ever get better?”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been sitting in her lungs for years. “Better isn’t the word I’d use for it. Different, maybe. Lighter in places. Heavier in others. It stops owning every second of you, though. That’s the part that matters.”
I swallow, my throat tight as I sit with what I experienced for the first time since getting home. “So it doesn’t go away.”
“No.” She shakes her head, but there’s no cruelty in it, just truth. “But it stops feeling like you’re drowning in it all the time. Eventually, it’s more like waves. Some days they knock you on your ass. Some days you just…float.”
Her eyes flick to mine, softer now. Careful.
“And some days,” she adds, “you forget for a few minutes. And then those minutes turn into hours. And then one day you realize you laughed without it hurting.” I look down at my hands, flexing my fingers like I’m trying to remember how they belong to me.
“What did they do to you, Thea?” There it is. The question I’ve known was coming but don’t know how to answer.
“I wish I knew…I think that’s what makes this worse.
I remember them beating me and restraining me to the table.
I remember the pain from them cutting into my skin until I passed out from the pain.
But I woke up with this…soreness between my legs and I have no idea what they did, if they used anything, how many took…
turns. And I’m too afraid to get an exam because I’m just as afraid they’ll confirm what I already know, deep down.
” My voice is barely there, cracking as emotions flood to the surface. “They took everything.”
Dylan’s jaw tightens. “No. They took a lot. Too much. But not everything.” And I suddenly feel selfish, because what I experienced in one night doesn’t equate to what she went through over the course of a week.
I shake my head but she cuts me off. “I thought I was nothing but what they made me. For a long time, that’s all I could see when I looked in the mirror. But that’s exactly what they want. For you to carry them with you, even after you’re free.”
I let out a hollow laugh. “I don’t feel free.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Me neither. Definitely not at first, and you won’t be for a long time. You don’t have to be okay right now.” She reaches over and grabs my hand. “You don’t even have to believe it gets better. You just have to stay.”
“Stay?” I echo, acting ignorant even though I know what she means, because she already told me.
She nods. “Stay. Through anger. The nightmares. Through the days you hate everyone, including yourself. Because every day you’re still here, is something they didn’t get to take.”
I stay still for a moment, before squeezing her hand. “Okay.”
“Do you want me to stay with you?” she asks.
I smile meekly. “Won’t Fletcher protest that?”
She huffs a quiet laugh, shaking her head. “Fletcher can deal with it. He’s not the one waking up in a cold sweat at three in the morning.”
“Still,” I murmur. “He’s…protective.” And that may be the understatement of the century.
“So am I.” Her voice softens, but there’s something unyielding beneath it. “The
difference is, I’m asking what you need.”
“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” I admit, even though I know Nathan is here. “But I also don’t want to feel like I’m keeping you from your life. Not when you’ve already experienced enough of this to last a lifetime.”
Her thumb brushes over my knuckles. “You’re not a burden. You’re a person who went through something horrible. And you’re my best friend. So I’ll ask again, do you want me to stay?”
I hesitate for a moment before answering her, knowing that the last thing Nathan and I need is more space.
But knowing that I need someone who’s been consistent with me through everything, and more importantly, someone who understands.
The best friend that I let get too distant from me, and the person who has always been the best at grounding me.