Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
-Thalia-
My phone vibrates violently in my trembling hand, Xander’s voice cutting through the thick tension in the air like a lifeline.
“Talk to me, baby. Breathe. I’m almost there.”
I can barely muster a response, my voice coming out as a strained whisper.
“I’m trying.” My knees are pulled tightly to my chest, the hardness of the floor pressing against me as I try to cope with the impending dread.
In the corner, Bella growls low, her ears pinned back, sensing the danger that hangs heavy in the atmosphere.
My stomach is in knots, tightening with each heavy footfall that scrapes against the concrete outside.
A tremor ripples through my hands, and the phone nearly slips from my grip.
Every instinct in my body screams to move, to run, but instead, I shrink further into the corner, folding into myself like my bones are trying to disappear.
The apartment is too silent between the sounds.
The scrape of his footsteps, the hum of the refrigerator, the frantic beat of my heart.
I can hear the creak of the hallway railing when he shifts his weight.
I used to love silence. Silence meant peace. Now silence is the inhale before violence.
Bella nudges my arm with her nose, a low whine trapped in her throat. I curl my fingers into her fur, trying to borrow courage from her warmth. I mouth the word ‘stay’. If she attacks Damian, he will hurt her.
Xander’s voice filters through like a life raft. “Just keep breathing. I’m coming.” My lungs don’t listen. The air simply… stops. I freeze, my heart racing in my chest as the sound grows impossibly close.
“Xander, he’s at the door,” I manage to say, my voice cracking under the weight of my fear.
My vision goes grainy, like the color is draining from the world.
The edges of the room darken until only the door remains in focus, swallowing everything else.
I swear the silence has teeth, sharp, sinking into my skin, scraping at the inside of my skull.
I blink, but the room doesn’t steady. It feels like I’m floating outside of myself, like I’m watching a stranger fall apart.
I squeeze Bella’s collar until my knuckles ache, grounding myself in the tangible heat of her. My therapist calls this dissociation a survival tactic, something my brain does to protect me. But it doesn’t feel like protection. It feels like drowning behind glass.
My phone slips in my sweaty grip. Xander’s voice layers over everything, a distant echo. If I could just hold onto his voice, I could stay here, stay present.
But the footsteps get louder. Closer.
My chest compresses painfully.
I think of all the nights I convinced myself I was finally safe. I think of the promises I whispered into pillows and the future I started to believe existed.
And as the first tear falls, I realize something brutal.
Safety is only ever borrowed.
-Damian-
Pathetic little locks. As if flimsy pieces of wood and metal could truly keep me out.
I give the knob a forceful rattle, the hollow sound echoing ominously down the hall.
The thought of her trembling on the other side fills me with a dark exhilaration; she belongs to me.
That boy she clings to? Just a temporary placeholder in her life.
I lean close and press my forehead against the door, reveling in the moment.
“Thalia,” I murmur, my voice low and teasing. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
Silence hangs in the air, but I know she’s listening. I can feel her fear; it courses through the space between us. She once begged me to leave. I remember the way her voice shook, how her hands trembled as she pressed them against my chest.
“Please,” she whispered. “Just go.”
I smiled at her like I was doing her a favor. I cupped her jaw with mock tenderness and leaned in so my lips ghosted over her ear.
“You don’t mean that.”
She flinched. God, I loved that. I could read her better than she could read herself.
Fear looks good on her.
People assume control requires force. They’re idiots. Control is persuasion. Control is convincing someone that their reality is wrong and yours is right.
If I close my eyes, I can still feel the way she sank into silence when I corrected her, how she swallowed her thoughts before I could shame them out of her.
A lock can’t stop me. A door can’t stop me.
Because what we had, what I molded, exists under her skin.
And I came here to wake it back up.
With a sharp kick, the doorframe splinters, and the lock gives way with another blow. The barrier between us is nothing.
I step inside, a predator ready to claim his prize.
-Thalia-
The door absorbs his presence like it recognizes him, like the wood remembers the last time he stood here. My breathing turns shallow, too fast, dizzying.
The thing about trauma is how your body reacts before your brain catches up. My palms go numb. My vision tightens to a pinpoint. My ribs lock around my lungs like a cage.
People romanticize fight or flight. No one talks about freeze.
Freeze is the quiet response, the one that feels like failure.
I want to move. To scream. To run. But my body turns to concrete, heavy and unresponsive. I don’t choose it. My body chooses for me. It remembers things my mind buried.
I hate that I go still.
Because stillness feels like surrender.
I hear distant memories—his voice telling me how dramatic I am, how no one would believe me if I spoke. Every word he ever used to shrink me slams into me like a fist.
My throat closes. My muscles lock.
I am trapped behind my own bones.
But then Xander’s voice on the other end of the phone cuts through the fog, so steady, so certain, and for the first time, the freeze fractures.
Not because I suddenly became strong.
But because someone finally came for me.
Damian taps his fingers against the wood, slow, rhythmic. Knock. Knock. Knock. I can practically hear the smirk stretching across his face. He doesn’t see this as a crime. He sees it as returning to what he believes is already his.
The door flies open with a shattering force.
My scream erupts uncontrollably, tearing from the depths of my throat as the phone nearly slips from my grip.
The apartment tilts. I don’t know where to look.
At the splintered wood still swinging from the screws, at his face twisted with possession, or at the open doorway behind him where escape should be.
But there is no escape. Not with him here. Not with that look in his eyes.
My vision blurs at the edges, and I taste metal on my tongue.
Fear tastes like blood, like pennies. Bella lunges forward, barking and snarling, a defiant protector in the face of unimaginable danger.
But Damian is quicker, already reaching for me.
His hand clamps around my wrist with a grip that feels like iron, yanking me off the floor as if I weigh nothing at all.
“Xander!” I cry into the phone, desperation ringing in my voice, the name falling apart on my tongue as if uttering it might summon him faster.
-Xander-
Her scream pierces through the call, and I nearly lose control of the steering wheel.
“Thalia!”
My heart hammers so violently in my chest that it feels like it might shatter my ribs. Every red light feels like a personal attack.
The world outside my windshield blurs into streaks of rain and headlights, but inside the cab of my truck is a storm far more violent.
Rage claws at my ribs, pumping through my veins like wildfire.
I’m gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather bites into my palms, but I don’t loosen my hold, not when her voice still echoes through the speakers of my phone.
Her scream replays like a tape stuck in Hell.
I would burn down the entire city if it meant getting to her one second faster.
My father used to tell me that a man isn’t defined by what he feels but by what he does with the feeling. Right now, I feel like murder.
But I can’t lose control. If I walk in there like a bomb, she pays the price.
So, I bury the rage and suffocate it under one truth.
I will get to her.
I will rip her out of the hands of the man who broke her.
And if he forces my hand…
I won’t hesitate.
I push the truck harder, weaving through traffic with reckless abandon.
“Stay with me! I’m almost there!” Though my voice is steady, it’s a facade.
Inside, chaos reigns and rage and terror intertwine.
All I can hear is her scream, her sobs, and the muffled sound of him looming over her.
As I slam into the complex parking lot, my tires screech, leaving rubber on the asphalt.
Then, through the phone, I hear it: a cry, choked and desperate.
My heart drops.
I’m too late.
He’s already inside.
The realization hit me like a bullet.
I failed her.
I promised her safety, and now I’m minutes too late.
That realization is poison, burning, corrosive, unforgiving. Every second that passes is another second he is breathing her air, touching her space, filling her world with fear. I slam the heel of my hand against the dashboard, barely feeling the sting.
I should have been faster.
I should have been there before fear had a chance to take her hostage.
I have never hated myself like I do in this moment.
I don’t pray. But with my forehead pressed to the steering wheel, I whisper something that sounds dangerously close to begging.
“Hold on. Just a little longer.”
Because if he hurts her again…
I don’t know if I can come back from what I’ll do next.
The moment I crash through the broken door, time itself seems to freeze.
Damian has her. His arm is locked around Thalia’s chest like a steel bar, while a glinting knife presses menacingly against her throat.
She gasps, her eyes wide with unmistakable terror, yet they’re glued to mine, tethered by an unseen force.
“Step back,” Damian sneers, the cruel edge in his voice as sharp as the blade he holds. “One more step, and I’ll open her up.”
I lift my hands slowly, deliberately, trying to give him no reason to escalate. “Alright. I’m here. No sudden moves.” My voice remains calm, but inside, I’m a raging inferno. “You don’t want to do this, Damian.”
He laughs, a cold, ugly sound that chills me to the bone. “Don’t I? She was mine first. You think she belongs to you? No, no. She’s just playing house until she remembers who gave her what she deserved.”
I can feel the muscles in my jaw tense as I grit my teeth. “You didn’t give her anything but scars. Let her go, Damian. This is between you and me. You want a fight? Fine. But she’s not part of it.”
Damian’s grin widens, an ugly display of triumph. “Oh, but she is. She’s the whole point. Without her, what are you? Just another man. With her—” He applies the knife harder, making Thalia whimper once more. “I own both of you.”
My pulse roars in my ears, the adrenaline pumping through me like a drug.
My hands flex at my sides, itching to fight, to protect.
I know there’s a gun hidden in his back pocket, I saw the outline shift when he moved, but I also know this: I’ll bleed, I’ll burn, and I’ll fight to my last breath before I let him win.
-Damian-
The fury igniting in his eyes nearly amuses me; he believes he can take her from me, that he can swoop in and be the hero. What an idiot. He doesn’t understand that she’s already marked. Already ruined. Mine.
I press the knife harder against her throat, relishing the way she whimpers softly, the sound fueling a twisted pleasure within me. She shakes when I touch her.
They all misunderstand that reaction, even her. They mistake trembling for weakness, for hatred, for fear. But fear is intimacy. Fear means I matter.
When someone fears you, it means you are carved into them.
Xander thinks he loves her. He doesn’t.
Love is fragile. Fleeting. Delusional.
What Thalia and I have is permanent.
I branded myself beneath her ribs. I live in her nightmares, in the shadows of every quiet moment she tries to claim as peace. I am written into her.
She thinks running will free her?
She forgets I taught her how to crawl.
When my blade touches her skin, I feel her breath hitch, and that, that right there, is connection.
Xander thinks winning means saving her.
He has no idea that saving her just keeps her trapped in the same cage.
Because the cage… is me.
“See how quiet she gets when I touch her? She remembers. Her body remembers. You can’t erase that.
” The weight of the gun in my back pocket gives me a sense of steadiness.
One wrong move from him, and this ends quickly.
But quick is not what I want. I want him to suffer, to know what it feels like to be powerless.