CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
His warmth still clings to my skin like a fever I can’t sweat out, a burning ache beneath the surface that won’t let me forget.
The room around me—the mattress, the sheets, even the cold, stale air—I can feel the ghost of his touch seeping into every inch of it. It’s the kind of presence that lingers long after someone leaves, the residue of submission and control, pressing down on me in waves.
Worse than that, I realize with a sick twist in my gut—I asked for it. I begged for his warmth in that freezing room.
Now, the thin, worn leather-bound journal rests on my lap. Its pages are frayed at the edges, stained with my tears and fingerprints, softened from nights spent clutching it like a lifeline.
I sit cross-legged on the bed, a blanket carelessly draped over my thighs, but underneath, I am bare—not because I want to be, but because he never told me to dress after the freezer punishment.
The cold still bites at my skin where the fabric once protected me. My body aches in a way that isn’t just physical. It’s the ache of giving up control, of surrendering to something I fought so hard to resist.
I reach down and pull the pen from the spine of the journal, clicking it once, twice, the sharp sounds somehow steadying me, anchoring me to this moment.
The silence around me is heavy, almost suffocating, but the clicking echoes in the quiet, breaking the tension enough for me to begin writing.
He put me in a freezer.
The words stare back at me, harsh and cold and clinical, like a medical report rather than the brutal truth they represent. I want them to carry the weight of the memory, but they fall flat—too sterile, too distant—as if I am an observer rather than the victim.
He said it would make me remember who I was. But I think it made me forget who I was trying to become.
My pen presses harder, the ink bleeding into the paper as if trying to force meaning into the words.
He didn’t hurt me—not really. He just waited. Waited until I begged. Until I said the words he wanted to hear. Until I was the one reaching out.
Cold makes a person quiet. Makes them needy. Makes them weak.
And I was.
I begged for him the same way I once begged Montgomery to take me away from Hirsh—like desperation was the only language I had left.
My hand shakes, trembling with a mixture of shame and defiance, but I force myself to keep writing, to capture the truth no matter how raw it feels.
I told myself I’d rather die than ask for his touch again. But in that cold, the line between death and him was razor thin.
I chose him.
Not because I wanted him the way I once convinced myself I should want safety, but because something in me still needed to be chosen at all.
The tears fall without me giving them a choice.
I wanted to be chosen—like Montgomery finally chose me when I turned eighteen and the world shifted into something that felt like ownership and salvation all at once.
Like Shoemaker choosing to sit across from me over coffee, acting like I was still someone worth checking on after the compound raid, like I hadn’t already been marked by everything that came before him.
My hand goes to my mouth.
The memory hits before I can stop it—Montgomery’s lips on mine, the weight of it still vivid enough to feel like it belongs in the present instead of somewhere I can’t reach anymore.
He used to look at me like he could burn the entire world down for even touching me wrong.
Like I was something worth destroying everything else for.
Instead, the world took him from me.
And it didn’t ask permission.
I wanted that again.
Even if I had to mistake survival for it.
My throat tightens and the pen hovers over the page, hesitating as if I’m afraid to confess the next words.
I don’t know if that makes me a survivor or something worse.
I pause, feeling the heat of my palm against the cold paper—a stark contrast to the icy numbness I fought through earlier today.
My ribs ache from clenching so hard, my lips are bruised from biting down, desperate to keep silent. Until I didn’t. Until I gave in. And he held me—not tenderly, not kindly, but like he knew. Knew I would break. Knew I would choose him.
I think he enjoys watching the moment I give in. Like it’s proof that he’s winning.
The pen presses down, leaving a small dot, a mark of surrender. I turn the page, the journal whispering beneath my fingers, and begin again.
The Warden is not a man. He is an institution. A doctrine of control wrapped in skin. His mask doesn’t hide him—it frees him. No rules. No limits. Just power exercised on flesh. My flesh.
And God help me...
Sometimes it feels good.
Not because I crave pain, or want to be broken.
But because, for once, I am seen. Touched. Claimed.
Is that what I’ve been chasing? Not freedom, but significance?
Is it because I am finally wanted?
Montgomery said he wanted me. Said he loved me.
I was in love with him. I know that now in the same way you only understand something after it’s already cost you too much.
But did he truly love me?
Because love is more than whispered promises in the dark.
And he never saved me.
I lean back against the headboard, exhaustion pulling at my limbs. The ink is still wet on the page, shimmering like an open wound. My throat aches with the weight of confession.
Confession of wanting to be claimed. Wanting to be saved. Wanting to be someone—not something—to someone, like it was ever supposed to be that simple.
And most of all, the part I can barely make myself write without my hand shaking over the page—being in love with Montgomery.
I close the journal gently, slipping the pen into the spine, and press it against my chest as if holding my own heart in my hands—trying to control something uncontrollable.
Then I hear it—a sound.
Not just a sound. Movement.
A voice downstairs, unfamiliar and rough, sharp and low, followed by another, louder and more aggressive.
Something slams—a chair or a door—echoing through the hollow bones of the building like a death knell.
My body tenses, instincts sharpening, muscle memory clutching at me like a lifeline.
I’ve heard this kind of noise before—the kind that precedes disappearances and screams that never reach ears.
A deeper voice cuts through, rough and silencing, ending mid-sentence as if someone’s authority crushed it.
Then—nothing.
A silence so complete it presses against my ears like thick water, suffocating and endless.
My heart pounds, loud and uneven. I slide off the bed, the journal left on the mattress, and press my ear against the cold door, straining for any sign of life—footsteps, breaths, a whisper. Nothing. The air is still, frozen, lifeless.
Minutes stretch out like lifetimes until I finally exhale, fogging the surface with my breath.
Just as I begin to turn away, the door handle clicks.
He steps in.
Not knocking.
Not entering hesitantly.
He owns this room. He owns me.
His mask stares back at me, utterly expressionless, yet his presence is sharper, coiled with something darker than usual. He moves quickly, stopping inches from where I stand.
His eyes lock onto the journal still lying on the bed, raw and exposed.
I reach out instinctively, clutching the journal to my chest.
“No—please—” I whisper, but his hand shoots out, snatching it from me like it belongs to him.
His gloved fingers flip through the pages, faster and faster—one, two, five—until they settle on the last, the page that burns behind my eyes:
And he never saved me.
His breath hitches, growing louder through the mask, sharper, like it’s slicing something deep inside. Without a word, he closes the journal with a sharp snap and tosses it onto the bed like it’s garbage.
“Stay in your room,” he orders flatly. “And put some clothes on.”
Confusion floods me. “What just happened downstairs?”
He turns away, the hard set of his shoulders rigid like stone.
“Was someone here?” I press, voice shaking. “Who were you talking to?”
He stops at the door, back still to me. “I said,” he growls, “Stay. In. Your. Room.”
No warning. No invitation. A command carved in iron.
He doesn’t slam the door, but the click echoes like a gavel.
Gone. Just like everyone else in my life.
I stand frozen in the middle of the room, the journal lying on the bed like a dead thing.
Slowly trembling, I crawl toward it and open it again. The page with that sentence is crumpled, ink smeared. I smooth it out and reread it, my throat tightening with questions I can’t answer.
What did he see? What did I write that made him walk out like that? Why does he all of a sudden care what I write about?
I rise and press my ear to the door again—nothing.
My hand moves to the knob and turns.
Locked.
Of course it is.
And then my thoughts start to slip.
Men in suits and uniforms. Smiles that never reach their eyes. Hands that move like they own everything they touch.
Flesh isn’t sacred to them—it is currency. A thing to mark, to possess.
Hirsh and Tomas—they took. They stripped away pieces of me like they had the right.
But Montgomery never did. And neither did Shoomaker.
They wanted. They watched. They commanded. But they didn’t take.
Not without my permission.
And that—God help me—makes it worse.
Because sometimes I wonder what’s more dangerous: the men who steal…or the ones who wait until you offer.
And The Warden? He was their gatekeeper—the man who kept the cage locked tight, deciding what went in and what never came out.
I don’t know how much I remembered and how much I invented to fill the gaps, but I know what I felt.
When he pulled the journal from my hands—
He wasn’t angry that I lied.
He was angry that I told the truth.
That I admitted he makes me feel something other than hate.
That I wrote about needing him.
He wants control. Not connection.
And what I wrote broke the rules.
I trace my fingers over the journal cover, then flip to a blank page and start to write again:
He read it. Every word. Didn’t speak. Didn’t strike me. He didn’t even correct me. He just left. And somehow that silence is worse than any punishment I’ve had before.
Something happened tonight. Someone challenged him. I felt it in the air. Heard it in the walls. And he shut it down quickly, with brutal efficiency. He’s still The Warden. Or is he? He didn’t sound the same after he read the last entry.
And, yet, I’m still a girl behind a door I can’t unlock.