Chapter 8
The worst part was that it didn’t happen once.
The mind has a strange ability to contain a single moment, even a terrible one. It can isolate it, place it somewhere separate, label it. Something that happened and something that ended.
This didn’t end; it repeated.
I didn’t notice it happening. Just the slow realization, night after night, that the house wasn’t quiet anymore. Something was there after the silence, even when everything else had stopped moving.
Bartosz would disappear first; that part became predictable early on.
The heavy rhythm of his steps fading down the hallway, the dull clink of glass, the slow fall of a body surrendering to alcohol, somewhere out of sight.
The house would settle, the same familiar sounds returning. Pipes, wood, the low hum of electricity behind the walls. And then… something else.
The air would change first, as if the house itself were holding its breath. And then she would come. Not every night at first, but enough for my body to start anticipating it before my mind allowed itself to.
You have to understand something, little Ghost. Anticipation doesn’t always come from desire. Sometimes it comes from repetition. The body often learns patterns faster than the mind is willing to accept them.
There were nights when I lay completely still, staring into the dark, and I could feel it building before anything happened.
The knock, when it came, stopped being surprising.
That might be the most disturbing part. Not the sound itself but the absence of shock.
The way my body stopped reacting to it like an interruption and started receiving it like confirmation.
Of course.
Of course, it’s happening again.
She never rushed. I learned that fast.
Some violence comes in loud, impossible to mistake. This wasn’t that, and that made it harder to resist in ways I didn’t yet understand. Because resistance requires clarity and nothing about those nights was clear, only inevitable.
Days, however, remained almost untouched. That was the strange balance of it.
Morning would arrive, and the house would return to something that resembled normality so convincingly that it almost erased the night.
Krystyna would stand in the kitchen, sunlight catching in her hair, moving between the stove and the counter with practiced ease. The same coffee, the same perfume, the same voice.
“Did you sleep well?” she would ask sometimes, glancing at me briefly.
I never answered, of course, and as time passed, I stopped having any form of facial expression as well.
It didn’t really matter to Krystyna, because the question was never really meant to be answered.
A performance of the version of reality she preferred, and during the day, she became something else.
Her attention shifted in ways that were subtle enough to seem almost natural to anyone who wasn’t paying close attention. But I was. I always was.
She started standing closer. Letting her hand linger a fraction longer on my body when passing something across the table. Her eyes resting on me.
“You’re very beautiful, Rowan.”
The first time she said it, I didn’t react. At least not outwardly, but something inside me recoiled. As if the words themselves didn’t belong in the space they were placed in. She smiled when she said it. Soft, almost proud.
“Those hazel eyes…” she added once, tilting her head, looking at me.
“They’re not common.”
Hazel.
I had heard the word before, but the way she said it made it feel like she was naming a possession, not a feature.
Her gaze would trace across my face slowly. My jaw, my neck, always the neck. Her fingers would follow sometimes, light, almost absent, but not absent enough.
“You’re going to be… very striking when you grow up.”
The words settled somewhere deep in my body. Because every time she said things like that, something inside me responded.
Violently.
I started thinking about breaking myself.
Not metaphorically, but literally. Each word she gave me, each look, each moment where her attention lingered too long… it layered something inside me that had nowhere to go. And eventually, it needed release.
I remember standing in my room one afternoon, staring at the wall across from my bed, and I had a very clear thought.
If I drove my head into it hard enough, repeatedly, I could change my face.
Enough to ruin whatever it was she thought she saw.
The thought didn’t scare me; it probably should have, but it comforted me.
Because it was something I could control.
Another time, I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my fingers into my eyes. Not hard enough to do damage, but enough to imagine what it would feel like to remove them. To take away whatever it was she kept looking at. To erase the thing she seemed to want.
The images came too easily.
My jaw, my neck.
I would sit there sometimes, my hand resting against my throat, feeling the steady pulse beneath the skin. And I would think about a rope being tied around it instead of her fingers. Even that would be better.
You see what happens, don’t you, little Ghost?
When something is taken from you in silence, the mind doesn’t scream; it redirects. It turns inward. Begins to dismantle the only thing it still owns. But I didn’t break myself, not physically.
Instead, I found something else, something more sustainable.
I started reading.
It began as an accident. Krystyna had a library card; she mentioned it casually one afternoon, almost as an afterthought.
“If you’re bored, you can borrow books,” she said, waving her hand toward the small stack of papers near the kitchen counter.
“Just take the card.”
So I did.
The library became something I didn’t expect. It became a parallel structure. A place where reality followed different rules, where pain had direction, where suffering meant something, where it led to somewhere.
I moved through the shelves slowly, the same way I moved through rooms. There was one book that I didn’t understand fully at first, but something about it stayed with me. It was worn, the edges of the pages softened from use. The title was simple.
The Count of Monte Cristo.
At twelve, I didn’t read it the way an adult would. I didn’t care about historical accuracy or political nuance.
What I saw was a man. Wronged, buried, stripped of everything, and then… patient. Calculating. Becoming something new and not just surviving what was done to him, but rebuilding himself into something capable of answering it completely, thoroughly, and without mercy.
I read it again.
And again.
And again.
Because I saw something in it, something valuable.
The idea that suffering could be repurposed, that time could be used, that silence wasn’t just absence but preparation.
That became important. More important than anything else at that time, because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t just enduring something, I was beginning to understand that it could be used.