Chapter 9 #2
The truth clawed up my throat, sharp and immediate.
I swallowed it down violently.
“I’m waiting,” Rafael said quietly, pulling me out of the memory I had fallen into.
“And what will you do with the name?” I asked before I could stop myself, my throat tight. “You don’t care about me in any way. So why do you need the name of my rapist?”
Silence followed.
Then his answer came—low, absolute.
“You are my wife.”
A pause.
“In everything that word means.”
My breath caught, but he continued before I could interrupt him.
“I don’t care how long ago it was. I don’t care what distance you think time has given him.”
His tone hardened slightly, not with anger—but certainty.
“I need the name of the man who did this to you.”
Another step closer. I could feel it in the shift of the air between us.
“It is my responsibility as your husband to bring ruin to anything—and anyone—that has ever laid hands on what is mine.”
The words landed like a sealed sentence.
Then, quieter. Almost controlled restraint.
“Because this version of you... the one sitting here carrying it alone... I don’t accept it as the final one.”
His voice lowered further.
“I don’t believe this is who you are meant to remain.”
The idea of someone looking at me and seeing me broken should have angered me.
It should have made me shut down completely.
But instead—
It felt uncomfortably close to being seen.
Still, I remained quiet.
“In that case,” he said, “I will find him myself. I’ll investigate every name, every trace, until I have him in front of me.”
“I don’t care who he is to you, or what he once meant in your life,” his tone hardened, clipped like steel being drawn. “When I find him... he dies by my hand.”
The rage wasn’t aimed at me. It didn’t touch me at all.
It was controlled, directed elsewhere—cold and absolute, like judgment already passed.
The heavy wooden door groaned open.
The sound cut through the room, snapping whatever fragile tension had formed between us.
Rafael turned without another word and walked away.
Silence returned instantly, swallowing everything he had left behind.
For a moment, I didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe properly.
Didn’t think.
Then my chest heaved once and something inside me cracked.
A sob tore out of me before I could stop it.
Ugly in a way I couldn’t hide even in blindness.
My hands curled into the bedsheet as my shoulders shook slightly.
Of course this wasn’t who I used to be.
That version of me didn’t survive.
That version didn’t make it out of Italy.
That version didn’t learn how to go still when hands reached too quickly.
Didn’t learn how to disappear inside her own body just to stay intact.
I pressed my forehead carefully into my palm, wincing at the tenderness there, and let the silence hold me without witnesses.
The kind of silence that felt like it was chewing on my bones.
I had once been a cheerful, lively young woman who danced in the kitchen while my mother cooked.
A woman who believed the world was simple.
Who believed her father’s rough hands were only clumsy with affection.
That belief had died screaming long before I understood how completely it would be replaced by something rotting and endless.
The first fracture came when I was twenty-one, the year my mother died.
After she was gone, the house changed its shape—silence lingering too long between meals, stretching itself into every corner like it had always belonged there.
And my father changed with it.
He stopped speaking gently, stopped wasting words on softness, and began to speak only in commands, his voice like gravel dragged across my skin.
Then my elder brother was sent away. “For his own good,” my father had said, eyes flat and dead.
As if exile could ever be kindness.
As if anything he ever did again would be anything but punishment.
After that, I became the only one left in the house with my father—a man who used to be my protector and now suddenly turned into a monster I did not know.
Three days after my brother’s disappearance, he dragged me down into the cellar.
I begged the whole way, my heels scraping raw against the stairs, nails clawing at his arm until they bled.
He threw me down like discarded meat.
The door slammed shut above me with a sound that still lives in my nightmares.
A place that swallowed time and hope and everything human.
The first time the door closed, I remember thinking it would open again in minutes.
Thinking he wouldn’t really mean it. That he would come back laughing, tell me it was all a cruel joke, pull me into his arms and say he was sorry.
He never came back for days.
There was only cold stone beneath my knees, damp walls that breathed moisture and mold into the air, and darkness so complete it felt like it was pressing its thumbs into my eyes.
I screamed until my throat tore.
I cried until I vomited.
I pissed myself in terror when the rats started moving in the corners.
I was starved for three days before my father began to come every night.
The nightmare began that fourth night.
He assaulted me.
I screamed until my voice cracked and died.
Then the others began to come.
Almost every hour. Strangers. Men who smelled of alcohol and cigarettes and hatred.
They came and went in shifts, while my father stood by and watched at times, unmoved.
“Hold her.”
“Behave, you worthless bitch.”
Every time I fought, they slapped me until my ears rang, kicked my ribs until something cracked inside me that never healed right.
They laughed when I cried. They laughed harder when I stopped fighting.
I eventually learned to leave my body.
To float above it while they used what was left of me.
Days blurred into weeks into months of endless torture, beatings, and degradation.
My body became a battlefield—bruises layered over bruises, ribs grinding with every breath.
Blood and piss stained the stone floor beneath me.
Eventually, I became pregnant. I don’t know when exactly it began—only that it was the final proof of what had been done to me.
As the memories rushed now, agonizing and unrelenting, a violent tremor seized me,
Tears streamed down my face before I even realized I was crying, mixing with the dried blood still stiffening on my skin.
The present collapsed.
I curled inward sharply, pulling my knees against my chest despite the white-hot sting it sent through my shin.
Blood and tears mixed again, slipping down my face without care for dignity. I didn’t wipe them. There was no point.
I pressed my forehead against my knees, breathing in ragged, broken gasps.
My voice came out raw, shattered, barely human:
“How can I ever enjoy sex? Never. I am not even a person anymore. I am just meat. Ruined meat that still feels every single hand, every thrust, every laugh. I will carry this darkness until the day I die... and even then, I’m terrified it will follow me.”