Chapter 13
LORETTA
“Idon’t know.”
It was barely even a sentence.
But I couldn’t breathe past it.
Those three words settled between us like something fragile finally snapping.
And somehow, they hurt more than any confession he could have made.
I forced myself to speak, needing control back.
“Is this...” My voice came out smaller than I intended. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Is this your room?”
“Yes,” he answered simply.
I heard him shift again—fabric rustling, mattress dipping deeper as his weight adjusted beside me.
I shrank back instinctively, curling slightly toward the edge of the bed, as if distance could be created by will alone.
But he didn’t move over me.
He stayed beside me instead.
Warmth radiated from him, subtle but constant, wrapping around my side like an invisible barrier against the cold space I kept trying to build between us.
“It’s been weeks since we got married, and I have never once asked you for sex. Do you know why?”
I didn’t answer.
The reason felt obvious enough that speaking it would make it worse—his unhinged devotion to Zara, the ghost of her always standing between everything we were not.
He didn’t wait for me.
“It’s because you told me you wouldn’t be able to enjoy it,” he said, calm and matter-of-fact. “And given what you’ve been through... I understood. I wouldn’t risk triggering that trauma.”
Still, I said nothing.
My chest ached with everything I was trying not to feel—like something sharp kept striking the same fragile point inside me, over and over, until I could barely sit still in it.
Seeing my silence, he continued.
“And the surgeon who removed your eyes—”
My head snapped toward him instantly, blind gaze useless but fixed in his direction anyway.
Fear rose in me, immediate and suffocating.
“Please tell me you haven’t killed him,” I said quickly, my voice breaking despite myself. “Because I won’t forgive you if you do.”
A pause.
Complete stillness.
Then Rafael spoke as though we were discussing something ordinary.
“Not yet,” he said evenly.
My breath caught violently.
It wasn’t the words themselves that shook me. It was the absence of emotion behind them.
“He’s only still alive because he claimed the procedure is reversible. He claimed the eyes can be replaced.”
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water.
For a second, the world narrowed to the echo of that single sentence, rippling outward through my skull.
My eyes can be replaced?
My heart lurched, a violent, painful thud against my ribs, then raced ahead in a frantic, stumbling rhythm.
Heat flooded my face.
Sight. Real sight. Not the hazy memory of it I clung to in dreams, but actual vision—colors, shapes, faces.
The possibility unfolded in my mind like a door I had nailed shut months ago.
I had accepted the darkness. I had grieved it.
The surgery was supposed to be final, a one-way crossing. That was the only way I could survive what had been done to me.
And yet here I was, discovering it wasn’t permanent after all.
Something deep in my chest cracked open—sharp, brittle, almost audible.
For one treacherous moment I waited for the rush of hope, the bright, desperate joy that should have flooded in.
It never came.
Instead, a vast, hollow silence bloomed inside me.
Not relief. Not gratitude. Just... emptiness.
I pressed my lips together, breathing through my nose in shallow, controlled pulls.
Rafael shifted slightly beside me and wrapped his right hand around mine. I tried to pull away, but his grip held steady, keeping me exactly where I was.
“Tomorrow,” he said, calm and certain, “we’re going back to the hospital. He’ll set a date for the operation.”.
My chest tightened.
“I told you,” I said, my voice trembling despite my effort to steady it, “I removed my eyes because everything I see reminds me of that dark cellar. Every shadow. Every light. And yet you speak about fixing them like it’s something I’ve been desperate to do.”
I swallowed hard, forcing the rest out.
“At least in the dark,” I added quietly, “I can pretend the memories don’t reach me so easily. What if I never want to see again?”
The words hung between us, heavy and absolute.
Rafael’s voice was low—controlled, certain.
“I understand what you’ve been through, Loretta,” he said. “But you are not going to turn your pain into a sentence you serve for the rest of your life because of what your father did.”
His hand tightened over mine—firmer now, not painful, but impossible to ignore.
He shifted slightly closer.
The mattress dipped more under his weight, and I felt it immediately.
His thigh brushed mine through the fabric of my dress, brief but deliberate enough to make my breath catch.
“You can’t deny what losing your sight has taken from you,” Rafael said quietly, as if he were presenting an argument in a boardroom rather than dissecting my life.
My spine stiffened.
He continued anyway.
“Simple things—navigating new spaces, reading expressions, protecting yourself from people like that man at the club.”
My jaw tightened at the reminder.
“The surgery is reversible,” he added, calm and absolute. “Let’s do it.”
The words fell between us like a verdict already signed.
A decision waiting for my approval.
I swallowed hard, my hands still enclosed in his.
His grip hadn’t changed since he took them—warm, steady, inescapably present.
“I...” My voice faltered, then steadied with effort. “I don’t know if I’m ready.”
A pause.
Then I forced the truth out before I could lose courage.
“Darkness has been my cage,” I said quietly, fingers curling slightly within his hold, “but it’s also been my shield. I’m not sure I know how to live without it anymore.”
His thumb moved across the back of my hand.
A single, controlled stroke.
It was such a small gesture that it should have meant nothing.
But it didn’t.
It grounded me in a way I didn’t expect.
“You won’t have to face it alone,” he said finally.
His voice had lowered slightly now. “But hiding in the dark forever isn’t living, Loretta. It’s surviving.”
The word hit harder than I expected.
Surviving.
Because that was what my life had always been.
Not living. Not choosing.
Just enduring.
Rafael’s grip tightened fractionally, like a reminder that he was still there. Still listening. Still refusing to let me drift away into my own thoughts.
“And you deserve more than survival,” he added.
Everything about him—his reputation, the man who had once ordered me to kneel in the snow until I collapsed, the man who spoke of killing as easily as breathing—clashed violently with the one holding my hands as though they mattered.
He spoke of my life like it had value.
My body betrayed me again, leaning subtly toward his warmth without permission.
I hated that instinct. Hated how natural it felt to move closer to someone I should have been afraid of.
In truth, not being able to see had limited me in ways I rarely allowed myself to fully examine.
The world had become a series of careful calculations—distance measured in sound, space judged by instinct, trust placed in what others said was in front of me.
Even the simplest things required negotiation with uncertainty.
Confidence, too, had changed shape. It was no longer something I could rely on instinctively; it had to be built, step by step, without sight to reassure me I was right.
Without sight, I was always a step behind a world that assumed I could still see what it expected of me.
And yet...
For the first time, I found myself thinking beyond survival.
I wanted to see him.
Rafael. Tess. The house he had brought me into.
Maybe he was right. Maybe I could not keep living as though punishment was the only way to answer what had been done to me.
My father’s crimes were not mine to carry in this way—not until they erased everything else I could still become.
I had been in darkness long enough that it should have felt familiar by now. Maybe even safe.
“I’m scared...” I whispered, my voice trembling. “If I regain my sight, those memories will come back stronger. And when they do... they bring thoughts I can’t control.”
My breath hitched.
“I’m afraid it will make everything worse.”
Rafael moved instantly.
Strong arms pulled me into him, cutting through my spiral before it could deepen further.
One arm wrapped securely around my back while the other slid up, cradling the back of my head with a firmness that wasn’t rough—but absolute.
I froze for a second in shock.
Then my body collapsed into him without permission.
His hand began slow, steady movements along my spine—up and down in a rhythm so deliberate it almost felt practiced.
Like he understood exactly where tension gathered and how to dissolve it without asking.
“You will never have to experience that again,” he said quietly.
“You are stronger than you think,” he added. “And you will get through this. You can move past it.”
My breath shuddered against his chest.
The way he said it wasn’t soft comfort. It was certainty.
“A time will come,” he said quietly, his hand still tracing slow, steady lines across my back, “when this won’t be all you are. You’ll speak about it. You’ll help others through it. And you won’t even recognize the person you are right now.”
A hollow laugh almost escaped me, but it dissolved into another shaky breath instead.
My body remained pressed against him, my face turned into the solid warmth of his chest.
I could feel the steady rise and fall beneath me.
I shut my eyes tightly, even though it changed nothing.
Darkness was already my world.
But right now, it felt different.
Like I had been pulled into a space where the edges of my pain couldn’t spread as far.
Rafael’s arms tightened slightly, not restricting me, just keeping me close enough that I couldn’t drift away into my own collapse.
And something in me—something exhausted beyond reason—stopped fighting.
My breathing gradually slowed.
I didn’t know when it happened.
When exhaustion overtook fear.
When silence replaced sobbing.