I thought of my father. A sneering shadow at the edge of the kitchen, slurring about how all women are the same, how they love to watch a man wreck himself for them. I wanted to scream his name, curse his bones, claw him out of my DNA, but I knew better.
The monster was in me, and it was never leaving.
It was easier to break than to hold. Easier to use my strength for destruction, to lash out, than to admit I needed anything at all.
She held on, barely, her fingers shaking, and the urge to crush her hand, to shatter the moment before it could dissolve on its own, pulsed in me, bright and savage.
I could taste the old, rotten script of my father in the air.A man is a weapon, or he is nothing. You take what you want, and when they cry, you leave them to it. You never, ever become the one who cries.
I tore my hand away, a violent snap that left her arms gasping empty. “You came down here for what?” I said, voice flat, dead. “To make sure I still want you? To see if you can drag me back to the cage, just to watch me beg you?” My lip curled. “Congratulations, Amelia. You win.”
She flinched, shoulders caving in, and I hated her for that too. Hated the way she looked at me, like I was both the predator and the trap. Like she wanted me to break her, just so she could have a reason to hate me again.
The monster in me rose, all mouth and teeth. “You like it when I hurt you?” I spat. “Is that it? You want me to grab you, bend you over, make you scream until you forget all the shit I did before? I got news, princess. I don’t fuck victims.”
I wanted to break her so bad it made my teeth hurt. I wanted to see her folded in half, weeping, clawing my back, because then I wouldn’t be the only one ruined. I wanted her to admitI was poison, to say the truth out loud so I could finally stop pretending I was anything else.
She jerked away, green eyes wide, glassy, but the spark was still there. Rage, or hunger, or both, sparking off her bones. “Fuck you,” she spat, but her voice was just a hair from breaking.
“Yeah,” I said, a sickness in my smile, “that’s exactly what you want, isn’t it?” My chest heaved, the violence rising up, the old scripts tattooing themselves along my throat. “Maybe you should go upstairs and let Alex hold you, since I’m such a fucking monster.”
She looked at me, and I saw every year of history between us, every time I’d hurt her, every time she’d ever believed I was the villain and not just another animal with its bones on fire.
“You should go back to bed,” I said.
She lingered, one step between run and stay, lips parted like she was about to speak. I watched her gather herself, watched her shoulders set and her face freeze over with that practiced coldness.
“Fine,” she said, and in her voice was all the old hate. She turned, bare feet slapping the tile like a drum roll, and vanished up the stairs.
I stood there, swaying, pulse in my ears, every muscle locked. The kitchen window rattled with the wind, and for a second, my father was there. An echo in the dark, the old bastard’s shadow stretched long and mean across the floor.
16
AMELIA
These days,I stood on the edge of haunt and hunger.
Some girls woke to birthdays and sunlight. I woke to the taste of old grief in my mouth. My emotional scars had never really left my bones, just reshaped themselves.
Even here, hundreds of miles from the wreckage, I breathed its ghosts in every morning.
It was supposed to be a trip for healing. That was what Sabrina said when she planned the itinerary. Like maybe she could mend what was broken if she staged enough group outings and forced enough laughter into the cracks.
But you couldn’t outrun trauma. You couldn’t bleach out the stains in your head.
I stood on the weathered pier. Sunlight cut through the sky, burning stripes across my ankles, and the ocean below heaved and rolled. Endless, hungry, blue-green, and alive. I pressed against the railing and tried to let the wind scrape the chaos out of my mind.
Beside me, nobody noticed the way my pulse tripped and staggered. Not Alex, who leaned in with casual confidence, forearms braced on the peeling wood, eyes the color of new denim and always searching for something to win.
“You’d think a view like that would get old,” he said. His voice was too smooth, too practiced. “But honestly? I wish I could wake up to this every day.”
I watched the line of boats tossing on the current. There was a beauty to it, I guessed. The kind that made you ache a little, because you knew it wouldn’t last. “Yeah,” I murmured. “It’s…nice.”
Nice. The word echoed inside my head, hollow as driftwood.
Alex grinned like he’d just reeled in a prize catch. “You ever think about moving closer to the water? Finding a house with a view like this?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.” All I could think was: water meant wildness, drowning, a roar in the throat, and blackness behind the eyes. But I couldn’t say that. Not out here, surrounded by laughter and sunburn and the pretense of normal.
