As I cooked her flesh over the fire, I thought of the children I had watched suffer. I could still hear their cries, their pleas for help. But I was powerless then, a prisoner in my own home. Now, I am the one in control. Each bite was a celebration of my victory, a triumphant reclaiming of my past.
But the darkness was relentless. I dreamt of the basement sometimes, of the children my father forced me to watch. Their faces haunt me, their screams echoing through my mind.
I thought I could silence them by becoming the monster. I thought I could cancel out the meat my father made me eat by eating new flesh. I thought I could free myself by embracing it. But the more I consume, the more they whisper. They tell me I am not free; I am merely a puppet in a twisted game that will never end.
So, to turn the tables, I have created my own set of games where I am the master, and I always win. Madness continues to consume me, and it is all I am becoming. It is all I ever will be in this world.
At least I have my little pets to give me company, until they become my fuel, their bones buried beneath my feet.
The journal fell out of my hands, and tears flowed endlessly from my eyes as I unraveled in the dark.
Sleep claimed me eventually, but the dreams that followed were a gruesome blend of blood and terror.
2
CAIDEN
Her emerald eyeshaunted me in the dark, in the day. It was fucking torture. I was seeing her a lot more often now that we had been rescued, after going almost seven years without being in her presence.
I never expected to see her again. I also never expected to feel anything other than the hatred that consumed me for so long.
Each time she smiled, or laughed, or touched me in the slightest, it drove me damn crazy in a ‘I want you now’ kind of way.
Even so, I still recoiled, picturing the hurt in her eyes every time I bullied her.
I don’t deserve her. I deserve to rot like the piece of shit that I have become.
She had given me a letter, but I haven’t dared to read it yet.
The isolation of being alone with her in the untamed wilderness, particularly during those long weeks of traumatic confinement within the cage where we were both exposed and vulnerable, initiated a profound and irreversible internal transformation.
It was dangerous and forbidden, teetering on the unknown, but I still found myself gravitating towards the allure of her presence.
I was so fucked.
I tried to kill the thoughts with alcohol, but they multiplied instead. Every swallow was a reminder that I was still alive, still cursed with the memory of her warmth.
I meant it when I told Amelia that all the reasons I learned to hate her were fading, especially since my father was no longer around to burn hatred and anger into my brain.
But the monster was still there, always there, and as long as that was the case, maybe the fear and the anger and the hatred would never truly vanish.
3
CAIDEN
Sometimes I thoughtabout the blood, the pattern it made on my hands. Not just that day in the Colorado woods but all the years before. The smell of it. The sound.
You never really forget those things, no matter how many miles you run. You just get better at pretending you don’t want them.
The truth was, I’d killed a man. Squeezed the life out of him in that rotting wilderness, every bone in my body screaming with purpose. Not for justice or survival or any of the other pretty words therapists liked to throw around.
No, I did it because I wanted to. Because I was fucking good at it. Because, for one perfect second, the world had made sense: him or me. And I was never going to be the one in the dirt.
And maybe I should have felt guilty. Should have choked on the horror, the guilt, the shit that kept normal people up at night. But there was something else in me, something black and endless, and it wanted more.
It remembered the look on Amelia’s face when she saw what I could do. It remembered her voice—ragged, nearly gone—calling my name while the blood pooled out of Blake’s neck and onto the warped wooden floor.
Even now, I saw her the way she looked in the cage, small and brittle, hunched around herself, eyes wide with fear. Waiting. Always waiting. For what? For me to save her? Or maybe for me to finish what someone else started.
