"Stop lying!” he shouts.
“I’m not?—”
"You're lying on the floor of a cell in your own filth, expecting me to believe a single word that comes out of your disgusting mouth?"
The edge sharpens briefly. I hold on to it. "Everything she's ever told you, Samuel, everything she's ever?—"
"Mary is in the ground." His voice drops to somethingquiet, almost worse than shouting. "My son asks for her. He wakes up and he asks for her, and I have to—" He presses his mouth together. "And you're down here getting high like you didn’t steal something from me. From my son."
No. No. No. No. No. What? I didn’t steal anything.
My arms quiver as I try to push myself up. "Samuel?—"
"Don't." He shakes his head slowly. "You should thank God my mother has you locked in this room, or I’ll kill you with my bare fucking hands.”
I think of blonde hair. Green eyes.Sophia, stay in the house, stay with Ian, don't come looking, please don't come?—
"I hope you burn in hell, motherfucker.”
He looks at me one more time through the slot. The look of a man who lost everything and he’s staring right at the cause.
The slot closes, the sound so very small.
I lie back on the floor. The haze settles like thick, warm syrup poured straight into my veins, slow and heavy and treacherous, flooding every capillary until my limbs turn to warm lead. The constant burning crawl under my skin dulls to a distant itch, then melts into a false, golden calm that makes my eyelids flutter.
My heartbeat slows to a lazy thud, each pulse pushing the drug deeper, spreading it through muscle and bone until even the sharp edges of my ruined hands stop screaming. The stench of my own filth—vomit crusted on my chest, old blood flaking from my knuckles—fades into something almost tolerable, like background noise.
Samuel’s face fades, manageable, filed away alongside everything else that I can’t hold at full volume right now.
For a few blessed seconds, the room stops tilting, the ceilingcrack stops crawling like a living thing, and the screaming void where Mary used to be quiets to a low, distant hum.
But I know this warmth. I know how it lies.
Beneath it, the real me is still clawing, still rotting, still starving for something cleaner than this poison. Still reaching for blonde hair and green eyes and the only touch that ever made any of this feel worth surviving.
Blonde hair. Green eyes.
Sophia.
I can still see her. The image still comes when I call it. That means something. I don't know what it means, but it means something.
Samuel thinks I killed Mary. I didn’t kill Mary. I put the thought out into the room. Let it sit. The certainty it carries is the same as yesterday. Solid enough.
Valeria says I was screaming when her men found me. She says the way I was screaming—she says people who watch something don't?—
My hands.
I look at my hands in the dim light. The damage on them. I know how some of it happened—the door, the walls, I remember the door and the walls. But some of it I can't account for, the specific pattern of it, and I look at it and I try to remember and the haze pulls and I can't?—
She had the poker.
She did. She was the one. I saw her. She was standing over?—
Wasn't she standing over…?
I was there. Wasn’t I?
Dead eyes. Seeping blood. It’s on my knees, my hands.
