Page 78 of Hidden

Or buried somewhere deeper, where no bruises ever fully showed.

I closed my eyes for a moment and tipped my head back against the door, forcing my breathing to even out. The pain itself wasn’t what made tonight unbearable. Pain was familiar. Easy, almost. My body knew what to do with pain. It could compartmentalise it, absorb it, turn it into background noise if I needed it to.

It was the humiliation that clung.

The way he’d smiled when he did it. The way the girls looked at me afterwards, wide-eyed and guilty and terrified, as though they wanted to apologise for surviving at my expense.

Sometimes, the girls even looked at me with spite and glee. As though this was a small price I should be paying, glad it was me and not them. As though I hadn’t saved them dozens of times before. But I would never share that truth with them. I’d never burden them with the knowledge that one more day of safety in this place came at the price of my own rape and humiliation.

The men in the room hadn’t even blinked tonight. It was as though a hand around my throat was no different to someone reaching for the salt.

I pushed away from the door and crossed the room slowly, each step measured, my knees threatening to buckle from the exhaustion that sat in my bones. I didn’t bother turning on the main light. I never did. The softer lamp near the vanity was enough, casting the room in a muted amber glow that left the corners drenched in shadow. It was kinder that way. Shadows blurred things. Softened them. Made it easier to pretend I was someone else.

I dropped my dressing gown onto the end of the bed and caught sight of myself in the mirror.

For a second, I just stared.

My hair was a mess, black and tangled from where it had been grabbed, one side of it knotted near the roots. My lipstick had long since worn away, leaving only a faint stain at the edges of my mouth. There was a bruise darkening just above my collarbone, another fingerprint-shaped mark emerging along the side of my throat, and one shoulder strap of my dress hung lower than the other, the lace twisted from where it had been tugged out of place. My eyes looked too big. Too empty. Like they belonged to a woman far older than the one staring back at me.

For one ugly, trembling moment, all I could think was:This is what he’s made of me.

Not strong. Not cunning. Not untouchable. Not the princess I had once been, or the girl who used to smirk through every argument like she had all the time in the world.

Just this.

A body that knew how to endure, a face that knew how to lie, and a ghost wrapped up in lace.

My hand came up before I could stop it, fingers brushing the bruise at my throat. It hurt. Of course it hurt. Everything did. But I pressed harder anyway, welcoming the sting.

I should have been tired enough to cry.

I should have been tired enough to collapse onto the mattress and shut my eyes and will the night to pass.

Instead, something else stirred beneath the exhaustion. Hotter than grief. Sharper than fear. Something restless and poisonous and bitter enough to curdle in my chest.

Anger.

Not the wild kind. Not the kind that made people scream or throw things or fight back until they were beaten into the ground.

Mine was quieter than that. Mine sat low and slow, fed by humiliation after humiliation until all that remained was a simmering fury.

I was so fucking tired of swallowing it.

Tired of being punished for other people’s mistakes.

Tired of being looked at like furniture until someone wanted to use me.

Tired of carrying this house and its filth and its secrets in silence.

Tired of surviving instead of living.

My eyes flicked to the window on instinct, to that familiar stretch of glass and darkness beyond it.

The light signal.

The ritual.

The one thing in my life that still belonged to another time.