Page 31 of Defending Van

“Actually, I think you're the one who’s only seeing what they want to. I'm not saying there isn’t darkness in you, Van. Living through the kinds of things we did changes you in ways you can never completely recover from, but you are a good person.”

“I'm not, Makayla. I’m here. I see women like you abused every day, and I never lift a finger to help them.”

“The entire reason you're here is to help them. Just because you had to shut down your emotions to survive, doesn’t mean⁠—”

“Stop,” he roared. “I'm not the man you think I am, Makayla. I'm darkness, I'm empty inside, I don’t care about others. Stop trying to convince yourself that I'm your knight in shining armor, because I’ll never be that guy.”

August 28th

1:12 P.M.

Makayla blinked up at him, obviously surprised by his sudden outburst.

She shouldn’t be. Okay, she’d never seen him lose it before, something he rarely did because he had such tight control over his emotions to the point where they were virtually extinct. Van lived in a world where control was important, but never more so than in his need to eradicate his feelings so he could function with a calm head.

Never again did he want to go back to the horrors of his preteen years, where he was so consumed with anger over his situation and the apparent helplessness of it, grief at the loss of his childhood, and sadness that he couldn’t seem to find a single person who cared about him.

There was no way he was opening those floodgates for this woman he barely knew, who would be out of his hair quickly enough. While he’d spent decades convincing himself that he had managed to crush his emotions into oblivion, it was now more than apparent that they’d been there all along. He’d just managed to lock them down tight enough that they couldn’t escape.

But Makayla was making them escape, and he resented the hell out of her for it.

Being angry with her wasn't fair. Of course, given her current situation, she wanted to believe in him, wanted to believe he was going to save her, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He wasn't getting her out, he was going to stand by and do nothing and let her be sold. He was going to let Prey be the ones to go in after her and rescue her.

Didn't she understand that made him empty? Darkness? Nothing different from the other men just outside the door?

“It’s okay, Van,” she said softly. Her voice possessed a soothing quality that it would be all too easy to fall into, allowing it to lull him into a false sense of security.

That would be all it was, though.

False.

Like everything else in this world.

If Makayla didn't think she needed him, if she didn't see him as her protector, would she really be trying to calm and reassure him? No. She wouldn't. She was being nice to him as much for her own benefit as his.

“I know it’s scary. I remember how badly I wanted to shut down back then. Lock everything inside me away because nobody cared,” she continued as though unafraid of him, even though he’d yelled at her. “But it’s not possible to lock everything away forever. That’s not how it works, not how being a human being works. You can suppress your emotions, sure, that’s possible. You can pretend for a while that you're in control, but it doesn’t make it true. Your emotions are there, building with each passing day, and sooner or later they will explode. You can't keep them buried forever.”

“Shut up,” he snarled, his hand moving of its own accord to wrap around her neck, not hard enough to stop her breathing, but a warning to stop talking. This wasn't something he wanted to hear. She wasn't right just because she believed she was. He had managed to shut down his emotions.

Instead of listening to his warning, she just kept talking, her blue eyes so full of empathy and understanding that he wanted to rip them right out of her face so they stopped taunting him.

“My mom abused me basically from birth. She hadn't wanted a daughter. She was sure throughout her entire pregnancy that I was a boy. When I was born a girl, she was convinced I was possessed by a demon who had stolen her son from her. She tried to kill me several times, and I'd get removed, placed in foster homes that weren't any better, before eventually being returned. I hated her with every fiber of my being. My dad, too, because he would rather get drunk and obey his wife than protect me. I wanted to let that anger take over, control me, but instead I looked for moments of goodness in the world.”

“There aren't any, and if you think there are, that makes you stupid,” he taunted, but she merely offered him one of those beautiful smiles of hers, ignoring his childish insult.

“You see stupidity, I see hope. A driver, pulling their car over to block both lanes of traffic so a mother duck can safely lead her ducklings across the street. A little boy stopping in the playground to help up another little boy who tripped and skinned his knee. An elderly woman who brings a cup of coffee and a donut to her husband in the hospital every morning because it was his favorite, even though he doesn’t remember it anymore, doesn’t remember her anymore. No one notices these moments, but they're proof.”

“Proof of what?” he snarled. To him, those moments were anomalies. They didn't represent most people, or even how most people behaved most of the time.

“That light exists. That it counteracts the dark every time it shines, that if enough of the light in the world shines all at once, it can eradicate the darkness.”

“You're deluding yourself.” He scoffed, tightening his grip ever so slightly to remind her nothing was stopping him from snapping her neck, or cutting off her air supply and watching her die at his hand.

“Or maybe you're the one deluding yourself,” she said, unfazed by his behavior, by how close to death she was.

“There’s more darkness in the world than light, Makayla. No amount of wishing is going to change that. Hasn’t the fact that you're here, that you got free from the darkness of your childhood only for it to find you all over again, proven that to you?”

“No, it’s proven to me I'm right. Because you're here. You're my light in the dark of this ordeal.”