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Crumpled on the floor.

Her face pale.

Her body still.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

“This door,” I murmur, voice low, steady, fingertips brushing the cold metal. The chill bites into my skin, sharp and grounding. This door.

“I used to think it was alive,” I whisper, letting the words hang there, barely a breath. “Like it could feel. Like it knew what waited on the other side. Like it wanted me to suffer. It fed off my despair.”

When I was little, I thought it was cursed. Not the kind from fairy tales. The kind you can’t break. Made of wood and rust and hate. I never understood how something so plain could terrify me. But I do now.

“It wasn’t the door that was built to destroy me,” I say. “It was the men who walked through it.”

My words slice through the quiet, jagged as broken glass.

A low, wheezing sound escapes him from behind me. Gurgling. Strangled. The kind of noise that doesn’t even try to be human. His throat works, useless and desperate, like he’s reaching for words he no longer deserves.

I turn to him slowly, letting silence stretch tight between us.

My hand still hovers above the knob, inches from the memory that lives behind it. It pulses cold through my bones.

“Do you know what this room is to me, Father?” My voice stays calm, like poison in still water. “It’s not just where Mother rots in the dark.”

I take a step closer to the door, let my fingers trace the splintered frame.

“This room, your room, is where you buried something else.”

I glance over my shoulder. “My innocence.”

His eyes go wide, bulging with a kind of horror I wish I could bottle and drink.

I step back from the cellar and toward him, one foot at a time, every step dragging the past up by its hair.

“I used to wonder why it always had to be down there. Why you and your brothers in Christ chose the dark. Was it the silence? The cold? Did the dirt make it feel holy, like you could bury your sins before they ever had to be seen?”

My voice trembles at the edge, but I don’t let it fall. I won’t give him that.

“You didn’t even have the decency to let me cry into my own pillow.”

I stop in front of him. I want him to feel the stillness. To feel me.

“Oh wait,” I say, tilting my head, voice like a blade.

“I forgot. You did. Just once.”

His face reddens, veins bulging like the roots of some bloated, rotted tree. His mouth opens, useless and wet, as if he’s going to speak, going to explain, going to beg. But all that escapes is a guttural grunt, thick and choking, smothered by his own weakness.

“I remember that night,” I hiss, stepping in close enough to feel his rancid breath ghost against my face. “The last time you tried to take from me.”

His eyes flick toward mine, panicked now.

“You thought I was asleep. Thought you could just slip into my bed like always, whispering your filth like scripture.” My voice cuts like ice. “But I woke up, didn’t I? I saw your face, really saw it, for the first time. You didn’t look like God’s soldier. You looked like a man about to be hunted.”

I pace in front of him, my boots thudding against the floor with each step.