Fractured

The Warden

Christina’s pen didn’t move for a long time. She sat there in her beige cardigan, eyes steady, waiting for me to c***k myself open again.

“Tell me about home,” she said at last.

The word landed like a punchline to a joke I didn’t get.

Home.

I leaned back into the too-soft leather couch, staring just over her shoulder at the bookshelf lined with neatly arranged self-help titles. “You mean where I grew up, or where I actually lived?”

Her head tilted. “Are they different?”

I smirked. “Very.”

The first picture that came to mind was the house, tidy enough to be a clean room scientist could use. Mom was obsessed with keeping a fresh, clean house. Can’t have the in-laws walk in and have something to say. The couch in the living room was the kind you weren’t actually allowed to sit on unless it was Christmas. Everything had a place. Even me. Especially me.

“My dad was… strict,” I began, which felt like calling a hurricane ‘windy.’ “Rules for everything. How to talk. How to sit. How many seconds I could be in the bathroom before he knocked.”

Christina raised an eyebrow.

“They called him ‘The Warden’ at the prison,” I explained. “I called him that too, not to his face, obviously. But it fit."

"Your Father was an actual Warden?" Christina asked, obviously confused.

"Yes. He worked there my whole life, and I think he brought the job home.”

I remembered those dinners: me, elbows perfectly tucked in, nodding at the right beats while he told stories about control. How to get a confession without laying a hand on someone. How to keep men in line by finding their weak spots. How to break a person subtly in a way they wouldn't realize till they were completely broken.

It would take me years to understand he’d been running experiments on me the whole time.

“I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere unless it was supervised,” I said. “Church trips. School functions. The occasional trips to the movies if Mom begged. Never at night. Ever.”

Christina tapped her pen lightly against the pad. “Why not?”

I laughed, short and sharp. “Because night is when bad things happen. That was his logic. And I believed him, until I didn’t. How twisted is that? To create the monster under my bed just to maintain control”

The first time I pushed my bedroom window up in the dark, my heart was a jackhammer in my chest. I eased one leg over the sill, then the other, and dropped into the cool night air. I didn’t even care where I was going; the point was just that I was going.

“Once I started breaking curfew, it was like… I could breathe,” I told her. “Like there was this whole world outside the Warden’s rules, and I’d been stupid not to see it before.”

That world smelled like cigarette smoke and cheap cologne, and it tasted like whatever burned the back of my throat in plastic cups.

I remembered my first ‘party’, if you could call it that. Six of us crammed into Jude’s cousin’s flat, the windows fogged, a Bluetooth speaker buzzing against the table. Someone’s older brother rolled joints like he was auditioning for a world record. I took my first puff and hacked like a seventy-year-old smoker, but no one cared. I laughed when everyone else laughed. I pretended I knew the lyrics.

“I was seventeen. Everyone else already knew how to be cool. I just… copied them,” I said. “I wore this short black skirt I had to roll at the waistband because it was technically for church. Took my first drag and thought, Oh. This is why people break the rules.”

Christina finally started scribbling. I fought the urge to lean forward and peek.

“From then on,” I said, “I was either sneaking out or finding excuses to stay out. I told myself it was just teenage fun, but I think… I was looking for someone to tell me I was more than just the Warden’s daughter. Someone worthy of affection.”

Someone did. Too many someones.

I stared at the pattern in the office carpet for a moment before I spoke again. “The thing about growing up caged is… you don’t recognize predators. You think they’re rescuers. You mistake the hand pulling you out for the one that’s going to hold you up.”

Her gaze softened. “And Tammy was the first?”

I nodded. “The first I thought mattered. The first I let matter.”

We sat in silence for a beat. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was heavy, the kind of quiet that asks you to keep going even if you don’t want to.

“After Tammy,” I said, “I wasn’t the same. I didn’t even try to be. I thought, fine, if I’m already ruined, I might as well lean into it. So I did. Parties. Drugs. Random guys. Whatever made me feel… alive for more than ten seconds at a time.”

A shadow crossed Christina’s face. Not judgment, something quieter. Maybe understanding.

I crossed my legs tighter. “It’s not like I didn’t have warnings. Friends told me to slow down. My mom caught me coming home high once and just… cried. But the Warden? He just said, ‘Figures. Eat.’”

Christina’s pen stilled. “Figures. Eat?”

“Yeah. Like I’d finally confirmed whatever theory he’d been building my whole life. That I was weak. That I’d always fail. Plus I had begun to look shriveled then hence ‘eat’. That’s when I stopped even pretending I cared about being ‘good.’”

The words hung there, sour and stale. I swallowed them down with the same determination I used to take shots.

I kept going. “And that’s when I met Nero.”

The name left my mouth like the first drag of something dangerous.

I gave a humorless smile. “If Tammy was a bad idea, Nero was a loaded gun I handed to myself.”

Christina leaned forward slightly. “What was it about him?”

“Everything. And nothing. He was older, dangerous, charming when he wanted to be. I thought he saw me. But looking back, I think he saw my cracks and just… decided to widen them.”

Her pen hovered midair. She didn’t push. She knew I’d get there in my own time.

I glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes left. I could've ruined her afternoon with the details if I wanted, but I chose to save that nugget for later