Chapter 23
908 Words
✨ Quiet Changes.✨
Flora Pov
The next morning found Flora still in her room.
She had woken before the light crept through the thin curtains, heart already racing as if it had been running all night. For a long while she lay very still, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house breathe around her.
Nothing had changed.
She repeated it silently, like a prayer.
Yet her cheeks still felt warm.
The memory came without warning — the way his hands had steadied her, the startled softness in his eyes, the brief, impossible closeness of another heartbeat against her own. She squeezed her eyes shut, but it only sharpened the image.
Flora rolled onto her side and pressed her face into the pillow.
Why had he done that? kissed her forehead.
She wasn’t like that. She had never been like that.
Slowly, carefully, she sat up. The room looked the same as always: the narrow bed, the small table by the window, the crack in the wall she’d traced a hundred times when she couldn’t sleep. Safe. Familiar.
Unchanged.
She dressed in silence, hands trembling just enough to annoy her. When she passed the mirror, she stopped.
Her mouth.
She leaned closer, searching for some sign — a bruise, a mark, anything to prove it had really happened. There was nothing. Only her own reflection, pale and uncertain.
Good, she thought. No one will know.
She moved through the morning as if rehearsed, folding blankets, straightening books, doing all the small things that made her feel in control. But every quiet moment betrayed her.
When her fingers brushed her collarbone, she remembered his touch.
When she heard footsteps in the hall, her breath caught before she remembered where she was.
She sat on the edge of the bed and hugged her arms around herself, staring at the floor.
It had been a mistake.
It had to be.
And yet — when she closed her eyes — she could still feel the way the world had gone strangely soft around him, the way fear had loosened its grip for just one breath.
That was the part that frightened her most.
By the time she finally stood and went to face the day, her mask was firmly in place.
Careful. Quiet. Unchanged.
She lift her fingers to her lips, just once, barely touching them.
And whisper his name into the quiet again, before she could stop herself.
For a long time after the house had gone quiet, Flora stood alone in her room and did nothing.
Then, slowly, as if afraid the walls might be watching, she reached for the fastening of her dress.
The fabric slid down her shoulders and pooled at her feet.
She had never really looked at herself before.
Not like this.
She faced the narrow mirror by the window and hesitated, breath shallow, arms folded loosely across her chest. The girl staring back at her seemed like a stranger — too thin, too careful, eyes always waiting for something to go wrong.
She let her arms fall.
Her skin caught the dim light, a warm brown softened by shadow. She traced her own reflection with her eyes, noticing things she had never allowed herself to notice — the gentle slope of her shoulders, the curve of her waist, the long line of her legs.
She leaned closer.
Her face first.
The soft roundness of her cheeks. The faint scar near her jaw she’d almost forgotten was there. Her mouth, still a little swollen from biting it too hard earlier, still remembering something she refused to name.
Her hair spilled loose down her back, darker than the room, tangled where she had never learned how to be gentle with it.
She swallowed.
Then her gaze drifted lower.
That was when she saw them.
The marks.
Faint now, but still there if you knew how to look — pale lines across her ribs, a darker bruise near her hip, the ghost of fingerprints that had once burned against her skin.
Evidence of hands that had never been kind.
Trump’s hands.
Her own fingers lifted without thinking. She traced one mark, then another, carefully, as if touching glass.
She had learned every one of them by pain.
Now she learned them by sight.
A strange thought slipped into her mind before she could stop it.
Nasir.
She closed her eyes.
What would he think if he saw this?
If he saw the places she had been broken and stitched back together in silence?
Would his eyes soften?
Would he look away?
Would he ask?
The idea made her chest ache.
She imagined him standing there, quiet as always, looking at her not with judgment, not with ownership — just seeing her.
The thought both warmed and terrified her.
Flora wrapped her arms around herself and stepped back from the mirror.
She did not hate what she saw.
That surprised her most.
For the first time, she did not see only damage.
She saw survival.
She picked up her dress and pulled it back over her shoulders, smoothing the fabric into place, hiding everything again.
But something had shifted.
As she lay down on her bed, staring into the dark, her hand rested lightly over her ribs, where the marks slept beneath her skin.
And for the first time in her life, she wondered
— not what had been done to her…
…but what she might still become.
- Writer
