Throne of Sin

The Damage Done

Eve Pov



The dream comes unbidden, the way it always does when I'm too tired to keep the walls up.

I'm ten years old again, lying in the narrow twin bed pushed against the wall of my moms trailer. The mattress smells like mildew and cigarette smoke, and the springs dig into my back no matter how I position myself. The walls are thin—particle board covered in peeling wallpaper with faded roses. There's a crack in the wall beside my bed, right at eye level when I'm lying down. A crack that runs from the baseboard to the ceiling, wide enough to see through if I press my face close.

I learned early not to look through that crack.

But children are curious creatures, even when curiosity cuts.

The trailer park stretched out in rows of rusted metal boxes, each one sagging under the weight of broken dreams and unpaid bills. Ours was number forty-seven, tucked between a couple who screamed at each other every night and an old man who sat on his porch drinking from a paper bag. The grass was patchy and yellow, littered with cigarette butts and broken glass. In summer, the heat made everything shimmer and stink. In winter, the cold seeped through every crack and gap, no matter how many towels my mother stuffed under the doors.

My mother was beautiful once. I've seen the photos—her at eighteen, dark hair glossy, eyes bright with something that looked like hope. My father had gotten her pregnant and then abandoned her, leaving her a young mom. By the time I was ten, that brightness had dulled to something harder, sharper. She was thirty-one but looked older. Too thin, always moving, always restless. She worked at a diner during the day, came home smelling like grease and coffee, and then the men would start arriving.

I didn't understand at first. I was seven when it started, maybe eight. I thought they were friends. Boyfriends. I thought the sounds I heard through the wall were something normal, something all mothers did. It wasn't until I was older—nine, ten— and had seen a few movies that I understood what the exchange meant. The way they'd hand her folded bills before they left. The way she'd count the money at the kitchen table afterward, her hands shaking slightly, her jaw tight.

She was doing what she had to do to keep us fed. To keep the lights on. To keep us from being evicted.

I tell myself that now, as an adult. I tell myself she didn't have a choice.

But the child I was didn't understand choices. She only understood fear.

The first time I looked through the crack, I was nine. I woke to sounds—low voices, the creak of bedsprings, a rhythmic thumping against the wall that made my own bed shake. I pressed my eye to the crack before I could stop myself.

I saw my mother's back, pale in the dim light from the lamp she always left on. A man's hands gripping her hips. The way her spine arched. The sounds she made—not pleasure, not pain, something in between. Something mechanical. Something empty.

I pulled away, my heart hammering, my stomach twisting. I buried my face in my pillow and tried to unhear it, unsee it. But the images were burned into my brain.

After that, I couldn't stop looking.

It became a compulsion. Every time a man arrived—and they came often, two or three times a week—I'd lie in my bed and wait. Wait for the sounds to start. Wait for the moment when curiosity overpowered shame. Then I'd press my face to the crack and watch.

I saw things no child should see. Bodies moving in ways I didn't understand. My mother's face—sometimes blank, sometimes twisted in something that looked like pain but she seemed to crave. Men who were rough with her, who grabbed her hair, who left marks on her skin. Men who whispered things I couldn't hear but made her gasp. Men who treated her like an object, a transaction, something to be used and discarded.

And my mother let them.

More than that—she seemed to need it. The rougher they were, the more alive she looked afterward. Like pain was the only thing that made her feel real.

I didn't have words for what I was witnessing. I didn't understand s*x, didn't understand desire or degradation or the way trauma rewires a person's brain. I only knew that my mother was doing something that looked like it hurt, and she kept doing it anyway.

I learned early that pain and pleasure were tangled together. That bodies were currency. That survival meant doing things that hollowed you out from the inside.

By the time I was eleven, I'd stopped looking through the crack. Not because I'd learned better, but because I didn't need to look anymore. I knew what was happening. I could map it by sound alone—the cadence of voices, the rhythm of movement, the particular quality of my mother's breathing that meant she was close to that edge where pain became something else.

I learned to disappear into myself during those nights. I'd lie in bed with my hands pressed over my ears, humming songs under my breath, imagining I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. A house with thick walls and a door that locked. A bedroom that didn't share a wall with my mother's transactions. A life where I didn't have to count the men who came and went, didn't have to see the bruises on her arms, didn't have to hear her crying in the shower afterward.

She never talked about it. Never acknowledged what I must have known, must have heard. We existed in parallel silences—her shame and my confusion occupying the same small space but never touching.

I left when I was sixteen. We had a fight—I don't even remember what it was about now. Something small that became enormous because we were both so tired of pretending. I screamed at her that I hated her, that I'd never forgive her, that she'd ruined me. She slapped me across the face—the only time she ever hit me—and told me to get out if I was so disgusted by her.

So I did.

I packed a garbage bag with clothes, took the two hundred dollars I'd saved from babysitting jobs, and walked out of that trailer. I slept on friends' couches, worked under the table at a gas station, finished high school by sheer force of will. I haven't spoken to her since.

I don't know if she's still alive. I don't know if she's still in that trailer, still bringing men home, still chasing that edge where pain becomes relief.

I don't let myself wonder.

But the damage was done long before I left. The things I witnessed, the things I learned—they shaped me in ways I'm still discovering. I learned that my body could be a tool, a weapon, a commodity. I learned that pain could be controlled, channeled, used. I learned that numbness was safer than feeling, that hunger was better than satisfaction because satisfaction meant vulnerability.

I learned that I could survive anything if I just turned off the part of me that felt.

That's what I carry with me now. That's what drives me through double shifts and sleepless nights. That's what makes me crave intensity, crave pain, crave the kind of control that comes from surrendering to someone else's will. Because when someone else is in control, I don't have to be. When pain is deliberate, chosen, negotiated—it's not the chaotic, shameful thing I witnessed as a child. It's something I can shape. Something I can own.

The Vault isn't just a job. It's a reclamation. Every scene I witness, every dynamic I observe, every moment of consensual power exchange—it's proof that what I saw as a child doesn't have to define me. That s*x and pain and power can be beautiful when they're chosen. When they're safe. When they're real.

I want to build something better. A place where people like my mother—people who are broken and hungry and desperate—can find what they need without shame. Without degradation. A place with thick walls and locked doors and rules that protect instead of exploit.

That's why I work so hard. Why I save every dollar. Why I push myself past exhaustion.

Because I refuse to end up like her. I refuse to let my hunger consume me the way hers consumed her.

I will build a life that's mine. A life I choose. A life where pain is power, not punishment.

And maybe, somewhere in that life, I'll find what I'm really looking for—someone who sees the hunger in me and doesn't flinch. Someone who can give me the intensity I crave without breaking me the way my mother was broken.

Someone who understands that my need for pain isn't damage.

It's survival.