TWISTED

CAPTIVE II

CHAPTER FIVE

The war between us is fought in silence, in stares, in the way I refuse his questions and he refuses to let refusal matter.

He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t strike. He dismantles me with restraint. When I refuse food, he eats slowly, deliberately, until the scent coils around me like smoke. When I turn my face from him, he waits until I can’t stand the weight of his gaze burning into my cheek. When I pace the length of the room to prove I won’t sit still, he tracks each step with his eyes, steady as a metronome.

It’s infuriating—his calmness, his refusal to lose control when I spend every hour dangling at the edge of mine.

One night, after hours of my silence, he breaks it with a single line:

“Do you hate me enough to leave, or love me enough to stay?”

The question rattles in my skull long after he’s gone, because the truth is I don’t know anymore. Hate and hunger feel too similar when they circle the same person.

Days pass, measured by his patience and my defiance. But then the boundaries shift, almost imperceptibly.

A book I leave open on the nightstand, he dog-ears without asking.

A glass I shatter in anger, he stoops to pick up the shards before I can cut myself.

Once, when I try to shove past him in the hall, his hand brushes my shoulder to steady me, and the touch burns longer than it should.

None of it is overt. Nothing I can point to as proof. But each gesture lingers, a splinter under my skin.

The worst is the night I wake from a dream I won’t admit aloud—Lorenzo’s face blurred, V’s voice echoing in its place—and find him sitting at the edge of my bed. Not touching. Not speaking. Just watching, as if my restless sleep belongs to him, too.

I should scream. I should tell him to leave. But the words catch in my throat.

Instead, I turn my back to him, curling tight around the ache in my chest. I wait for him to leave. He doesn’t. Hours pass, and his presence becomes a second heartbeat in the room, steady, inevitable.

And for the first time, I wonder if resistance isn’t about surviving him. Maybe it’s about surviving myself.

The fortress around me isn’t built from locks or walls. It’s built from time.

V never rushes. He knows that silence is sharper than a knife, that waiting can wound more deeply than punishment. And the longer I sit in his world, the more my thoughts turn on themselves.

I start to talk to Lorenzo in my head, as though he could hear me from the grave they never let me see. You’d hate me if you knew how much space he takes up now, I whisper to the ceiling. You’d hate me for surviving in his hands.

But the truth burns hotter: sometimes I can’t even remember your voice.

That’s the first fracture. Forgetting.

The second comes when I catch myself timing my breathing to V’s—when he lingers in my doorway at night, and instead of shrinking from the weight of his presence, I match it, like my body is learning the rhythm of a song I swore I wouldn’t listen to.

The third fracture is the hardest to hide. It comes in the form of curiosity. I tell myself I’m studying him, mapping the lines of his face the way one memorizes the terrain of an enemy. But the truth coils tighter than that. I want to understand why he never shouts, why he never strikes, why his punishments are built from patience instead of pain.

One night, I snap.

“Why me?” The words cut the air between us at dinner, brittle and shaking. “Why not someone else? Why not anyone else?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He just wipes the rim of his glass with a napkin, calm as a priest before confession. Then:

“Because no one else fights like you.”

I laugh, but it sounds too close to a sob. “You call this fighting?”

“You haven’t broken yet,” he says simply, as if that’s proof enough.

And I realize, with a shudder I can’t suppress, that he doesn’t just want me obedient. He wants me struggling. He feeds on the resistance as much as I do.

It should make me hate him more. Instead, it makes me question what’s left of me to hate.