The floor is the first thing that greets me.
Not gently, but cold and unforgiving.
Stone scrapes my cheek as my body hits it, thrown forward with enough force to rattle my teeth and knock the air clean out of my lungs. Pain blooms—sharp, immediate—and before I can even gasp, the doors slam shut behind me with a deafening crack.
The sound echoes too much like memory.
Too much like childhood.
Darkness swallows me whole.
For a second—just a second—I’m eight again. Small and barefoot.
Standing in a long marble hallway that smells of incense and cold authority. My father’s shadow stretching across the walls like a monster in the dark.
He never hit me back then.
He never needed to.
Not when he had other ways to break a child.
He used to lock me up in rooms just like this—alone in sile
