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He threw me down onto the living room floor.

“I trusted you. I let you back and THIS is what you do?” He kicked me in the ribs. I heard something pop, or maybe it was just the world coming apart. Kicked again, heel driving into the curve between bone and flesh.

I couldn’t move. My mouth flopped open, fish-gasping. Little noises bubbled out. I couldn’t make them stop.

He crouched down. Grabbed my shirt at the collar, yanked until it tore. The fabric burned against my skin. He hauled me upright, slammed me into the wall.

His voice hissed in my ear. “You think I want this? You think I LIKE this? You make it happen. You make me insane. You want to ruin your own body, fine. I’ll ruin it for you.”

Something hot and wet ran down the inside of my thighs. For a second I thought it was piss, or maybe blood, but my brain was too slow to care about the difference.

My hands weren’t working. Nothing was working.

He let go. I slid down the wall, landed hard. My tailbone sang with agony.

He paced above me, red-faced, breathing like a wild dog. “You want to fuck psychos? You want to have some killer’s baby? You’re filth. Total filth. I can’t believe I wasted my life on you.”

I stared at the floor. The blood drops didn’t make sense. They made patterns. Little galaxies, bursting open in the beige carpet. Stupid. Funny. I almost laughed, but then I vomited instead. It came up pink and sour and sticky. It hurt coming up, it made my ribs crackle.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” I managed. Didn’t even sound like me. I wasn’t in my body anymore. There wasn’t a body. Only pain and blood and the icy dark in his eyes.

Everything slowed. Something inside me felt wrong, like something had ripped or torn, some cord snapping too loose.

He kept hitting. Mostly directing the hits towards my belly. There was a point where the pain became something else, a buzzing, a new silence, a float.

There was so much blood. Everything went white at the edges. Everything. I drifted. The pain faded into numb. I floated above my body, watched the blood pool around me, then everything went black.

When I woke, I was somewhere else. White ceiling tiles blurred above me. Every time I blinked, the world shifted. There was a soft beep, steady and cruel, something monitoring my insides.

I thought, for a moment, maybe I’d died and gotten stuck in a purgatory, a hospital filled with ghosts. Maybe that’s what I deserved. People like me didn’t get to wake up anywhere good.

Something tugged at the veins in my arm. Tape and needles. Every inch of me hurt.

I was awake.

Fuck.

Everything slammed back in. The pain. The beating. Brandon’s voice, choked with hate. “You cheating whore. I’ll ruin it for you.” The world going white at the edges. The sound of my own teeth clicking together, then nothing. Just blankness.

Somebody rustled. A shape moved in the doorway. For a flash, I thought it was him. Brandon. Come to finish what he started, to loom and gloat and tell me how I deserved it.

But it was just a nurse. She wore pink scrubs. Her shoes squeaked. She didn’t bother to smile.

“Oh! You’re up.” She looked at the monitor, then at me. Her eyes flicked over my face. “Do you know your name?”

My voice didn’t work at first. I coughed, tried again. “My name’s Starla.”

She scribbled something on a chart. “Good. No amnesia, then. That’s a relief.” Her pen scraped paper. “Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital?”

“Yep. County hospital. You’ve been out for a while.” She stepped closer. For a moment, her eyes lingered on my bruised cheek, the split lip, the purpled skin where Brandon’s hand had closed around my throat. For a second, she looked so sad I wanted to scream.

“What happened?” I managed.

She set the chart down. Checked the needle in my arm. “Your boyfriend brought you in. Said he found you unconscious at home. He said you’d been jumped and robbed outside the house. Beaten up pretty bad. You’d lost a lot of blood.”

My jaw locked. I looked away from her, stared at the fucked-up ceiling. Of course Brandon lied. Nobody would ever question it. Nobody would go looking for the truth. Just another girl jumped out by the curb, probably her own fault, probably she was drunk or high.