Page 25

I needed to feel something other than terror, something other than the certainty that I was going to die here, buried alive.

My mind spun faster, circling back to every mistake, every wrong turn—Brandon, my father, the group homes, trusting the wrong people, letting myself believe in hope. Hope was a disease, a fever, a hallucination. It got you killed.

My breathing was too loud, so I tried to hold it, but then my lungs spasmed and I gasped, choking on nothing. My breaths were coming out unevenly and painfully. I scratched at my scalp and rocked back and forth.

A sound—just a whisper, no, only my heart beating against bone, echoing back at me. But my skin prickled.

I imagined hands reaching up from the dirt, bony and pale, my mother’s hands, Brandon’s hands, my father’s hands, all of them clawing at my ankles, dragging me down, down, down.

The panic rose higher, swallowing me whole. My breath came in shallow gasps. My fingers shook so badly I couldn’t control them. I closed my hands into fists and pounded them against the earth, but all it did was make the silence louder, more complete.

I pressed my forehead to the wall, feeling the cold seep into my skull. I tried to think of something else. I tried to remember happy things, good things, but my mind wouldn’t cooperate.

It kept spinning, faster and faster, until everything blurred together—the blood on the floorboards, my mother’s broken voice, the way Brandon smiled before he hit me, the way Malakar’s hands felt around my throat, the sound of the chain, the rattle, the rattle, the rattle⁠—

Stop. Stop it. Breathe.

The dark wasn’t just a void, it was a thing, a presence, pressing into me from all sides. I felt it pushing inside my skin, into my mouth, gushing through my veins. My thoughts weren’t my own. I heard whispers—at first distant, then closer, louder, until I couldn’t tell if they were memories or hallucinations.

You killed me, Starla. You did this.

No, no, I didn’t, I didn’t, I tried to help.

But her voice didn’t care. It wormed into my skull, soft and insistent, looping over and over, a nightmare I couldn’t wake from.

I started to rock, knees pulled tight to my chest. The motion helped a little. It made me feel like a child again, hiding in a closet, waiting for the shouting to stop, for the screams to fade.

But there was no one to come find me, no one to wipe my tears and tell me it would be okay. It wouldn’t be okay. It would never be okay.

My voice was hoarse. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” I lied, over and over, but I knew I wasn’t.

A wave of dizziness hit me. I pressed my forehead to my knees, squeezed my eyes shut. I counted the breaths again but I kept losing track, my thoughts scattering like cockroaches when the light came.

I saw shapes moving in the dark—faces forming in the dirt, eyes opening and closing in the walls. They whispered to me, voices slithering through the silence.

You’re already dead, Starla.

You were dead the moment you left him.

You were dead the moment you turned your father in.

You were dead the moment you crawled out of the lake and left your mother behind.

The hole wasn’t empty anymore. It was crowded with the ghosts of everyone I’d ever failed. My mother sat beside me, her dress soaked and clinging, hair swirling around her face. She reached for me, her fingers dripping lake water, and I recoiled, but she only smiled.

“It’s better here, Starla,” she whispered. “The dark is quiet. The dark is kind. No one hurts you in the dark.”

I shook my head. “You’re not real. You’re dead. You left me.”

She laughed. “You left me first. You turned him in. You broke us. Now you’re alone. Now you see what it’s like.”

I pressed my fists to my ears, humming to drown her out, but the walls were closing in. The air was running out. My chest felt crushed, my lungs too small. I tried to scream again but only managed a sob.

I saw visions of all the women my father raped and butchered. Some were headless. Some were missing limbs. Some had all their body parts but were bruised and bloodied.

Some were opening their mouth to scream, but no sound would come out. Their eyes were so hollow, so dead, and eventually would morph into black holes.

I curled tighter, wishing I could disappear into the earth, dissolve into bones and roots and nothingness.