Page 11 of Peak Cruelty

Marlowe

T he door slammed shut like punctuation.

I don’t think about how long it will be before he comes back. Counting is how it starts—the slow math of survival, then bargaining, then breaking.

And I’m not breaking.

Not for him.

The restraints are still tight. Not painful. Not kind. Just…engineered. Like everything else in this room.

There’s no clock, but the time bleeds out slow. The way it does in hospitals. Or funerals. Or marriages you know are ending but no one says it yet.

I shift slightly. The leather bites back.

It could be worse. I could be dead.

He thinks fear is the thing that’ll break me.

That’s the part that scares me.

We could be here a long time.

I lie still and let the room settle. It’s too clean. The kind of clean that means either bleach or guilt. Possibly both.

It makes you wonder what happened before.

He said I had until tomorrow.

That’s generous.

It’s also a trap.

I know better than to believe in deadlines.

This isn’t about time.

It’s bait.

And I’ve chewed through worse.

My shoulders ache from holding still too long. There’s a line of sweat crawling down my back, slow as doubt. I ignore it. Let the discomfort sharpen the edges.

The room is made for unraveling. There’s nothing to occupy your thoughts. No clocks. No mirrors. Just the sound of your own breath getting slower as your thoughts start circling the drain.

He’s not the first man who thought silence would do the trick.

He won’t be the last.

They always think stillness means surrender.

That if you’re quiet, you’re cornered.

But I learned young: some cages don’t need locks.

Just someone who believes they know better.

I was twenty-two. He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to. Just said my name as though it was a warning label, and suddenly I wasn’t a person—I was a hazard. I feel it now, the echo of it, low and tight in my chest. Like someone’s holding a match near a gas leak.

That’s what happens when the wrong man decides he’s right about who you are.

I close my eyes—not to rest, but to think. Harder. Past the panic. Past the question of where I am or what happens next.

What matters is what he knows.

Ava.

I picture her in the kitchen this morning—feet bare, dragging her stuffed rabbit by the ear, asking if monsters drink coffee, too. I said no. I lied. Of course I lied.

It’s not the first lie I’ve traded. It won’t be the last.

That’s what he’s betting on. That I’ll confess—just to make it stop.

They always do. That’s how it starts—your name, your fault.

I’ve been married. I’ve sat through seven years of cold silences and sharp critiques that cut deeper than fists. I’ve had men press their power into me, word by word, until I couldn’t tell the difference between shame and obedience.

This?

This isn’t new. The shape’s different. The weight’s the same.

It’s just the stakes that have changed.

He wants me to sit here and stew. To crack under the weight of waiting.

But I’ve done harder time than this—in nicer rooms.

He wants a confession. For what, I haven’t figured out.

But it’s not like I’m dealing with a sane or rational man.

A confession would be easy. I could build him one from the bones of better lies—polished, heartfelt. The kind that makes monsters cry.

But I don’t think it’s the truth he’s after.

It’s permission.

That’s the danger.

He wants to believe the worst of me. Because it means he’s right. And people like him? They fall apart when the world refuses to cooperate.

And yet here we are.

I hear the ocean—distant, steady and something in me shifts.

It’s not that I think there’s a way out of this.

Escape’s a fantasy.

But endings?

Endings I know how to write.