Page 69 of Scarred in Silence

A tear rolls down my cheek. He wrote this for me and never gave it to me. I pick up another one, feeling a rush of warmth in my chest. This one reads:

She is a contradiction. Soft voice with a sharp tongue. Fragile body with a destructive core. A liability disguised as longing.

I’ve studied her long enough to understand the patterns—she doesn’t crave love. She craves chaos. Attention. Pain. She’ll ruin anyone who tries to save her, and maybe that’s why I keep trying. I don’t fear the ruin. I welcome it.

She mistakes my presence for devotion. It isn’t. It’s control. I don’t need her. I simply refuse to let her belong to anyone else.

There’s a difference.

She thinks I see her. I don’t. I see the version I created. And that’s the only one I’ll keep.

—L

These aren’t for me… These are journal entries. My stomach knots at the words he wrote. My curiosity gets the best of me, and I read another one:

She moaned my name like it meant something. Like I hadn’t just branded her hours earlier. Like I hadn’t broken her in every way a person can be broken.

I expected shame in her eyes. Regret. Maybe even fear. But she looked at me like I was her goddamn savior.

She’s mine now. Fully. Completely. Irrevocably.

The fucked-up part? I felt something. Not softness—not love. Just the thrill of having her so far gone she doesn’t even realize she’s drowning.

She offered herself to me like a sacrifice and smiled through the slaughter. And I took it. Every last piece of her. I branded her with a piece of another man, and she accepted it.

She’s not healed. She’s converted. And that’s better.

—I don’t write this for her. I write this so I remember what I’ve done. And how easily I’d do it again.

—L

Tears of sadness roll down my cheeks. He doesn’t love me? My heart aches in my chest. It’s not true. He tells me all the time. Before he branded me, he told me to remember that he loves me. He must not have been thinking clearly when he wrote this. I toss the note to the side and pick up more pictures.

We looked so happy. What happened? I know what happened. Drugs.

I started using more and more to fill the void. The void that is my soul. I can’t get enough. I never will.

I stand up and head into the bathroom, rummaging through his medicine cabinet. Fucking nothing. He took everything.

A sob racks through my body, and I slam the mirrored door shut. I stare at my reflection in the mirror and see nothing but shame.

I pick up a candle and throw it into the glass, shattering my reflection. I look into the shattered mirror and see fragments of myself. I see myself as Elliana once did. Fragmented. No one will love all of me, only parts. Why did I ever think that someone could love all of me? I’m defective.

That’s why my parents never loved me.

I go into the garage and get a golf club. I walk back into the house and destroy every mirror. The mirrors all lie. I’m not the person I see in the mirror. I’m not sad, broken, or full of shame.

I am strong, powerful. Like water.

He even said I have a haunting stare— that’s because I could kill someone if I really wanted to, but I don’t. I just want to be free.

I stare down at all the shards of glass glistening on the floor, and a trail of blood leaves the sole of my foot like a signature painted in crimson. It doesn’t hurt. Nothing could hurt me anymore.

I wonder what it would be like to be water?

27

Lucien