Page 9

H is touch lingered long after I drove away from Victoria's, each point where they had pressed leaving invisible marks with ghostly throbs as I drove through the empty streets. His scent clung to my clothes, my lips burning from his callous touch.

My hold tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked. What terrified me most wasn't the silhouette in my rearview mirror—that relentless outline of his motorcycle stalking too close. No—what truly unnerved me was how my body had begun reacting before my mind could catch up, responding to him without my permission.

I signaled toward my apartment complex, eyes darting to the mirror, searching for the shape I'd learned too well. The wheel groaned under my white-knuckled grip, eyes widening when I saw nothing.

My heart stuttered as scenarios filled my mind—each more violent than the last, painted in crimson shades I'd grown to know intimately. My stomach turned into that sick, electric pull.

Stop it, Oakley.

I pulled into the driveway and killed the engine. Silence pressed down as I rushed from the car, gravel scraping under my shoes as I jogged to the front door, keys trembling against the lock as I entered, securing a door that might as well have been paper against a man who treated walls like mild suggestions. The metal clattered into the bowl, the clank sharp and lonely in the quiet apartment. Tonight, the room felt different, heavier, as if the corners had learned to whisper his name.

With a sigh, I trudged to the ensuite bathroom, light buzzing to life, harsh against my reflection—pupils wide from adrenaline. My bottom lip was swollen where I'd bitten it, where he'd touched it. Even now, I could feel the phantom pressure of his rough thumb.

The rattle of medication offered hollow comfort as I fumbled with the cap. The bitter pill dissolved slightly on my tongue before I swallowed it down. I'd relied on these since high school, back when anxiety and PCOS were my biggest problems.

Now it was the half-hidden man stalking me like it was his full-time job.

My bedroom felt wrong without light—every corner crept closer, pressing in too tight. Thin ribbons of pale light traced silver paths across my floor. There in the corner stood my lifelong enemy—the full-length mirror draped in a black sheet. For years, it had waited, gathering dust beneath its protective shroud, marking all my failures to face it.

I used to avoid this mirror like it could read my mind. When I was thirteen, I threw the sheet over it and told myself it was because the morning light made it glare. But it wasn't the light. It was the shape of my body. It was the way I couldn't meet my own eyes without wishing I wasn't there at all.

My hands shook as I approached, heart pounding so hard my teeth started chattering. The coarse sheet rasped against my fingers. One quick pull—that was all it would take. Just one moment of courage. But I'd never been brave, had I? I'd spent my whole life running, hiding, making myself smaller to avoid exactly this kind of confrontation.

Do it, Oakley.

The blanket tore away with a sound, ripping a bandage from an old wound. The mirror revealed itself—tall, merciless, unavoidable. My reflection stared back, frightened and fragile with wind-tangled chestnut hair and jade eyes too large on my pale face. My size sixteen clothes still carried dust from Victoria's basement.

I drew a shaky inhale that felt like broken glass in my lungs and gripped the hem of my shirt. The fabric had been my shield for so long, I'd forgotten how to exist without it. My stomach clenched, acid burning the back of my throat as I fought against years of carefully constructed walls.

The shirt came off like peeling away scars, leaving me defenseless. My fingers trembled over the pooled clothing, too afraid to look up and see my full reflection. I kept my eyes down, watching dusty material gather at my feet. My pants followed, kicked away before I could change my mind, before the voice in my head—so much like Mom's—could remind me why I always wore layers. Now only thin pale underwear stood between me and the person in the mirror I'd been avoiding for years.

My eyes blurred with humiliation as they traveled my body, cataloging every imperfection in unforgiving detail. My thighs showed a texture akin to the uneven peel of an orange—dimples and ripples catching the light in all the wrong places, the kind I'd spent years scrubbing raw in the shower, trying to smooth away what was never going to disappear. Beneath my lower belly, reddish-purple stretch marks fanned out. Bruises, scars from endless diets abandoned in tears behind bathroom doors. Each failure left a mark, staining what was already covered in disappointment. Darkened patches clung to my inner thighs and creases—evidence of a body waging war against itself.

Every flaw felt like punishment for a crime I didn't remember committing. But I was still paying for it daily.

"Five things," I whispered to my reflection, voice crumbling. "Just find five things you like about yourself, Oakley." The girl in the mirror stared back, a stranger wearing my face, her collarbones sharp enough to cut, shoulders curved inward like parentheses around an empty space. My therapist's exercise had seemed simple—just five small mercies, five fragments of self-worth to cling to. Dr. Sarah made it sound as easy as breathing.

I hated that part most. The quiet voice asked, If your parents loved you, why are you still like this?

If love could fix me, I would've been happy at twelve.

But I wasn't. Not when birthday balloons taped to my locker returned shredded after lunch. Not when Mom curled beside me on the couch and I flinched because classmates had spent the day whispering that I was disgusting. I had love. I just couldn't feel it through the constant work of sucking my stomach in and pretending that made me easier to look at.

I was the kind of broken that didn't make sense. The kind you didn't get to justify. I wasn't like Nyla, whose adopted Dad tried to kill her until she found her biological father. Or Joslyn, who lost both of her parents at an early age.

My mouth opened, but no words came. Throat closing around empty compliments, each attempted praise dying before it formed. "I..." My vision blurred, pressure building sharply at the corners as I searched desperately for something, anything positive. "My eyes are..." No, they were too revealing.

A sob caught in my chest. "I'm good at..." The words crumbled. Good at what? Hiding? Making myself small enough to disappear?

"Just one thing," I begged the reflection, hands pressing against my stomach as if I could physically hold myself together, feeling each rib beneath my fingers. But every potential compliment felt like a lie, each attempt at self-love corrupted by years of learned hatred, by every sideways glance and whispered comment that had burrowed into me. "P-Please just one thing."

My ragged breathing filled the space, and something warm slipped from my chin to the floor. Not even one thing. I couldn't find a single piece of myself worth loving.

My fingers found my arms, nails scraping across flesh that already knew where to break. My breath hitched in shallow bursts, the room spinning as black spots crept into the corners. The mirror multiplied every flaw, every reason I'd learned to hide, until I was drowning in a hundred failures staring back. In the harsh light, even my reflection seemed desperate to escape me.

A quiet creak of floorboards behind me made my spine snap taut, nerves jolting alive even before my eyes registered his fragmented image in the glass. My legs collapsed, knees striking the carpet as the room lurched violently. Reality tilted and fractured, scattering me into a thousand distorted echoes of myself. I crumpled fully to the floor, lungs seizing shut, my throat closing tighter with every gasp, oxygen slipping further out of reach as panic clawed viciously through my chest, dragging me deeper into chaos.

Bile surged as the room spun. My stomach lurched, but nothing came—just broken sobs I didn't recognize. I dropped to the floor, palms scraping against the carpet, forehead pressed to the cool surface like it could hold me together. The rough fibers bit at my skin, but the pain didn't help. Something tore out of me—raw and broken, too sharp to swallow. I pressed my hands to my ears, trying to block it out, but it kept pouring out like it had nowhere else to go.

My mind racked for what my court-ordered therapist told me about grounding myself. Five things I could see—moonlight cutting the floor, my jittering hands, the unforgiving mirror, his mask, and the bat. Each one grounding, but none of them enough.

Four blurred sensations—carpet scraped my palms, tears dripped down my cheeks, gasps breaking into ragged pieces. His bat tapped the floor in a steady rhythm, the air conditioner humming a hollow whisper—each dragging me further into panic, reality unraveling faster with every second.

My chest constricted, each gasp sharp and shallow, barely enough to sustain me. My vision tunneled, edges dimming too quickly to grasp. My attempts to ground myself failed; everything slipped—my body, the floor beneath me, my sense of place. Nothing held firm. Nothing stayed.

This was supposed to help. Why wasn't it working? Why couldn't I ever help myself?

Three things I could hear. The floor shifting faintly under his weight. The quiet rustle of his sleeve as he adjusted. And my own breathing, sharp and uneven, echoing in my head until it swallowed everything else. I gripped each one, desperate to stay present, to keep from slipping under.

He moved without warning, hand shooting toward my face.

My body reacted before my mind caught up. I scrambled backward, spine slamming into the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth. A thin, cracked sound escaped—raw, involuntary. My chest hammered, heart slamming against my ribs like it wanted out.

He stopped inches from me, hand suspended mid-air, unblinking eyes locked onto mine.

"Don't," I choked out, "Please."

He didn't pull away. Didn't move. Every muscle remained tight, ready to snap forward at the smallest provocation. His bare fingers curled slightly, hovering so close I felt the heat radiating from his skin. The tension stretched taut between us, almost painful in its intensity. My pulse roared through my ears, vision narrowing down to him—only him, waiting to see which boundary he'd break next.

Two things I could smell. The sharp musk of worn leather—familiar, thick, impossible to ignore. It had followed me through rooms, pressed into doorways, and clung to everything he touched. I could taste it at the back of my throat. The second was metal. Cold. Faint, but there. It hit somewhere deep, pulling memories forward faster than I could shove them back.

One thing I could taste—the salt from my tears, bitter and sharp. But it wasn't just salt. It was powerlessness, a taste I'd learned too young and carried too long.

My senses returned slowly, dragging me back piece by piece. The room steadied, leaving behind a different kind of unease—here I was, nearly naked in front of V.

My fingers wouldn't obey as I tried to push myself up from the floor. My legs felt like water, muscles trembling from the aftermath of the panic attack. And he just stood there, watching me stitch myself back together.

"V," my arms wrapped instinctively around my middle, trying to hold together pieces that felt scattered across the floor. "You broke in." A statement, not a question. "Again." Each word broke on my tongue, too thin to hold up—how do you tell a hurricane not to destroy you when you're already in its eye?

His eyes locked onto me, unblinking. In the dim light, they looked almost liquid, like spilled ink searching for something to stain. My chest, just beginning to steady, kicked back into its frantic pace under that penetrating stare.

"What happened?" The question was deceptively gentle but carried that underlying titanium that made my spine straighten despite itself.

"P-Panic attack."

"Panic?" His head tilted, not understanding what it was.

I buried my face in my hands, peering through my fingers like a child hiding from monsters—except the monster was real, and hiding only seemed to draw him closer. "You can't keep breaking in."

He held up something that caught the moonlight like a broken promise—a key. My key. "You stole my key?"

"Borrowed," he corrected.

His dark eyes traveled down my body, lingering on places that made heat bloom at my lack of clothes. There was something different in his gaze—not judgment. But something that made me want to run and stay perfectly still all at once.

"I thought you went back to Hellbound." My words wavered, still thick from crying. Aftershocks of fear made my hands tremble as I wiped dampness from my cheeks. The salt stung against nail marks I didn't remember making.

"I always come back here at night." My entire body tensed at his unapologetic confession.

"W-While I'm asleep?"

Those black eyes pinned me in place, heavy with unspoken meaning. How many nights? How many times had I laid here, thinking I was alone, while he watched from the foot of my bed? My medication always puts me in a deep sleep. The thought should have unsettled me more than it did, but my nerves were too frayed to process another wave of alarm.

In three fluid strides, he closed the distance between us. My back hit the mirror as he caged me in, one hand pressed against the glass beside my head. The bat rested against my hip—not threatening, but present, a reminder of what he was capable of. My lungs seized, body still hypersensitive from the crash. Every point of almost-contact between us buzzed like live wires.

"You're hurting." Frustration edged his voice as the hand against the mirror curled into a tight fist, knuckles going pale. "But there's no blood." Anger flashed in his eyes—not at me, but at his own inability to solve this without drawing blood, the only language he truly spoke. The bat stayed steady at his side, rigid with unspent impulse.

A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat. Of course that's how he'd see it—pain quantified in drops of red, measured in bruises and broken bones. How could I explain that some wounds didn't bleed, that sometimes the deepest hurts were the ones that left no visible marks?

"I-it's nothing," I stammered, shrinking beneath his stare. The mirror pressed cold against my back, holding me in place. Dozens of distorted versions of us reflected back—predator and prey, protector and protected, nightmare and dream. "Don't... don't worry about—" My voice failed, gaze dropping to the floor. "I'm fine."

My stomach twisted hard. Pressure climbed fast behind my ribs, nausea curling up my throat?—

Then glass exploded beside my ear.

The impact knocked everything out of me, sharp and deafening. I flinched hard as shards burst outward, slicing the air, raining down in sharp flashes that caught in my hair and scattered across my arms. Tiny fragments pricked my skin like frozen needles, each one leaving a faint sting. The scent of iron flooded the space, sharp and sickening. Something bit into my ankle—hot, sudden—but I barely felt it over the noise in my chest. The wall behind me stuttered. My reflection shattered across the floor, pieces thrown wide, none of them looking back the same.

Scarlet streaks from his torn knuckles dripped steadily, but V remained motionless. His chest, usually so controlled, rose and fell slightly faster beneath his vented shield.

"Tell me," his voice was cold, "what you like about yourself."

I blinked rapidly, trying to process the shift. "W-what?"

His fingers flexed against the wall beside my head. Red lines smeared across the mirror from his knuckles, jagged and unforgiving. "Answer."

"I..." My mind went blank, fear rising in my throat. The way he loomed over me made it impossible to think past the thunder of my own heart. "I don't... I can't..."

"You can't think of anything?" His other hand remained on the bat at my hip, a heavy reminder of how trapped I was, how completely he controlled this moment.

"V, your hand—" He cut me off with a sharp movement, pressing closer until I felt the rough fabric of his mask near my temple, his breath ghosting across my skin through its vents.

"Answer." The command vibrated through me, his voice dropping lower, heavier. "What do you like about yourself?"

Caught between the splintered glass and the man who broke it, I felt my vision swim again. How could I tell him there was nothing? That every morning I woke up loathing what I saw? The words stuck in my throat like glass shards.

The pressure of saying something real felt worse than the clench of his hand.

"I... I don't..." My voice cracked along old lines, fingers nervously twisting at nothing, desperate to shield myself from his stare. A warm droplet hit my bare foot, and I jerked away, nausea clawing sharply up my throat. Blood—no, not now, please. Panic fluttered rapidly in my chest. "Maybe," I whispered weakly, trying not to look down again. "Maybe my hands, for?—"

The bat clattered to the floor, his hand shot to my hair, forcing my head back until my neck strained under the pressure. "Try again." His words held no room for argument, no space for the lies I'd been telling myself since childhood.

His thumb pressed harder against my chin, tilting my face up until I had no choice but to meet his gaze. Those dark eyes studied me, dissecting every micro-expression that crossed my face, reading stories written in trembles and tears.

I tried to swallow past the lump in my throat, my chest so tight it felt like my ribs were slowly collapsing inward.

"I can't..." The words fell apart as they left me. "I can't think when you're?—"

He remained silent, but his thumb brushed away a tear. The gesture felt like a threat, a reminder of how easily he could hurt me if he wanted to–how he was hurting me–how completely he controlled this moment.

When I still couldn't speak, his other hand finally released my hair, only to grab my face with bruising force. A small, frightened squeak escaped me as he forced me to look directly at him. The mask was inches from my face now, those dark eyes seeming to see straight through the carefully constructed walls I'd built around my self-hatred, through years of avoiding mirrors and wearing clothes too big to feel.

He towered over my collapsed form on the floor, eyes unreadable as they tracked every tremor in my body. Still folded on the carpet, body curled protectively, I watched him through blurred eyes as he reached down. Then, in one fluid motion, he pulled me upright. The sudden movement made me stumble, my hands instinctively bracing against his cut to keep my balance.

He held me suspended—barely touching the floor, jaw in his grip, eyes tracking every shiver like it was a code he needed to break. Standing before him nearly naked, with nothing but thin underwear shielding me, I felt painfully vulnerable beneath his scrutiny.

His grip on my jaw finally loosened, but instead of letting go, his thumb dragged across the heat left by my tears. The gesture felt more like a promise than comfort, his fingers leaving trails of fire across my face, marking territories only he was allowed to explore.

Just as suddenly as he'd grabbed me, he released me. Without his support, I stumbled back until my legs hit the bed, the mattress catching me like an afterthought. He bent down, retrieving the bat before straightening to his full height. The movement was pure predator—efficient, controlled, threatening in its grace. Stains from his knuckles traced dark patterns down the wood.

The last thing I saw before he vanished into the hallway was that mask, still turned toward me in a way that made it clear—this was only the beginning. He'd seen something in my reflection that I couldn't face, and V wasn't a man who left unfinished business. Whatever he'd started tonight would continue until he decided it was done, until he'd forced me to see whatever he saw in me.

I sank onto the bed, the ghost of his hands lingered on me—my jaw, my scalp, my cheek. My fingers traced where his had been. Sleep wouldn't come easily tonight, not with the weight of his unspoken intentions hanging in the air.

Maybe that was the real horror—he saw me more clearly than I ever had. Maybe I was just glass waiting for him to break. Maybe I didn't hate the mirror. Maybe I hated that it looked like him.

I touched my throat where his grip had been, feeling a flutter beneath my body that remembered his grip too well. Tomorrow, I'd have to face what was left in that mirror—his damage, and mine. Nothing whole. Nothing untouched.

But maybe that was his point—some things had to break first, just to see if they were worth putting back together.