Broken Doll (Willow Heights Prep Academy: The Exile #4)

by Selena .

Not when he’s here, when he can find me so easily, come back for me. I might act tough, but inside… The screams I can’t force out in my nightmares are playing on repeat, the time loop I never visit spinning at breakneck speed.

I still feel small and helpless inside the huge monster. I’ll never feel safe again. When I get to Mr. D’s, I sit in the garage and punch the steering wheel until my knuckles bleed, and for the first time since it happened, I let myself cry.

I don’t argue. I remember coming back, parking the truck, closing the garage to put one more wall between me and Royal. But he found me, anyway. And now he found Mr. D, and I’m not safe here, either. There’s nowhere safe.

He followed me here,” I repeat, as if just realizing it, as if saying it again will make it untrue, make him contradict me. Panic rises in my voice.

Day by day, I feel myself emerge, not the girl I used to be or the one Mr. D made but someone else, someone whose raw edges are sealed over with scar tissue, whose broken pieces at least resemble a human.

But it whispers that a future of nightmares is still a future, that though my heart and body have been decimated in ways there’s no going back from, even those missing a soul can keep breathing. Even a mutilated, broken thing can find the sun.

I remember what it was like to have that much confidence in my body, to know it would take care of me, and my chest aches. Sooner or later, we all realize the false sense of security that lends us, when someone bigger and stronger and better comes along and strips it all away.

I nod, swallowing past the lump forming, trying to choke off my words. Even if Blue can’t help, even if this doesn’t help, I can’t hold onto it anymore. There’s no purpose, no motive in telling. It’s just spilling out like the water from the swimming hole when it rains and the banks can’t contain it all anymore.

My focus is sharper than the razor blade. Nothing else matters. I make my way up my arm, each stroke one of pure, potent life. For one moment and then a hundred, I can barely breathe with the rawness of this edge I’ve found, a barely perceptible line between reality and illusion, between life and death, pain and bliss. I hold onto it, feeling my way along, tiptoeing along the tightrope toward some ending I can’t see and that doesn’t matter.

For the first time in months, something matters. For these sacred minutes, as I kneel on the faded linoleum of a stuffy, windowless bathroom on the wrong side of Faulkner, I have unwavering control of my mind in this world where nothing is under my control, and I live again.

But he didn’t give me time to get frigid, to get weird about sex. I’ve been having it since the day after the assault. I’m not scared of sex, of touch, of anything. I am an undisturbed pond—still, shallow, reflective. I show him what he wants to see.

He took everything, even my voice, my ability to submit, my ability to fight. I want to scream with frustration that after all that, somehow, it still wasn’t enough to satisfy him.

I can’t be fixed,” Royal says, his dark gaze rising to mine.

I endured things no one should endure. I walked through hell, and I made it back, if not quite alive. If there’s a merciful god, I should get to feel nothing when I look into the devil’s eyes. I fucking earned it.

“I can’t, either,” I say, my throat tight. “You made sure of that.”

It’s his need that will kill me. Because now I’m empty, but he still needs more. He’s still here, demanding more, and I have nothing to give him but tears. I’m as hollow and soulless as he is.

“No,” I say. “I don’t care about her, or you, or if you’re lying through your teeth. I could matter to you, or the whole town, or no one, and it wouldn’t make a difference. I don’t matter to me.”

Even I don’t know when he’ll step on a grenade. I can’t predict my reactions, can’t control my hollowness like he can. I don’t know when I’ll be totally numb and calm, and when I’ll burst into uncontrollable rage or sobs. I just know that when I’m still, when no one is walking around the craters inside my soul, there are less explosions.

You have no idea what it’s like to be tied up, completely helpless, while someone takes every part of you until there’s nothing left, not even your soul.”

You have no idea what it’s like to have no choice in how your body responds, and to have it mocked and used against you. You don’t know the shame of hearing them fucking reveling in it.

You don’t know what it’s like to have people touch you without your permission, to not even know who’s been inside you and done the most intimate act possible to you, how many of them, who they are, who has violated you in a way that you will never come back from, even if you find out it was just three of them instead of ten. It doesn’t fucking matter, Royal. Don’t you get that? It’s too late. Knowing the truth doesn’t change what I experienced that night.” “I know.”

I like dangerous guys with tattoos who can rock my world and wreck my soul.

In that one breath, one heartbeat, the space between heartbeats where life is measured and decided, I’m weightless. I’m lost and I’m found, I’m destroyed and renewed, I’m insignificant and infinite. I am his, and I am free.

“What the fuck, Royal?” I snap. “If someone’s trying to kill you, you don’t fucking encourage them!”

He grabs my face between his hands and pulls me in, kissing me hard on the mouth. “What the fuck?” Royal yanks me back. “If you want me to resist murdering your friends, then they need to keep their hands off you.”

My mother wasn’t lying. And I didn’t fuck my cousin.