The door clicked shut behind her.
A portly man advanced, eyes glinting. “So this is the woman Soren kept for five years. Tender indeed. He’s ruined you already—why pretend to be pure for me?”
Her scream went nowhere. The lock held.
He shoved her onto the bed, tearing at her dress. The wound on her back ripped open, white-hot pain shooting through her. She thought she’d learned to live with agony—until the moment his weight crushed down and a sob forced itself past her teeth.
Delirium dragged her under. She was twelve again, clutching her mother’s hand as they bent over a starving boy collapsed by the roadside.
Mom, he’s so pitiful. Let’s take him home.
She had pulled him to his feet, dabbing blood from his face with her handkerchief, never minding the stains on her pink princess dress.
Her father agreed, eventually, to sponsor the boy. Soren.
She had given him her lucky bear. With this, you’ll be as lucky as me.
But he’d refused to stay. When he left, she chased him until she fell, knees bloodied—he never turned back.
---
Years later, her father’s money had made him the new darling of Kingsport. Marriage offers piled at his door, but he courted her obsessively: renting every city billboard for ninety-nine days of proposals, planting a thousand and one roses in Bulgaria, climbing three thousand steps to pray for her safety.
Bleeding from the effort, he had pressed a string of heirloom rosary onto her head.
“Linnea, I love you. I’d die for you.”
She had believed him. Loved him. Married him.
And tonight, he had sold her.
---
After the man was finished, she stumbled to the bathroom, scrubbing at her skin until it burned—but she couldn’t wash the violation away.
Her reflection was a ghost: hollow eyes, wet cheeks, wrists marked with the pale ridges of old suicide attempts.
“Why?” she whispered, voice breaking. “Why?”
She had told him a thousand times she had never harmed his sister. He had never listened.
Through her tears, a brittle laugh tore out of her.
“There’s no going back, Soren. But I’m going to die soon. And then… you’ll never get to torture me again.”
She stumbled out of the room in a daze. Soren was already gone.
The night wind of Kingsport cut like razors, slicing through her exposed skin. Each gust felt like it was peeling her alive.
Snow whirled under the streetlamps, and for a moment Linnea was back in the first year they’d been together.