Page 85 of Hollowed

Because no amount of soup could feed what he had carved into me.

Because I didn’t want peace.

I wanted to ache for something again.

I whispered his name.

Once.

Twice.

Until the air remembered how it sounded.

And then I knew.

I hadn’t left to escape.

I had left to starve.

And now I was starving.

ChapterThirteen

The sun was too soft.

It filtered through the window like warm breath, touching the bed where I lay with the kind of light that was supposed to feel comforting.

It didn’t.

It felt like trespass.

Like light that didn’t know me. That hadn’t watched me bleed on stone or kneel for something bigger than mercy. It felt foreign, like it had never seen a girl wrecked by a vow, had never heard a name moaned into sacred silence.

The sheets beneath me were linen. Clean. Smelling faintly of lavender and earth and everything I had once been told a girl should want. But my body ached for cold. For stone. For the scratch of wool against bruises and the weight of his breath against my spine.

I rolled onto my side. The movement felt wrong.

My legs didn’t protest.

My thighs didn’t burn.

My core didn’t pulse from being full.

And that emptiness felt worse than pain.

I pressed my face into the pillow and inhaled.

It smelled like dust.

Like air that had never held his silence.

I stayed there a long time.

Not crying.

Not sleeping.

Just trying to remember what it felt like to belong to someone who knew how to hold my ruin like it was sacred.

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