Page 226 of Sins of the Hidden

"Look how you've grown," she whispered, her voice carrying across the clearing like a corrupted lullaby.

The past crashed over me like a tidal wave, dragging me back to white fences and pastel flowers, to brick structures slick with runoff and rooms built for screaming. To the woman who'd watched, never intervened. To basement walls that drank screams and the needle through my lips, thread pulling tight until my voice disappeared forever.

To the woman who'd taught me that monsters were made, not born.

"Mother."

Eleven years.

A distorted mirror reflection stared back at me. My features mirrored hers grotesquely—a poisoned inheritance. Her eyes, her jawline, the hollows beneath her cheeks—all of her imprinted in me, inescapable until death.

Her eyes hadn't changed. Dead, washed-out black that watched while they held me down. The same flat stare that studied the ceiling while begging made no difference. The vacant expression that never blinked when her fingers tangled in my hair, dragging me to the basement, when she cracked my head against the wall.

She tilted her head, a sickly sweet tone twisting her lips. "Hey, V was it? Nice to know you finally have a name."

Her voice—that exact pitch and cadence—made my muscles tense. My fingers numbed around the bat, a weapon that had first tasted her boyfriends' flesh over a decade ago. Because of her. Because of the men who'd treated my body as currency she'd already spent.

Rain pelted the space between us. My tongue traced the ridged scar tissue inside my mouth. This woman, this shell of a human, had dictated every corner of my existence even in her absence.

"My parents sent me to this place—Divine Diligence." Her expression flickered, hatred dulled momentarily by something else. "Because I got pregnant with you."

Lightning flashed, and I saw myself on the basement floor writhing, drowning in my own blood with nowhere for it to go, eyes wide while her hands moved. Lips sealed together with blue thread.

"Even though your father could've been any of their friends—I stopped counting after ten." Her words carved through the rain. "But it was my fault for being sixteen and not being able to fight men twice my age."

I could see through her—venom set so deep it became her.

"You ruined my fucking life!" she spat.

The violence I'd learned howled for release, coiling in my gut—the urge to end her, end it, end all the years she carved into me. My vision tunneled, edges bleeding to darker shades. One movement and this agony would stop forever.

But I'd never be free of her.

"What are you waiting for?" she screamed, spittle flying from her lips. "Finish it! Kill me! That's what you've always wanted, isn't it?" Her voice cracked. "Isn't it?!"

Something inside me snapped. All the rage, all the suffering—it exploded through my body at once. I charged at her, boots splashing through puddles, closing the distance between us in three long strides, my hands ready to end this forever.

She screamed, high and terrified, stumbling backward before her feet gave out. She hit the muddy ground hard, immediately curling into herself, arms protecting her head, body shakingviolently as she made herself small—the way I once had beneath her shadow.

And I just... stopped. My feet planted in the mud barely two feet from where she cowered.

I looked down at her huddled form, my bat raised above her head. How many times had I been in her position? How many times had I curled into myself, trying to disappear under the shadow of someone bigger, stronger? How many times had I flinched from raised hands, waiting for the hurt that always followed? The bat in my hand felt heavier than it ever had. One swing. That was all it would take.

I wasn't that seven year old kid who didn't understand why a man three times my age wanted to come into my room at night.

I wasn't that nine year old boy who thought childhood was supposed to be like it was.

I wasn't that eleven year old boy who couldn't open his mouth due to her stitches for the first time.

… But I was that fifteen year old kid who finally fought back. The one who killed her boyfriends with a bat. The one who survived after she ran.

I drove it down beside her head instead, the wooden barrel sinking into the muddy earth inches from her face. She recoiled violently, rolling away from the embedded weapon, a whimper escaping her that sounded exactly like mine used to.

I straightened slowly, towering over her prone form as she stared up at me from the mud.

"... No." Her eyes snapped open as she looked at me. "I wanted you to come back for me."

I stood over her, the wooden barrel still embedded in the ground, and looked down at her with an expression I'd never worn before—not anger, not hatred. Just the shape of something that never got to exist.

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