Page 102 of Jayson
—Jayson can still dispose of you whenever it suits him.
—Sex isn’t a contract. It’s not protection. It’s not love.
—Unwilling brides make convenient collateral.
—The past doesn’t stay dead. It hunts. It knocks on the wrong fucking door.
Each line slices a little deeper. I repeat them until they rattle around inside me, until the ache lodges under my ribs like shrapnel too twisted to pull free.
My hands are fists beneath the blanket. I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend the dark is empty. It isn’t. It’s a theater. A fucking cinema screen on loop—nightmare edition, full color, Dolby surround sound. And I’m trapped in the front row with no way to look away.
Red leather couch.
Flickering lightbulb.
A girl’s sobs.
The crack of a slap.
Blood pooling under a door.
A man’s voice, calm and final?—
“She’s a problem.”
I jerk upright, gasping.
My skin is cold. My mouth tastes like cotton. And my own breath feels like it’s been stolen and handed back to me wrong. Too sharp. Too jagged.
I press a hand to my chest like it might stop my ribcage from snapping open. Like maybe, just maybe, it can hold in the pieces I don’t know how to name yet.
Who the hell is Maddox?
Why does that name feel like a stain I can’t scrub out?
Why does hearing it make me want to run barefoot through glass just to escape it?
The silence is thunderous now. Every creak in the house is a threat. Every shadow is a hand. Every breath feels borrowed.
I curl tighter under the covers and stare into the dark.
Jayson would come if I called.
But I don’t.
Because I don’t know if I want him here to protect me…
Or to save me from myself.
The nightmarealways starts the same.
Blue door. Brass knob. My hand too small to grip it properly, the metal biting cold, slick with sweat—or blood, maybe. Riley behind me, whispering the same plea she always does.
“Don’t.”
But I always do.
Because the dream isn’t a dream. It’s a memory. It justwearsthe skin of a nightmare to sneak past my defenses.
