Page 345 of Eternal
I think…I think I’m scared.
“I can’t,” I whisper. It slips out without me meaning to. “I can’t go back out there. I thought I could. But… but Ican’t.”
They hold me tighter, no questions, no lectures. Only warmth and silence, and their arms around me like maybe they can keep the world out if they hold on hard enough.
Viktor lowers his head to mine. His voice is soft, careful. “You’re okay,Kroshka?”
I shake my head, barely. Then I whisper, not even sure why I say it, “Flowers don’t cry, right?”
It’s quiet for a second. Then he hugs me tighter, like the words hit something in him too.
“They do,” he says. “They do when someone finally lets them.”
They don’t ask questions. Don’t try to pull more out of me than I can give.
We end up all curled on the same couch, like we used to as kids. Kat tucked into one corner with her legs over mine, Viktor sitting on the floor between us with his back against my knees.
Kat's hand stays on mine. Warm.Real. She hasn’t let go since I sat here with her.
Viktor hasn’t moved from the floor, but now his arm is hooked around my knees, like he’s trying to hold the pieces of me together without saying a word.
I close my eyes. Try to breathe. The air’s poisonous in my chest.
“She…the girl,” I start again. “She said she’d been taken in by her parents but they quickly died and she stayed there alone.”
Kat leans forward slightly, her grip tightening.
“She said it started out like a group home, but it wasn’t. It was this church. But everything was off. They made them pray all day. No talking. No windows in the bedrooms. Cameras. Locks on the outside of the doors.”
Viktor’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t interrupt.
“She said... the girls and boys were always being watched. And if they acted out, they’d disappear. Sent to a room. Broken forever after they got out of there.”
I pause. The room is too quiet. I can hear my heartbeat in my teeth.
“She was smart,” I whisper. “She kept her head down. Did what they said. Pretended to break. One night she escaped. Said she ran barefoot through the woods for hours until she hit a road. But she was there for so long… Scared to death to be taken by a man or a woman during these gatherings. She was terrified of it, knowing she’d watch her friends be taken, crying because they didn’t want to.”
My breath shudders.
“AndI…I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About what happened to her. What might’ve happened to the ones who didn’t make it out.”
My throat tightens. I curl forward slightly, pulling the blanket up to my chest.
“And all I could think was... how close it sounded. How much it felt like... that house.Myhouse. The basement. The mattress. The...bleach. The sound of the door. I wasn’t even there but it was the same kind of thing. It is the same thing. And it made me feel?—”
My voice breaks.
“Like I was stillthere.”
Sometimes, no matter how strong you are, no matter how hard you’ve worked to hold yourself together, it only takes one small thing to bring it all back. A memory, a feeling, something you didn’t even see coming. And suddenly, you’re right back in it, back in the version of you that struggled to breathe, to cope, tosurvive.
You feel it in your body before your mind even catches up.
That tension, that heaviness, the scars no one else sees, but you still feel like it, especially when you’re alone. Especially when you’re tired of pretending you’re fine.
There’s this constant fear underneath it all. Maybe it was never over, and no matter how far you’ve come, that fear doesn’t go away. Some days it’s quiet, other days, it presses down on your chest like it’s trying to stay.
And today it’s suffocating.
