Page 57 of Broken By Silence
Lottie.
Her breath catches, and I know what she’s seeing isn’t just muscle. It’s a history carved into skin.
Raised scars. Jagged seams. Some faint as ghost trails, others still livid, purple-edged, refusing to fade. I’ve stopped counting them.
I turn my back to her, because if she’s going to know me, she needs to see all of it—the map of pain, the graveyard.
I feel her eyes catch on the welt under my shoulder blade. I almost flinch before she can even touch it. I lift my hand instead, fingers brushing it like a reflex. “This was the first,” I murmur. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “I refused to hurt you… So he hurt me instead.”
Her voice is soft, tremoring. “With his belt?”
I wish it had been. At least then it would have been familiar. I shake my head, and a bitter smile drags at my mouth. “I wish.”
She says my name like it might anchor me. “Roman.” I hear the heartbreak in her voice.
I can’t look at her.
If I look, I’ll see pity. I’ll see fear. I’ll see everything I don’t deserve.
“I’m no saint,” I hear myself confess. “I enjoyed hurting you. Not because it was you. But because it meant I wasn’t alone in it… the pain.” My throat is dry. “But some of the things he wanted me to do to you… I couldn’t.”
Her fingers graze the scar along my shoulder, and for a heartbeat, my body is a live wire. I inhale sharply, then let it out like I’m bleeding air.
“Don’t make me say it,” I whisper. “I’m already a monster. If I say it, if I see it in your eyes… I won’t survive that.”
Her voice cuts through me, quiet but firm. “Try me.”
I don’t know why I do, maybe because she’s the only one who ever saw the boy underneath the monster, maybe because this is the only way to kill what’s left of me.
“He wanted me to take you,” I whisper, each word like glass. “To see if I would. It was a test. And God help me, for a moment… I considered it. Not because I wanted to break you—not like that. But because I thought maybe if you were mine, if I took you somewhere safe, somewhere far from him, I could keep you. Protect you.”
She stares at me, heart hammering, and I feel the walls inside me crumble. “And when you refused?” she asks.
Slowly, I turn and take her hand, moving it away from my back, because she can’t touchthatword. I show her instead.
Carved into my skin.
Coward.
The letters are uneven, cruel. He carved it so deep I thought he might kill me.
Sometimes I think he did, and I’m just what’s left walking around.
“Please don’t touch that,” I whisper. “I can’t stand the thought of your hands on that word.”
“There’s no shame in any of this, Roman,” She says, her voice shaking. “You were a victim. We both were.”
She’s wrong. I shake my head. “No. I chose to stay. I chose to be a part of it. That makes me different from you.”
“That’s not true?—”
“It is,” I cut in. My voice is rough, splintering at the seams. “Because no matter how many times I told myself I was better than him… part of me wasn’t. Part of me wanted to do it.”
She flinches, but she doesn’t pull away. That undoes me more than her words ever could. I step closer, hands trembling as I cup her face. She feels like the last good thing in the world.
“Don’t you get it, Reyes? I wanted to break you. Not violently, not all at once, but carefully. Lovingly. I wanted to shatter you slowly, until you thanked me for every piece I took. And now look at me—” My voice cracks, and I drop to my knees in front of her. For a second, I’m not the man who once held power over everything. I’m ruined.Hollow. “Now I’m the one broken. I’m the one kneeling in the wreckage, begging just to hear you say my name like it doesn’t make you sick.”
My voice cracks. The mask I’ve worn for years—the control, the arrogance. It all shatters at her feet. Silence stretches between us like a blade. I can feel her eyes on me, and it’s unbearable and holy all at once.
