Chapter 67: AM I RUINING HER?

DANTE

I watched her on the feed for almost an hour before Marco showed up.

I sat in the dim glow of my apartment office, the multiple screens casting cold blue light across my face. The main feed showed Mia’s room clearly. She thought I had removed all the cameras but I only removed the most obvious one.

It has been fifteen days now.

She'd been pacing for most of it, back and forth between the bed and the kitchenette, talking under her breath which I couldn't hear. Her hair hung limp around her shoulders, unwashed for days despite the supplies I provided.

I increased the volume and caught, “This isn’t real. This can’t be my life. Wake up, Mia. Wake up.”

Then she stopped and sat on the edge of the bed, put her face in her hands and her shoulders started shaking as she cried, knees to her chest which broke my heart. This wasn’t the feisty Mia that I knew.

My chest tightened as I sat there watching her.

This wasn’t what I had planned. The room was supposed to be a sanctuary with protection from the chaos outside which I had built it with love. But watching her now, I wondered for the first time if love could look like this. If it was supposed to break the person it claimed to save.

Was I doing the right thing or making it worse?

The door opened without a knock and Marco walked in.

"We need to talk," Marco said.

"Not now."

"Now." He walked across the room and stood in front of the desk so I had to either look at him or look past him at the monitor. I turned to the monitor and his eyes followed and I felt him tense. "She's breaking, Dante. Completely breaking."

I minimized the feed but didn’t close it. “She’s adjusting and it takes time. The first weeks are always the hardest but she’ll come around. She promised to try.”

He laughed but there was no humor in it and when he looked at me again, his eyes held disgust.

"No." His voice didn't rise but it got harder. "She's not adjusting. I've watched the feed too. I watched it this morning before you got up and she talked to herself for hours. She stopped eating most of what you brought her. She just sits there some days and stares at the wall because there's nothing behind her eyes anymore." He leaned forward, both hands flat on the desk. "You're killing her slowly. She is slowly deteriorating. Just look man, she is a ghost of who she was. This is torture."

"I'm protecting her!” I snapped.

Marco rose too, facing me squarely. Years of loyalty stood between us, but today it felt frayed. "From what? From life? From freedom? From everything that made her who she was before you locked her in a basement? The spark, the fire, the way she challenged you—that’s gone. You’ve snuffed it out. She’s talking to walls down there, Dante. Crying until she can’t breathe. This is destroying her.”

I didn't answer that as I stared at the screen again and saw her actually becoming a shell of herself.

"Say something," he said.

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want you to say you'll let her go."

As soon as he said it, I felt panic grip my heart.

Marco’s voice softened, but the tension remained. “Let her go. Before there’s nothing left to love.”

I swallowed hard. The thought of opening that door and watching her walk away clawed at something deep inside me. “I can't.”

"Why not?"

"Because if I let her go, I will lose her for good. She will run and tell people and then the life we have built… it will crumble.”

Marco straightened up and looked at me for a long moment.

"You've already lost her," he said. "That woman down there isn't Mia anymore. That's what you've made her. You took someone who laughed easily, trusted people and had a whole life full of friends and work and small ordinary things that made her happy, and you turned her into someone who sits in a room and stares at nothing." He shook his head. "Let her go before there's nothing left to love."

"You don't understand what she means to me."

"I understand exactly what she means to you. That's the problem." He walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame. "Think about what you're protecting, Dante. Because right now it isn't her."

He left without another word, the door clicking shut behind him. I sank back into my chair, the room suddenly too quiet. My hands shook as I pulled up the main feed again. Mia was still on the bed, sitting motionless as though she was just… empty. A shell in the perfect prison I had created.

I couldn’t look away. The doubt Marco planted took root, twisting through every justification I had built. Was this love? Or was I the monster she screamed at in those early days? I had always told myself the end justified the means. She would understand and love me again, even deeper, because I had saved her from the world.

But the woman on the screen wasn’t being saved. She was fading.

I minimized her current feed and pulled up old footage. Something from before, back when the cameras in her old apartment were still my only window into her life.

She looked so vibrant and alive and that was the person I had fallen in love with.

Her and Yuna were on the couch with some show playing on the television that neither of them was watching because they were too busy laughing at something on Yuna's phone. Mia had her head tipped back, her whole face open, one hand pressed to her chest like she couldn't physically hold the laugh in. She looked over at Yuna and said something I couldn't hear and Yuna threw a pillow at her and they both fell sideways onto the cushions still laughing.

I watched it twice.

Then I switched back to the live feed.

She was sitting exactly where she'd been a minute ago and the contrast started to set in.

The two images sat side by side in my head and I couldn't make them look the same. The woman laughing on her couch months ago and the woman sitting motionless in a room I built for her. Same face and same body. But nothing else was the same.

Marco was right.

But even with the truth staring back at me, the thought of letting her go was unbearable. She was mine. The only thing that had ever truly been mine so losing her wasn’t an option. I would rather keep her broken than watch her leave whole.

I picked up my phone and my fingers hovered over the screen for a moment and then I texted Marco.

“Find a psychiatrist,” I said. “Someone discreet. I think she needs help.”

His reply came almost instantly: “She needs freedom.”

I didn't respond as I set the phone down and realization hit me. I might actually be the monster she thinks I am.

And still, I couldn’t open the door.