Chapter 51 Chapter 51
"A mother can teach you how to survive a wound, but she can also teach you how to live inside it.”
Hale stood at the threshold staring out into nothingness with a cigarette burning itself down between his fingers. The smoke curled lazily, dissolving into the air as though it had never existed, the way he preferred most things to end.
He did not inhale often. He let the cigarette exist more than he used it, a quiet rebellion against the rules that had shaped him. Just in a distance away the city buzzed with cheers, even in the dark cold night. This world had been made for men like him, and yet it had never felt like home.
Clara’s face drifted uninvited into his vision, soft and infuriating all at once. Her eyes glossy and naive followed him even when he shut his own. The last image he had of her was burned sharply into his mind: Clara turning away from his cell, hurt plain on her face, as though he had struck her instead of the other way around. The memory made his jaw tighten, a muscle jumping beneath his skin. It wasn’t guilt that rose in him, it was anger, sudden and scorching, the kind that left you hot and needing an avenue to vent.
She looked like his mother in that moment, that was the cruelest part of it all. He wanted to bury the image of his mum forever but she kept reminding him of her.
The cigarette trembled as his thoughts dragged him backward, through layers of time he pretended not to revisit. He was young again, too young to understand the architecture of cruelty, watching his father’s shadow stretch across marble floors polished to a mirror shine.
Their house had always been enormous, too many rooms with very few people to occupy, too much money, too much silence that screamed painfully.
Wealth did not soften blows; it only made them echo longer, His mother moved through that house like a ghost made of glass. Beautiful, delicate, soft spoken and endlessly accommodating. She wore bruises the way other women wore expensive jewelry; hidden, curated and never meant for the public eye.
When his father’s temper flared, she did not raise her voice, she did not resist cause she believed fragility was a virtue, that being breakable would one day summon a saviour strong enough to fix everything. Strong enough to eradicate the existence of her torturer and maybe all these will be worth it.
Hale learned early that no one was coming, especially when abuse was covered and hidden. Everyone turned their eyes away.
He watched his mother absorb abuse with bowed head and quiet tears, watched her smooth things over with soft words and excuses.
“He’s under pressure,” she would say. “He doesn’t mean it.” She taught Hale how to shrink, how to disappear, how to survive by not provoking storms. He learned obedience before he learned anger, before he learned defiance.
Then came the day his father finally snapped at him, for the first time he was the recipient of the abuse. The slap came out of nowhere, the sound cracked through the air and humiliation bubbled inside of him.
Hale remembered the shock more than the pain, the disbelief that this violence had turned toward him so casually. He ran to his mother, tears blurring his vision, his cheek burning. He expected comfort. He expected her to hold him, to protect him the way mothers were supposed to but she looked at him with something close to disappointment.
“You should have fought back,” she said quietly.
The words confused him. Fought back? He had never seen her fight. He had never seen anyone stand up to his father so he did not know how to. Hale wiped his tears with the back of his hand and asked the only question he knew how to ask.
“How?”
She hesitated, then straightened, as though remembering a role she had neglected. “You’re a man Hale" she said. “You’ll figure it out. You have to..... One day, you’ll be strong enough to stand up to him, strong enough to stand up for me and protect me.”
The weight of that expectation crushed him. He was a child being handed a war he did not understand.
The next time his father struck him, Hale did not run. Fear crawled up his spine, but he swung anyway, clumsy, desperate and fueled more by terror than rage. His fist barely connected, but the act itself was unforgivable.
His father’s eyes darkened, insulted not by the blow but by the fear behind it.
“Useless,” his father spat. “ you want to be a princess?, just like your mother?."
He laughed, cold and sharp. “Men aren’t weak. They’re strong. If you think you're ready to be one, I’ll teach you.”
That was how Hale ended up locked in an empty room with no furniture, no windows, just concrete walls and a single door that closed with finality.
His father’s voice carried through the metal. “You come out when you can punch a hole in the wall.”
Hale was just twelve, he had never even hurt a fly prior to that experience. How then was he suppose to punch a hole in the wall.
Days bled into weeks, light taps turned to desperate hits, his hands bruised and split. His knuckles swelled until they no longer felt like his own and he screamed until his throat went raw, cried until there were no tears left to shed. Anger came in waves but it was useless. Soon enough he was punching and punishing, the resistance of the wall teaching him lessons no one bothered to explain.
Three weeks later, the wall finally cracked, When the door opened and light flooded in, Hale collapsed. His mother rushed to him, gathering him into arms that shook with sobs. She pressed kisses to his hair, murmuring, “My poor boy, I'm too weak to save you. ”
The words carved themselves into him, it became a memory he could never get rid of no matter how hard he tried and here Clara was dragging him back to relive it.
Hale’s eyes opened, the present slamming back into place, his jaw ticked as he crushed the cigarette beneath his boot, grinding it into nothing. That was why Clara enraged him so deeply. That was why he wanted her but despised her in equal measure.
She was too weak, or maybe she was pretending to be. To him, clara’s kindness felt rehearsed, her softness almost strategic. Hale had learned that fragility could be a weapon, that innocence could absolve people of responsibility.
After all, the oppressed were rarely questioned, they were never held accountable for the roles they played in sustaining their own cages. His mother had chosen weakness because it made her blameless. Clara whether she knew it or not wore the same mask.
And Hale could not forgive that. He stepped back, letting the shadows claim him. His scythe rested easily in his grasp, he had a mission tonight, one that had to be complete before dawn and sweet Clara was a big part of it.