Chapter 149 Celebration Pt.II
Chapter 149 Celebration Pt.II
Silena sat through the feast and the night moved through its hours and eventually she lay in his tent that she now shared with him, the candles were burning and Vikram was above her.
"Spread your legs for me, Silena." She ignored him and just lay there, with her eyes closed, she felt him pull her legs apart and move above her, she gripped the sheets beside her and felt nothing that she wanted to feel.
The tears came anyway, not because of the pain. Or at least, not entirely, the pain would fade. Bruises healed. Bodies recovered.
This felt deeper than that.
It was the crushing realization that somewhere along the way, she'd walked into a life she had never wanted, and now she couldn't see a road that led back out of it. Every choice she'd made had been for someone else. Every sacrifice had been made believing it would save the people she loved.
Now she lay staring at the ceiling, wondering if she'd simply traded one prison for another.
The tears slipped silently into her hair, she didn't wipe them away. She didn't even blink.
Moving felt impossible, as though every part of her had become too heavy to lift. So she stayed perfectly still, her fingers tightening around the bedsheets until her knuckles ached.
She refused to cry out, It was the last piece of herself she could still protect. If he wanted her obedience, he would have it. If he wanted her body, he already had it.
But she would not give him the satisfaction of hearing her break, so, she swallowed every sound and waited.
Eventually, it was over. Vikram drifted off to sleep beside her.
Sleep never came for Silena.
She simply lay there in the darkness, listening to the quiet rhythm of his breathing, wondering if this was what the rest of her life was going to feel like.
She thought about a knife. She could see exactly where it was, the blade at the side of the tent on the low table, and she thought about the distance between her and it and the distance between the knife and his throat and what would happen after that. If he survived it she would not.
She could not risk it.
Silena lay in the dark for another hour, before sitting up slowly, he did not stir, she put her feet on the ground and stood to move toward the tent entrance.
His voice came from behind her.
"Where are you going?"
She turned. He was on his side, watching her, eyes filled with nothing.
"I need to use the bathroom," she said. Her voice was completely flat.
Vikram looked at her for a moment and she held his gaze, forcing herself not to look at the knife on the table. He settled back and closed his eyes.
She went out.
The camp was quiet, it was very late at night, the fires banked low, she slowly walked till she reached the edge of the camp. Still, she kept walking.
She walked past the perimeter and into the dark beyond it and only when the last of the camp's light was behind her and the dark was around her completely did she start running.
She ran with everything in her, the trees and everything else were a blur, her tears came and she did not stop for them, she let them flow as she felt the cold night air bite her face.
She thought about Maddox.
Not the thing wearing his face. Maddox. The man who had walked into a prison corridor and spoken to a room full of broken people with the specific honesty of someone who had nothing to perform, who had stepped in front of a raised foot without calculating whether it was worth it, who had looked at her across various fires and various camps with the quality of someone who saw the person rather than the function.
Silena wanted him back.
She did not know how to get him back and she did not know if it was possible to get him back, she had not had space to think about it properly since Vikram arrived in his body and everything had moved too fast for thinking. But she wanted him back.
Silena kept running even as her legs burned, she kept running till she got to a road and paused. It was tarred, flat, streetlights at intervals, the kind of road that existed on the edge of a city. She had no idea how far she had run or in which direction.
And suddenly, without any warning, she collapsed.
Her body hit the ground and she knew she didn't want to be here anymore, not in this body that had been through what it had been through tonight. She wanted to stop existing.
She looked at her hands on the ground, not knowing how long she stayed there. Long enough for dawn to start creeping in, she lay there allowing the cold to seep through her as her eyes drifted close.
Silena did not expect to wake up anywhere but she did, she woke up in a bed.
White ceiling. The smell of antiseptic and recycled air. A soft beeping from somewhere to her left. She turned her head and looked at the machine it came from and looked at the tube running from it to the back of her hand, her eyes roamed around the room.
A hospital. Humans called it a hospital.
She sat up slowly and the room spun around her. She was wearing something that was not her own clothes, thin and pale and tied at the back, and beside the bed was a wheeled pole with the bag of fluid that connected to her hand.
She sat in the bed for a while, then she got up.
She took the pole with her and walked to the door out into the corridor, she was thirsty. There was a machine further along the corridor and she moved toward it slowly, rolling the pole beside her, and her feet were bare on the linoleum and the light above was the flat institutional light that made everything look the same temperature.
She got water from the machine and stood in the corridor to drink it, she took a few sips then looked up.
At the far end of the corridor, near the entrance, two figures were moving. One of them was being held by the other, a hand on the arm and something that looked like urgency in the grip, Silena looked at them and looked at the face of the one being held.
Her chest stopped.
She knew that face, it was connected to the man she wished on everything that he would return.
It was Grace.
Maddox's Grace.
She was being pulled away by some other woman who looked anxious with every step she took.