Prologue
The Body Remembers
Everything
Isabella
I do not remember the first time I was unloved.
But my body does.
My pain wasn’t punishment for my stepfather; it wasentertainment.
When he locked the door, it was never for hours. It was for days. I’d drink from the leak in the wall, chew on my sleeve when I was starving. The body adapts. It learns to find pattern in chaos.
And no one came.
Not my mother. Not neighbors. Not God.
One person came, theDevil.
I have the symptoms of a haunted girl.
I am hypervigilant. Codependent. Self-erasing. Rage-filled and shut down, all in the same breath.
I don’t sleep. I shut off. I don’t eat. I forget to.
Touch feels like invasion.
Love feels like surgery.
So when I met him, when I met the man with the bloodstained hands and dead eyes and a voice like a gunshot, it didn’t scare me.
It calmed me.
Because I knew a man like that would never lie about who he was. He wouldn’t smile while setting the fire. He’d burn the world in front of me and hand me the match.
And that felt like the closest thing to love I’d ever known.
He was violent. Cruel. Unforgiving.
And I clung to him like salvation.
Because the first rule of trauma-bonding is this: you don’t fall in love with safety, you fall in love with what feels familiar.
And pain was my mother tongue.
With him, I didn’t have to lie.
I could be the worst version of myself, and he’d still want more.
Because he wasn’t afraid of the devil inside me.
He just wanted to know her name.
I never wanted gentle. Gentle didn’t feed me when I was starving. Gentle didn’t carry me out of the basement. Gentle never stood between me and the fist.
I used to hurt myself just to feel control. Not because I wanted to die, because I wanted to remember I was still the one holding the blade. Because sometimes, choosing your pain feels like freedom.
