A cage dressed as kindness.
But I know a cell when I see one.
My body tenses before my brain catches up. My breath hitchesagain, sharp, fractured. The panic claws, still hungry.
What has happened?
Where am I?
I try to lift my arms again, once. Twice. The restraints stretch, but they don’t let go. Not even a little.
A sound rips from my throat, raw and broken, but it dies in my chest when Isabella stirs.
I don’t want her seeing me like this.
Tethered. Cornered. Half-wild. Half-gone.
My breath stutters.
Something inside me buckles the moment I look at her—really look.
She’s pale. Not just tired, not just worn, but faded, like someone pressed life out of her with slow, invisible hands. Her freckles, usually scattered across her cheeks like stars in bloom, are dim now. Faint. Like they’re slipping into her skin to hide from the light.
Her face is thinner. Too thin. The delicate angles of her cheekbones have sharpened, as if the months carved at her while I wasn’t looking. Her lips, once so full of soft words and sharper truths, are colorless, parted slightly with each shallow breath. Her eyes are closed, lashes resting against skin that looks translucent in the wrong light.
I search for pink in her cheeks, but find only silence.
Even her hair, red as fire, alive with defiance, is dulled at the edges. Matted in places. Streaked with salt and sleep and something I can’t name. It spills over the sheets like a thread unraveling, one I’m terrified to tug in case she comes undone.
I don’t recognize this version of her. And it guts me.
Because I did this.
Not with my hands, not with intention, but with every shadow I dragged behind me. With every day I wasn’t here. With every wound I thought I could protect her from by staying silent. Andshe followed anyway. Into the dark. Into me.
I feel the pressure building behind my eyes again, but I don’t blink.
If I blink, she might change again. Vanish. Fracture.
She might dissolve again, a dream.
She’s lying there, inches from my hand, and somehow still out of reach. Still curled in a shape that screams of endurance, of someone who stayed too long in a place that didn’t love her back.
A quiet whimper escapes my throat. I don’t mean to make it. I barely even feel it leave. But once it does, the rest of it comes unfastened.
My chest shakes.
My jaw clenches, but it can’t hold the grief in.
She’s here, and it still feels like I’m losing her.
Tears burn hot down the sides of my face, silent, shamed. My body writhes once—just once—against the restraints, a last-ditch effort to feel something other than helpless.
I’d bleed myself dry if it could put color back in her cheeks. If it could feed the freckles. If it could take the ache out of her bones and bury it in mine instead.
I whisper her name again, but it shatters halfway out.
“Isa…”
