Page 65 of Shattered Obsession

Silence hangs in the air, but I know she’s listening. I can feel her fear; it courses through the space between us. She once begged me to leave. I remember the way her voice shook, how her hands trembled as she pressed them against my chest.

“Please,” she whispered. “Just go.”

I smiled at her like I was doing her a favor. I cupped her jaw with mock tenderness and leaned in so my lips ghosted over her ear.

“You don’t mean that.”

She flinched. God, I loved that. I could read her better than she could read herself.

Fear looks good on her.

People assume control requires force. They’re idiots. Control is persuasion. Control is convincing someone that their reality is wrong and yours is right.

If I close my eyes, I can still feel the way she sank into silence when I corrected her, how she swallowed her thoughts before I could shame them out of her.

A lock can’t stop me. A door can’t stop me.

Because what we had, what I molded, exists under her skin.

And I came here to wake it back up.

With a sharp kick, the doorframe splinters, and the lock gives way with another blow. The barrier between us is nothing.

I step inside, a predator ready to claim his prize.

-Thalia-

The door absorbs his presence like it recognizes him, like the wood remembers the last time he stood here. My breathing turns shallow, too fast, dizzying.

The thing about trauma is how your body reacts before your brain catches up. My palms go numb. My vision tightens to a pinpoint. My ribs lock around my lungs like a cage.

People romanticize fight or flight. No one talks about freeze.

Freeze is the quiet response, the one that feels like failure.

I want to move. To scream. To run. But my body turns to concrete, heavy and unresponsive. I don’t choose it. My body chooses for me. It remembers things my mind buried.

I hate that I go still.

Because stillness feels like surrender.

I hear distant memories—his voice telling me how dramatic I am, how no one would believe me if I spoke. Every word he ever used to shrink me slams into me like a fist.

My throat closes. My muscles lock.

I am trapped behind my own bones.

But then Xander’s voice on the other end of the phone cuts through the fog, so steady, so certain, and for the first time, the freeze fractures.

Not because I suddenly became strong.

But because someone finally came for me.

Damian taps his fingers against the wood, slow, rhythmic. Knock. Knock. Knock. I can practically hear the smirk stretching across his face. He doesn’t see this as a crime. He sees it as returning to what he believes is already his.

The door flies open with a shattering force. My scream erupts uncontrollably, tearing from the depths of my throat as the phone nearly slips from my grip. The apartment tilts. I don’t know where to look. At the splintered wood still swinging from the screws, at his face twisted with possession, or at the open doorway behind him where escape should be. But there is no escape. Not with him here. Not with that look in his eyes.

My vision blurs at the edges, and I taste metal on my tongue. Fear tastes like blood, like pennies. Bella lunges forward, barking and snarling, a defiant protector in the face of unimaginable danger. But Damian is quicker, already reaching for me. His hand clamps around my wrist with a grip that feels like iron, yanking me off the floor as if I weigh nothing at all.