The other two deferred to him, coming to stand in front of her chair.
“You’ve cost my bosses a lot of money and a lot of men, Lyla,” the mean one, the leader clearly, spoke. “What should we do with you?”
She stayed silent, her heart pounding, a sense of dread infiltrating her veins as she looked at the men.
“You’re too important to let go of, but too useless to the business. You were leverage against some powerful people, and now you’re also leverage against the Shadow Man.” The eagerness of the man’s voice scared her. “Do you know who he is?”
She shook her head quickly. She genuinely didn’t know who he was.
The man studied her for a long minute. “The Shadow Man came out of nowhere about ten years ago. He became a legend in the underworld. Disrupted our path again and again, and to this day I don’t understand what his end-goal is. So, let me rephrase. Do you know anything about him?”
She shook her head again.
“You wouldn’t be lying now, would you?”
She wasn’t lying.
“Good,” he smiled, his face creasing in laugh lines that should have made him look nice. “We have traveled a long way to see you. Why don’t you get on your knees and make us feel better?”
Swallowing, she looked at each of them, finding some semblance of strength inside her. “That would be signing your death warrant. He kills everyone.”
One of the men stepped closer, suffocating her space. “We’ll risk it. If he cares about you, maybe he'll find us. If not, it's our gain.”
Grabbing her by the arm, he dragged her to the bald man.
Lyla looked around the room, knowing she was trapped, knowing there was no escape, feeling claustrophobic because day after day, there had been no reprieve. And this time, she knew in her gut he wasn't even aware of what was happening.
The man with her arm pushed her to her knees, the other took out his camera.
“Make the feed live,” the bald man instructed from his place at the head of the table. “Let him see how we break his little toy.”
Lyla closed her eyes.
No.
He wasn’t there to save her, not like he’d told her, showed her, promised her he would be. And she couldn't save herself. He had lured her into a false sense of safety until she started relying on him, and now she was trapped because he had endangered her.
He had lied.
And he may kill everyone he wanted afterward, but it wouldn't be for her. It would be for himself, and it would never bring back the last piece of her that broke.
She closed her eyes, and let the black hole swallow her whole.
***
Her room was small.
Her bed was small.
Her life was small.
And it didn't matter.
She didn’t matter, nothing mattered.
She was the black hole and the black hole was her, endless nothingness with no capacity for light.
She didn’t know who came to her room, who left, who did what to her.
She felt nothing; she spoke nothing; she saw nothing.
She just stared at the cracked ceiling, recognizing the cracks within herself, widening, sharpening, lengthening.
Purposeless.
Endless.
Lifeless.
***
Days passed.
The ceiling stayed the same.
Months passed.
The ceiling got worse.
Time became meaningless.
The last sign of life in her body came when her box fell over, black roses scattering across the floor, sparking something.
She flew across the room in a rage and tore them apart, crushing the petals, bruising them until her eyes began to burn and her throat locked tight.
She wanted nothing of him. No reminders. Nothing of the man who had made her believe in an illusion of safety, only to push her into danger himself. He had betrayed her, time and time again, leaving her behind for the jackals to feed off her flesh.
Standing up, she went to the bathroom and grabbed a razor from the cabinet behind the mirror. Looking at herself, at her sunken eyes and her pallid reflection, at the hair he had been so fascinated with, she began to hack away at the long tresses she had never cut before. With each lock of hair that fell, she felt herself go, felt who she had been disappear as a silent doll took its place—good to use and play with, pretty to look at, but completely lifeless.
Cutting the last lock of her hair, she let him go, let herself go, let everything that connected them go.
The ceiling cracked.
***
PART TWO
Embers
“Each time you happen to me all over again.”—Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Chapter nineLyla | 6 months later