Chapter 3

The days bled into one another, each one a new lesson in cruelty. Isabella found a particular, twisted joy in my suffering. One morning, she "accidentally" spilled a cup of scalding hot coffee on my arm as I was serving her breakfast. A sharp, searing pain shot up my arm.

"Oh, my goodness, I am so sorry!" she exclaimed, her voice thick with fake concern. "How clumsy of me." She dabbed at my reddened skin with a napkin, her touch lingering just a little too long, her eyes glittering with triumph.

I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to remain still. "It's alright," I said, my voice flat. I had learned that any reaction, any show of pain, only fed her appetite for malice. Inside my head, I detached myself. This is just a body. It feels pain, but it is not me. I am somewhere else. It was a strange, dispassionate thought, a survival mechanism kicking in. The pain was real, but I was an observer, watching it happen to someone else.

Julian' s cruelty was different. It was less about pleasure and more about punishment. He assigned me the task of cleaning the mansion' s enormous, sprawling gardens. By hand. He gave me a small pair of shears and a bucket. "The weeds are getting out of control," he said, his tone clipped and impersonal. "I want them all gone by the end of the week."

The sun beat down on my back as I knelt in the dirt, my hands raw and blistered from pulling at thorny weeds. My muscles ached, and the constant pain in my chest was a burning fire. My hands were soon covered in a crisscross of scratches and cuts. Blood mingled with the dirt under my fingernails, a stark, visual testament to the toll this labor was taking on my already fragile body.

Isabella came out to the veranda to watch me, sipping a glass of iced tea. "Working hard?" she called out, her voice a mocking sing-song. "You look so... natural, down there in the dirt. It suits you." She laughed, a light, tinkling sound that grated on my nerves.

One afternoon, while clearing out a storage shed at the far end of the garden, my fingers brushed against something small and wooden. I pulled it out. It was a small, intricately carved bird, a miniature replica of a detail from one of my father' s early building designs. I remembered this. My father had carved it. He' d been teaching Julian the art of detail work, and I, a little girl at the time, had sat watching them, fascinated. Julian had made one too, a slightly clumsier version. We had kept them as mementos.

A wave of nostalgia, sharp and painful, washed over me. For a moment, I was that little girl again, safe and happy in my father' s workshop. I clutched the wooden bird in my hand, a tangible link to a life that was gone forever.

Julian found me there, staring at the bird. His eyes fell on the object in my hand, and his face went rigid.

"Where did you get that?" he asked, his voice dangerously low.

"I found it," I whispered, holding it out. "Don't you remember? Dad made it."

He snatched it from my hand. For a second, I thought I saw a flicker of that old memory in his eyes, a shadow of the boy he used to be. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by a cold, hard fury. "This is junk," he snarled, and with a flick of his wrist, he threw the small wooden bird into a pile of garden waste destined for the incinerator. "Don't touch my things."

The act was so final, so needlessly cruel, it felt like he had thrown away a piece of my heart. The last good memory I had of him, of my father, was now trash.

His inner voice screamed, a sound of pure agony that ricocheted through my head. That was his. He gave it to me. He said, 'Never forget where you came from, son.' I promised. I promised him. Why did you do that? Why? This time, the voice wasn't just a whisper; it was a howl of grief and self-hatred. It was a confession. He remembered. He knew exactly what he had just thrown away. The conflict within him was so violent, so raw, it was a wonder he could still stand.

I couldn't hold it in anymore. The physical pain, the constant humiliation, the destruction of that last, precious memory-it was all too much. A sob tore from my throat, and I doubled over, my hand flying to my chest as a spasm of pain seized me. Tears streamed down my face, hot and unstoppable. I was breaking, right there in the dirt, in front of the man who was destroying me.

He just stood there, watching my breakdown with a cold, detached expression, as if observing a scientific experiment. But his fists were clenched at his sides, his knuckles white.

Later that night, as I was throwing out the trash, I saw the wooden bird lying on top of the pile. My hand hesitated. I couldn't save the memory, but I could save the object. I reached in and pulled it out, hiding it in my pocket. As I did, I noticed the photo I had picked up from the floor the other night had fallen out of the broken frame. It was the picture of him and my father. I picked that up too. I took them back to my tiny room and hid them under my mattress. It was a small, secret act of defiance. A declaration that he could break my body, but there was a part of my past, a part of myself, that he could not destroy.