Page 180 of Once Upon a Fable

She twitched in the blankets as if she could sense my growing animosity.

She’d been my prisoner. Mine to do whatever the hell I wanted.

Yet...somehow, she’d overthrown me. She’d fought me. Cut me.

She threw me off the goddamn cliff!

I snarled in the dawn.

Who would’ve thought that the closest I would come to dying was at the hands of a woman half my size? A woman who was meant to obeyme. My own twisted version of a slave.

Who was she to be so pious and grandiose to think she had the right to sleep in my house? Why was she not in the basement where she belonged? How long had she been free? Rooting through my things. Touching my books. Walking through the dirty archives that this house held.

How dare she!

I bared my teeth.

My naked feet took another step toward her. Pink-gold light from the new sun peeked through the windows, dancing over my body.

My clean body.

A body that only wore a pair of navy boxer briefs. Skin that’d been washed. Wounds that’d been tended to. Hints of her handiwork. Blatant signs she’d dressed me like a child, nursed me like an invalid, and had been there for every fissure of my heavily fractured psyche.

Soft fingers in my hair.

Gentle whispers in the dark.

Female strength half guiding, half carrying me to the bathroom.

I choked.

Fuck.

This girl had seen me at my absolute weakest.

She’d been witness to whatever hallucinations I’d endured. She’d stood over me while I was unconscious...touched me without my permission.

Christ.

I wanted to be sick.

No one.

Not even Quell, Zanik, or Wes hadeverseen me so weak.

I’d always been the strong one—the one who screamed in his sleep but never shed a single fucking tear while awake.

I couldn’t—

My mind swam, black filth blending with fists and kicks and blood.

I was alone when I finally decided to live instead of die.

My eyes opened painfully, eyelashes sticky and struggling to lift as dried blood cracked and crumbled. I was cold, lying in a puddle of piss and other unmentionable waste.

I didn’t move to begin with. I hovered in a space of existing and fading, trying to gather the will to survive.

It was a while before I finally managed to crawl on my hands and knees, every piece of me bellowing in pain. Time splintered again, slipping into nothing until I had the strength to crawl up the basement steps and into the kitchen.