Page 22 of Seeking Shadows

I was never meant to.

I was never truly there. Not in the way that mattered.

I was just flesh—open, vacant, disposable. A breathing corpse, stripped of choice, of self, of anything that made me human. They wanted a puppet, something to tear apart without consequence, something that wouldn’t scream because the drugs made sure of that.

I was always drugged, floating between consciousness and oblivion, my body a hollow shell while hands I didn’t recognize pried it open, claimed it, ruined it.

The world around me bled into a sickening blur, faces shifting like ghosts, their voices slurred and sticky with want. I was trapped in a place where time didn’t move, where pain became background noise, where I forgot what it felt like to be clean.

I’ve spent so long like this—adrift, defiled, unreal—that sometimes I wonder if I was ever a person at all. Or if I was just something to be used and discarded, over and over again, until there was nothing left to break.

Back then, I was just a puppet. An unresponsive, drugged-up thing, existing only to be used.

The man’s smirk widens. “Cat got your tongue? If you keep acting like a mute bitch, I might just fuck you in public. Maybe I’ll find you again.”

Don’t react.

Don’t explode.

Kill him, Mia. Break the glass. Shove it down his throat. Watch him bleed.

No.

A dead body means unwanted attention. It means punishment. It means a cage.

And I can’t protect Zane from the cage.

“Don’t touch me, please,” I whisper.

He ignores me.

His fingers trail down my spine before gripping my arm, hard enough to bruise.

“You’re still nobody’s,” he murmurs. “Still free to be used.”

I force myself to stay still.

“I have a fiancé.”

He chuckles. “A fiancé isn’t a husband.”

But he lets go. Steps back. Smiles.

“I’ll come find you when the party’s over.”

And just like that, he turns, fading into the crowd, like he hadn’t just made a promise to destroy me.

Everything around me starts to blur, the noise growing distant as my chest tightens painfully. Each breath feels like I’m choking, my lungs searing with the effort to breathe.

I can’t be here. I need to get out.

“Mia.”

A voice. Distant.

“Mia, look at me.”

Hands cup my face, warm and steady. Familiar.

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