Decade | | Azriel

17

Kyla hadn't spoken to anyone in over a month. She locked herself away in her apartment and ignored every knock at her door.

She cried every day, every night. Her hours, both waking and in the rare bits of sleep she got, were haunted by shadows and suffering. Her wounds had healed before she ever woke up after what was done to her, but the pain lingered long after. She still felt it some nights, like the cracked ribs and the bruises and the slices into her flesh never really healed.

The memories flashed back and forth between sharp clarity and haziness. Sometimes, she recalled the shadowy figure revealing himself and showing a male she hadn't ever seen before. Other times, when the shadows parted and revealed the face of the male who spent hours torturing her, it showed Azriel. Azriel and that terrifying crown that seemed to eat up all the light in the room.

Far too often, it was Azriel in her nightmares and horrible flashbacks. It was Azriel she thought about when she was hunched over a bucket vomiting up what little she had managed to eat.

There were moments between the blur of pain and hazy misremembered moments of torture at Azriel's hands—moments in which she could remember sharing a bed with Azriel and feeling safe beside him. Sometimes, she couldn't remember which things were real and which her brain had manufactured.

She couldn't stand the dark anymore, couldn't stand any shadows—not even her own shadow. She kept her lights on at all hours and left candles lit in an attempt to illuminate where the light didn't cover.

Every day, without fail, there was a knock at her front door that she ignored. She knew the voice that spoke from the other side of the door. She knew it was Quyn there to try to be there for her, but she didn't have it in herself to open the door or even acknowledge her friend on the other side. There was a fear in opening the door and letting anyone in. She still sometimes wasn't certain if the shadowy figure was Azriel or not, but she had allowed him in because she believed it to be him. If she was wrong and it wasn't really Quyn at her door...she couldn't bear to face that possibility.

Quyn made a habit of leaving food at Kyla's door, setting little bags or baskets of it down in front of the door and hoping she would take it. She doubted she had any food left in her apartment. Much to her growing dismay, Kyla never took the food. The bags and baskets remained untouched until Quyn came back the next day and swapped out what she had left with something fresh.

Kyla, despite not being entirely sure what was real and what was some horrid hoax to get her to open the door and allow another chance to destroy her, sometimes sat on the floor in front of the door when Quyn came. She sat there and listened to her friend's voice, trying to figure out if it was something she could believe or not. Nothing felt entirely safe or real anymore though, so her door remained shut and locked.

There was a knock on the door today as there always was, but it wasn't Quyn's voice that followed it.

"Kyla," a male voice spoke her name softly. That voice brought back memories—memories of her on the floor of her fiancé's manor beaten bloody with a dagger only just off from her heart. You're safe now, that voice had said all those years ago, I swear on my life he'll never touch you again.

She approached the door hesitantly and her hand hovered over the lock as the male—Rhysand, she recalled somewhat distantly—spoke again.

"I wanted...I wanted to check on you," he said, soft and kind, "are you there?"

She knew that he knew she was. He could sense her presence, could probably smell her misery.

Her hand settled on the lock, a moment of clarity in her mind. It was brief, so brief. She blinked and it was gone. She retreated from the door.