Page 263 of Once Upon a Fable

None of those facts ensured this night would be swallowed until I died.

It would remain my biggest secret, not because of whathedid...but because of what I did in return.

I didn’t understand it.

I couldn’t untangle it.

But watching the monster who’d trapped me, chained me...raped me...come apart in violence and grief, switched all my tears from my own pain to his.

I cried for him.

He’d shown me what he’d endured. What his life had been like. What it felt like to be stripped of everything—to be ignored when pleading, to be used when begging, to be unseen even while being so intimately joined.

He’d been nothing to them, just like I’d been nothing to him.

He’d been discarded and scrunched up, thrown away into the dark only to be dragged back out whenever they wanted him. He’d been scarred far, far worse than the wounds on his body. And those sorts of wounds (soul wounds) would never heal. They’d festered too long without company, without help, without compassion. He was a lost cause. He had nowhere else to go and no one in which to turn to.

And thatpulverizedme.

There was no hope for him.

No chance at happiness when he had no concept of the word.

No ability to be free because his own mind had caged him.

He was a man who’d hit rock bottom and had nothing left.

My tears rolled at the same speed as his, washing away what he’d done, leaving us in unfamiliar, dangerous territory.

I couldn’t look away.

I’d thought my homesickness crippled me but it was nothing compared to his. A homesickness he couldn’t even decipher because he had no home, no family, no one. He only had emptiness...and a mind full of evil.

I didn’t know how much time passed while he attacked the wall. His back bunched and his arms swung and he didn’t stop until blood smeared the shredded wallpaper.

I never looked away.

I let him purge.

I allowed his torment to seep through the carpet and coat me in the misery he drowned in. My pain wasnothingcompared to his. All my justified curses, threats, and anger didn’t stand a chance because how could I be mad at a creature so despicably distraught? How could I kick him when he was already downtrodden into dirt he couldn’t climb out of?

Maybe, that was stupid.

Perhaps, I’d been in this valley for too long and all rational thinking had fled, but there wasn’t a single part of me that hated him. Not after what he’d done. Not even while my core still throbbed from his rough thrusts.

Right here, right now, this was more than what’d happened between us. This was more than just a moral mistake. This was him breaking...and it overwhelmed me.

He finally stopped punching the mansion that’d kept him trapped, and a bone-deep heaviness settled inside my chest. A heaviness that crushed me with need to bekindinstead of angry.

As he spun to look at me with eyes so achingly haunted, a hunger welled inside me to help. A terrible, undeniable desire to take away the shadows inside his soul before they killed him right here in this valley.

That desire to rescue him didn’t absolve or forgive him. The feeling pooling inside me was borne from something far, far deeper than being mistreated and mishandled. It was honest and righteous and true.

It was therightthing to do, even if no one else would ever understand.

Even ifIdidn’t understand.

Even as I gave him a tiny shrug and a smile that took so much effort to conjure and watched him crash to his knees in tears, I still couldn’t name what unfurled inside me.