He hurled the girl onto the cold, merciless stone. The impact rattled through her fragile bones, and a cry, sharp and broken, escaped her lips. She was slight, almost weightless, her platinum hair falling forward in disarray, clinging to the wet trails of her tears.
"Father—please," she choked, her voice trembling, her fingers clawing at his boot. "Please, don't put me in there again. I'll be good, I promise, I'll be good…"
But mercy was a foreign word to him. His foot struck her small hands, tearing her grip away. In one swift motion, he wrenched the belt from his waist, and the chamber filled with the hiss of leather. Blow after blow descended upon her delicate frame. The sound was not only the crack of the belt—it was the sound of flesh breaking beneath it, the sound of innocence torn apart. Her screams pierced the air, rising higher, shriller, until her voice broke into ragged sobs.
Then—silence. Not of peace, but of exhaustion.
When she opened her swollen eyes, vision blurring with tears, he was fastening his belt once more. The monster's mask slipped away, and in its place bloomed a chilling tenderness. His lips curved into a smile that did not belong on the face of the man who had just beaten her.
"Elvira, my darling," he crooned softly, as though the very same lips had not moments ago shouted in fury. He turned to the younger girl, his gaze gentle, poisoned with warmth. "What are you doing on the floor? You'll soil your pretty dress."
He lifted her into his arms, cradling both child and doll against his broad shoulder, like some doting father out of a dream. But the dream was twisted, grotesque—love and cruelty woven together until one could no longer tell them apart.
The elder sister, Olivia, stood frozen. Her sorrow welled up in her chest, yet she bit it down, choking on it, unable to release even a whisper of comfort. Across her tearful gaze, Elvira smiled—an innocent, practiced, serpentine smile that never faltered.
"Father," she said, her voice soft, almost playful. "Will you really leave my sister alone? How sad… perhaps Peter could keep her company?"
The Duke's eyes gleamed with sudden amusement. "Mmm. Yes. A companion will teach her better manners."
Moments later, the servants obeyed. They brought Peter—not living, not breathing, but a corpse. His head severed that very morning for treason. The stump of his neck was dark and wet, staining the air with a metallic stench that burned the throat.
Olivia's body seized with terror. She was only ten, yet now she stood before a horror that would haunt the rest of her nights. A man without a head, dragged like a puppet with cut strings, slumped into the narrow, stinking cell.
The Duke pushed her inside, slammed the heavy door, and with the grinding screech of iron bolts, sealed her in darkness.
In that moment, the silence was not empty. It pulsed. It breathed. And in the shadows beside her, something headless waited.
"Let me out! Please—Father, please! Elvira! Anyone! I beg you, please!"
Olivia's voice cracked as she beat her tiny fists against the door, her nails clawing deep furrows into the wood until they bled. Her cries pierced the cold stone halls, echoing in ragged waves of despair. But no reply came. No mercy. Only silence.
The servants passed often—she could hear their measured footsteps, their hushed whispers as they walked the corridor beyond her prison. They lingered long enough to hear her pleading, long enough to know she still lived, and yet they never answered. Their silence was worse than cruelty—it was consent.
One day bled into another. Then another. Two. Three. A week.
The air thickened with decay. The corpse in the corner, once a man she had seen alive, now slumped against the wall, rotting into something unrecognizable. The stench clung to her hair, her skin, even her tongue when she tried to drink water. She gagged with every breath, but she could not escape it. It was her constant companion.
She screamed until her voice grew hoarse, until her throat burned raw and bloody. But the door never opened except for the jug of water they slid through, as though she were some beast to be sustained, never saved.
And then her mind began to falter.
At first it was small—a trick of light, a fleeting shadow. She thought she saw the corpse shift, only slightly, the slump of its body altering as though gravity itself had not finished with him. She blinked, and it was still. She told herself it was her imagination.
But it happened again. And again.
At night, when the faint glow of torches seeped through the cracks of the door, she could swear she saw him lean closer. Inch by inch. Always when she wasn't watching. She began to sleep less, terrified she would open her eyes and find him looming above her.
Soon, she heard it too. A faint scrape across stone. A dragging breath where no lungs remained. The silence of the cell turned into something alive—full of whispers, full of sounds too soft to name.
One night, she woke choking, her hands clawing at her throat. Fingers—cold, unseen—pressed into her windpipe. She thrashed, gasped, nails tearing her own skin. When at last the pressure lifted, she sat trembling, eyes wide, heart hammering as she stared into the darkness. The corpse had not moved. And yet she was certain it had been him.
Her hunger sharpened the visions. The emptier her stomach grew, the more vivid the horrors became. By the ninth day, she could no longer tell if her eyes were open or closed—whether she was dreaming or awake. Sometimes she thought she saw his head, the one he no longer had, returned in shadow, tilting toward her. Sometimes she heard his voice, low and guttural, whispering from the dark:
Eat. Eat. You must eat.
Her body shrank into nothingness—skin stretched over bone, a frail shell of a child. She whispered into the darkness with the last threads of her voice:
"Please… only a crumb. I'm hungry. Please, I'll die…"
By the eleventh day, reason fractured. The gnawing in her stomach became unbearable, screaming louder than her fear, louder than her shame. She crawled across the floor, dragging herself on trembling arms, her legs too weak to lift her. A shard of glass lay near the wall, jagged and dull, but sharp enough for desperation.
She clutched it, the glass trembling in her bloodless fingers, and turned toward the corpse. Tears blurred her vision, but she saw it clearly: the body that had haunted her, suffocated her, tormented her nights. Her lips trembled, her chest heaved.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, voice cracked and small, as if begging forgiveness from the dead. "I'm so sorry… I just… I can't. I'm so hungry. Just a little. Just a little, and then I'll stop."
The shard tore through decaying flesh. The sound made bile rise in her throat, but she forced herself not to turn away. A strip of meat clung to the glass. She gagged, her whole body convulsing, yet she lifted it to her mouth.
The taste was rot, filth, death itself. She retched, nearly vomited, but she swallowed. Because to starve was worse. To starve was to die.
The door creaked open.
The servant who brought the water stepped inside—and froze. His eyes widened in horror as the jug slipped from his hands and shattered, the water spilling uselessly across the stones. His voice, when it came, was a scream.
"Monster! You—monster! Filthy, wretched monster!"
The word cut sharper than the shard of glass in Olivia's hand. She stared at him, her lips trembling, the taste of rot still clinging to her tongue. The glass fell from her hand.
Her own scream ripped from her throat, louder than ever before, wild and broken:
"I'm a monster! What have I done—what have I done?!"
Other servants gathered, their faces twisted with revulsion. They looked at her not as a child, not even as a victim, but as something unnatural—something unworthy of pity. Their silence condemned her, their stares carved her into the very thing she feared.
And Olivia wept, for she realized the truth: she had become exactly what they named her.
When Olivia finished, her voice was calm—unnaturally calm. She told the story as though it belonged to someone else, her eyes fixed on the far wall, detached, unblinking. Each word fell from her lips without tremor, without grief, as if she were recounting the weather or a passage in a book.
"…and so I thought it moved. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it was only my mind. I can no longer tell. But I was hungry. So hungry… and I survived. That is all."
Her hands rested motionless in her lap, her tone steady, almost indifferent. It was not the voice of a victim, nor of a child—it was the hollow voice of someone who had long since locked her pain away.
Across from her, Isabella sat frozen. At first, she tried to breathe through the tale, to listen without reaction. But as Olivia spoke on—so quietly, so coldly—Isabella's composure crumbled. The weight of those words pressed into her chest until tears welled and spilled freely down her cheeks.
"Olivia…" she whispered, her voice breaking, "how… how could you endure this alone?"
Olivia turned to her at last, her pale eyes empty, unreadable. "I didn't endure," she replied softly. "I only continued breathing."
Something inside Isabella shattered. She leaned forward, pulling Olivia into her arms with desperate tenderness. Olivia did not resist, but nor did she cling back—she simply allowed herself to be held, her body limp, her gaze still distant.
Isabella's tears soaked into Olivia's hair as she tightened her embrace, rocking her as if to shield her from a world that had already done its worst.
And Olivia, silent in her arms, told herself once more that the story she had spoken was not hers at all. For if it were, she could not bear to live with it.