The white noise was constant, incessant, like tinnitus in my ears and a throbbing headache behind my eyes. The kind of sound that would drive someone to madness if they weren't already halfway there.
I'd gotten used to it all. This ward. The hiss of machines, the metallic clinking of medical tools, the smell of chemicals and medicines, the nurses murmuring in code, the shuffles and squeaks of shoes on the linoleum floor. I'd gotten used to the routine. Used to the walls. Used to the comings and goings of staff and patients.
It seemed endless. And this was— what? Only my fourth day? That was hard to believe.
At some point, I remember looking over the foot of my bed and I'd propped myself up on my elbows.
I could see Tom, still in the bed opposite like a ghost — barely a shape, barely a soul. The curtains around his bay had been left half drawn, one side clipped back with a plastic tie.
This was the first real look I'd had at him. Not a silhouette buried under sheets. Not pale flashes of skin when the nurses cleaned him or changed his bandages. This was different. This was all of him. Lit up under the brutal fluorescence that buzzed like hornets overhead.
There was nowhere to hide under this light.
For a moment, I forgot how to breathe. My eyes went wide.
He was wrecked.
His face was a landscape of violence — swollen beyond recognition, bruises blooming across his skin. One eye swollen shut, the other barely open. The colours blended in a sickly gradient — purple that bled into black, red fading into yellowing flesh. Like rotting fruit.
It didn't look real. It looked like SFX makeup. I wanted to believe that's all it was. But I knew.
A slash ran over the bridge of his nose. Two more ripped across his right cheek. And the scar of a previous cut started behind his left ear and ended at the base of his neck in a diagonal line. The skin had healed over, leaving something thick, raised, and faded where the wound had been.
What I could see of his chest mirrored the same agony. A map of injuries — slashes, welts, ridges of scabbing flesh, and healing cuts that looked like they'd been made with something cruel and serrated. Some were stitched. Others just left to scab over, as if they'd given up partway through caring.
His arms were worse. Lined with cuts, rough and ugly. Some were wide, puckered and healing. Others were thin, surgical almost. They weren't accidental. They weren't from a fall or a fight.
It was art... Someone's idea of it.
I realised — Dylan didn't just beat him. He carved him. And not just once. I didn't need to be told. I knew it. I could see his handiwork in every jagged edge of this boy's body. The methodical cruelty. The same way he'd spoken to me, touched me, held me like I wasn't a person but a thing to study and break open.
I felt bile rise in my throat.
And still — even through the horror — I saw things that didn't belong.
Slim fingers. Not built for fists. Hands meant for sketching. Maybe piano. The delicate kind of hands that knew creation, not destruction.
I wondered what his voice had sounded like before. Did he sing under his breath while he worked? Did someone once kiss the corner of his mouth — the same corner that was split open now — and make him laugh?
That thought gutted me. He'd been happy once, he had to have been. Right?
I stared at him in disbelief, like my eyes had betrayed me with another hallucination. But then—
His eyes met mine. Properly.
It knocked the breath from my lungs.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no jolt of connection, no cinematic moment of understanding. It was worse.
Because he was empty.
Completely, utterly vacant, like whatever had lived behind his gaze was long gone. What was left was a shell of a body waiting for permission to die. Not desperate. Just... done.
He didn't flinch when I stared at him. He stared back. Didn't blink. Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes but didn't fall. His lips were cracked, one corner split, his jaw slack.
He looked like he was already dead. Like he was just waiting for his body to catch up. Like it was long overdue.
I swallowed against the dry ache in my throat. "Tom?"
Nothing. Not even a twitch. He was almost... catatonic.
I tried again. "Tom? Can you hear me?"
His eyes glanced across my face, just slightly like he might've heard me, but chose not to react. Or maybe I imagined it.
I sat there, trying to think of what else to say, but the words didn't come easily. What could I say to him? "I saw what he did to you, I want to help you." Almost said it. Didn't.
The fluorescent light above me buzzed and flickered, briefly washing the room in strobe-like pulses. His eyes lifted to it, then dropped back to me.
Down the corridor, someone screamed. The sharp metal clatter of a gurney echoed outside the ward. He didn't even react to that.
Not even when I let out a shaky breath and whispered, "You don't deserve this."
And I meant it. With everything in me.
I wanted to get out of bed, to walk over there — run to him, even. To sit beside him and do something . But I couldn't. My body was still too weak. And something in his posture told me he wouldn't let me close, even if I could.
But then, in the dull noise of the ward, a tiny little sound.
A whisper. So small I almost missed it.
One word. His lips moved.
"Help."
I leaned forward, a jolt of pain cutting through my ribs. I didn't care. It was so quiet I wasn't sure if I'd heard it, or if my brain had filled in what I wanted to hear — that I'd somehow conjured it from my own desperation.
Then he said it again. Slightly louder. Still fragile. Still whispered. But real. "Help me.”
The words broke something inside me. I didn't know what to do. So, I nodded, slow and careful, making sure he could see it. So he'd know he wasn't alone anymore, that he could trust me.
"I will," I whispered. My voice cracked on the second word like glass shattering.
His head tilted. Barely. Like he was weighing the words. His hand moved slightly. He reached for the edge of the blanket on his lap and pulled it up just a few inches.
That's when I saw something else.
His left wrist, partially covered by a blood-stained bandage. But it wasn't the bandage that froze me. It was what was under it.
Letters.
Carved into his flesh.
DYL—
They weren't fresh, but they hadn't fully healed either. Red, raw outlines against the pale of his skin, scabbed and angry. Not written or inked. Etched. Like ownership. Like branding. As if Tom were property, not a person.
Dylan had signed his property with his signature.
My jaw clenched and my stomach churned in disgust. I swallowed hard, blinking through the tears that welled up behind my eyes. I gripped the railings on my bed, my knuckles white and cracking.
I wanted to scream. To claw that name off his skin with my bare hands. To take every drop of pain that had been poured into that boy and hurl it back tenfold into the monster who'd caused it.
"He doesn't own you," I whispered, my voice shaking.
No response. But I continued, regardless. "He's going to fucking pay for this."
I threw myself back onto the pillow and folded my arms, my heart pounding as I stared up at the ceiling tiles.
Thinking.
About Dylan.
About killing Dylan.
And then... I just lay there.
The silence wasn't peaceful. It pressed in around me like a second skin. Like the ward itself had gone quiet to let the thoughts inside me echo louder.
I could still see the blood. Still see the way those letters were carved — deliberate, cruel. Not hurried, he took his time. I bet Tom was screaming the whole time.
I felt heat behind my eyes. My hand flexed around the blanket. The skin on my arms crawled like it knew something was coming.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
I knew what I had to do.