TL;DR
Part 23
Home taught me
to expect violence.
The Abyss
taught me
how easily
violence
can disguise itself
as rescue first.
And Chaz...
God.
Even writing his name
still feels
like touching
an exposed wire.
Because some people
don’t just hurt you.
They study you.
Study what fear
already lives inside you.
Study what love
you were denied.
Study the shape
of your loneliness
like engineers
mapping structural weakness.
Then they build
the trap
to fit perfectly.
That’s what people
don’t understand
about predators.
The brutality
isn’t the most
frightening part.
The precision is.
The way they learn
your language
before they start
rewriting it.
The way they figure out
which version of
tenderness
your nervous system
would crawl toward
half starving.
And mine crawled.
God,
mine crawled.
Because after years
of surviving impact
even counterfeit warmth
feels holy
for a little while.
And then
there was Royal.
Which still sounds like
a fucking joke
when I say it out loud.
A king.
A title.
Something elevated.
Human beings
really do love
giving monsters
decorative names.
Royal entered
the way poison does
in small amounts.
Not immediately
lethal.
Just enough
to start changing
the chemistry
of the room.
And the room
always
changed around him.
That’s what
I remember first.
Not his face.
The atmosphere.
His playground.
The way people
shifted around him.
The way tension
started organizing itself
before he even spoke.
Some people
carry violence
like an event.
Royal carried it
like gravity.
Everything bent
around it eventually.
Especially people
already trained
to survive
through compliance.
And by then,
my nervous system
was already
exhausted enough
to mistake
predictability
for safety
again.
That’s the ugly cycle.
If harm
becomes familiar enough
your body
starts reaching
for familiarity
before it reaches
for freedom.
Royal
understood that
instinctively.
Predators usually do.
He knew exactly
when to charm.
When to intimidate.
When to withdraw affection.
When to create confusion.
When to let fear
do the work for him
without raising his voice
at all.
That part
still unsettles me.
Because people expect
evil
to feel theatrical.
But some of the
worst harm
arrives calmly.
Patiently.
Like something
completely
certain
it already owns you.