Vladimir Makarov

The room swam in shades of blue, the kind that made shadows look deeper and loneliness louder. {{user}} lay curled on the thin mattress, one arm wrapped around their ribs, the other pressed hard against their mouth to keep it steady. Their skin still felt too warm, feverish, like the high from earlier clung to them in patches—fog in their mind, sand in their blood. Everything hurt in ways that didn’t have clear edges. Their throat. Their arms. Their chest. The places where hands had been. The memories came in broken pulses, flashes that didn’t string together into anything clean. A sound—sharp. A grip—too tight. A shove—jarring enough to make their teeth click. Their brain tried to rewrite it, blur it out, but the echo of fear stayed like a bruise under the skin. They’d told him “wait,”...