Gereksiz İntikam

42

Authors POV

Taniya woke to the sound of rain tapping softly against the windows—a tender sound, too gentle for the wreckage that was her life.

Her body ached in places she hadn’t even known could hurt. Her limbs were heavy, bruises blooming like cruel reminders across her skin. Her stomach felt hollow, a cavern of grief where something precious had once grown. Her hand instinctively drifted to her belly, and for a moment she couldn't breathe. The emptiness there screamed louder than any words ever could.

Shoaib was sitting in the corner, eyes open, unmoving. Watching.

He hadn’t slept. Just sat there—knees drawn to his chest, whispering to himself sometimes, staring at her other times. He looked almost childlike in that position, but his eyes held none of a child’s innocence. They were hollow. Hungry. Possessed.

“I made you breakfast,” he said softly, like they were a normal couple. Like last night hadn’t happened.

Taniya turned her head slowly, neck stiff. She didn’t answer.

“I even remembered you like your tea with honey,” he added, a smile twitching at the corners of his lips. “See? I listen. I care.”

He was unraveling.

Not loudly, not with fury or chaos—but with terrifying quiet. The kind of breakdown that simmers beneath the surface. Controlled. Calculated. Obsessive.

Taniya’s throat burned. She hadn’t spoken since she whispered those last words to him—This isn’t love. This is a cage. The silence between them since then had grown into something monstrous.

She tried to sit up, wincing, her breath catching. Shoaib was by her side in an instant, hands reaching out to steady her—but she flinched before he could touch her. Her thighs and lower stain with dried blood and stained sheet,

His face darkened. “Don’t pull away from me,” he said quietly. “I’m the only one who’s still here. Everyone else left you. I didn’t.”

Left me? Taniya wanted to scream. You took everything from me. My innocence. My peace. My self.

But she stayed quiet. Because defiance made him cruel, and silence at least kept her safe—for now. Her body is not in position to bear his actions,

“You don’t understand what it’s like,” he whispered, brushing her hair back with shaking fingers. “To love someone so much it kills you inside.”

She looked at him then—really looked. His eyes were rimmed red, sunken and wild. His nails were bitten to the quick. His shirt was stained. He looked like a man unraveling thread by thread, clinging to one last thing—her.

But he didn’t love her. Not truly.

He needed her. The way an addict needs a fix. The way a drowning man clings to the very water pulling him under.

And she? She was the oxygen he was trying to strangle out of her own lungs.

Taniya spent the next few days moving like a ghost—just as she had for months, but now even more hollow. Every sound made her flinch. Every word he spoke felt like a lie dipped in sugar. He’d bring her gifts—books she once loved, her favorite lotion, earrings she had worn before everything shattered.

“See?” he’d say, eyes lighting up. “I remember everything. We’re healing, you and me.”

But there was no “we” anymore.

Only his fantasy—and her prison.

She cried in the shower so he wouldn’t hear. She wrote escape plans in her mind, revised them nightly, memorized routes, hiding spots, emergency numbers.