Scarred by the Ember

Prologue: The Scars We Keep
They say the worst kind of prison is the one built of memory.
I didn't disagree. My skin was a roadmap of faded scars-a violent topography of what they'd tried to burn out of me. But the deepest scar was invisible, a silent, festering wound that never let me forget the twenty-five faces-children who died because I was too naive to understand that in their world, kindness was a weapon aimed at your own throat.
I learned to stitch skin back together with a steady hand and an empty heart. I learned to smile and study and talk about things like GPA and weekend plans. I built a life of sunlight and laughter, brick by ordinary brick, hoping the shadows of the past wouldn't recognize the woman I'd become.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours between midnight and dawn, I still felt the familiar, brutal grip of the steel door and smelled the acrid scent of burnt iron and fear. In those moments, I was not Dia, the thriving, 23-year-old medical student. I was just the girl they forged-a weapon so sharp, so deadly, that even after all this time, the world of darkness would eventually remember what it lost.
And when it came for me, it wouldn't send a warning. It would send a bill, payable in blood and freedom