Can't scream.

Her throat is open, wanting to make a sound, but nothing leaves it. Her lungs shake like she’s underwater, drowning in her own silence.

Don’t. you don’t need to be afraid, love. besides, no one can hear you. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to do anything.

The voice glides into her mind like something warm and rotten.

Some of the men lay dead and others are left. The woman keeps dancing, and gets closer to gonca while moving. Gonca feels her lower lip tremble and her tears dripping. She can't move. she wants to run—wants to run so badly—but her legs don’t obey her, her body betrayed by terror. Her nails are red from scratching at the wall behind her, desperate, useless marks of wanting to escape.

The woman is in front of her. She grabs the silk on gonca’s shoulders and she spins and dances, like she is so happy.
Gonca isn’t. Gonca feels sick. Dizzy. Like she’s falling even though she’s pressed against the wall.

The silk wraps behind her neck; the woman’s strong hands grip her tear-covered cheeks. Gonca can’t even flinch away.

The kiss shocks her—cold, then burning.
She whimpers in her throat, still silent. It's her first kiss.

I have been watching you, feeling your ache. Such a painful little life.

She separates them and looks gonca in the eye. One of her pupils is dilated, like she’s blind in one eye. Gonca tries to look away but the woman holds her still, thumb stroking her cheek like touching something fragile. 

“Looking for a way out. Purgatory, you called it?”

Gonca’s chest rises in sharp, trembling breaths. She can’t think straight. Her thoughts scatter like terrified birds.

The woman wipes under her eyes. Cradles her cheeks. Gonca flinches again, but it doesn’t matter—there’s no space to move.

“Why not heaven, love? Would you want that? Tell me.”

A way out?

Gonca swallows. Her throat burns. Yes, she wants out—out of this room, out of this moment. But the voice makes her feel weightless, dizzy.

“Yes. An escape out of this corrupted world.”

escape to where?

“My side. I will take you wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do. And do them at night, when everything is so beautifully quiet. When anyone who could’ve hurt you is gone. And you will never ever feel alone again. I will always be with you, protecting you, being with you when the world is too heavy of a burden.”

Gonca is trembling in her strong hold. She feels like she’s disappearing, slipping out of herself. The woman’s words press into her chest harder than her hands do.

Her life flashes before her eyes.

Mother smacking a kid gonca in her face. Men eyeing a teenage Gonca up and down, even when she's all covered up. Mother’s back turning against her.

She can’t breathe. Can’t run. Can’t deny any of it.

“I won’t push you into anything, my Gonca. I will free you. I will allow you, to be you. You must say yes.”

The woman’s voice is soft, but it traps her harder than iron bars.

Gonca looks at her big orange eyes. They glow. They swallow the light. They swallow her.

“Won’t you be the cure for our loneliness?”

The room sways. Her heartbeat pounds in her throat, her ears, her teeth.
All the things she said, it makes so much sense. Too much sense.

And suddenly she finds herself nodding.

"Take me."

Bloody lips press on gonca’s and before she even thinks about closing her eyes there are teeth in her neck. She gasps, a broken silent sound, her body arching in pain and surrender.

Gonca and Anamaria. End of mortality.