Chapter 6: Awakening in the Ruins

Élianor

The night swallowed me. After fleeing the banquet hall, laughter clinging to my skin like a burn, I didn't have the strength to go home. Facing Liora's gaze, my parents' muted questions? Impossible. My body was nothing but an empty shell, vibrating with shame.

I found myself in front of a shabby bar on the outskirts of the city, a place where the light was dim and the gazes indifferent. I pushed the door open. The smell of stale beer and cold tobacco welcomed me. It was perfect.

I settled at the counter and ordered a drink. Then another. The alcohol burned my throat, but it was a simple, clean pain that drowned out the other, the piercing pain of Raphaël's betrayal. Each sip was a poisoned balm that erased a little more the memory of his smile, his sweet words, his lies.

The lights in the bar became blurry. The voices turned into a distant hum. I no longer thought. I no longer felt. I was a shipwrecked soul letting myself sink, drunk on pain and cheap whiskey. Shadows came to talk to me. Greasy laughter. Hands brushed against my shoulder. It was blurry, distant. I don't remember a particular face. Just a masculine presence, a deep voice saying things I wasn't listening to. I clung to that anonymous presence like a lifebuoy in my sea of distress. It was better than solitude, than the horrifying emptiness.

Then, nothing. A black hole.

The daylight pierced my eyelids like a blade. A dull pain pulsed at my temples, and a sour nausea twisted in my stomach. I was lying down. This was not my bed.

The smell was the first thing that struck me. It wasn't the scent of my room. It was a man's smell, of sweat, of stale air, of cold tobacco. An unfamiliar scent.

I opened my eyes slowly, my head heavy. The ceiling was low, cracked. The room was small, messy. Dirty clothes lay strewn over a chair. An empty beer bottle rested on the nightstand.

And I was naked.

A cold chill, far worse than a hangover, suddenly seized me. I sat up abruptly, my heart racing, the sheet pulled up to my chin. The movement awakened a throbbing pain, diffuse, between my thighs. A pain I had never known.

My frantic gaze swept across the room. There was no one.

But on the pillow next to me, a mark. The imprint of a head. The pillow was crumpled. And on the sheet, a stain. A small brownish spot, rusty, resembling dried blood.

The blood.

Reality hit me hard, violently, obscenely.

I had never gone home. I had gotten drunk. A man had brought me here. And that pain... that stain...

I am no longer a virgin.

Breath escaped me. The room began to spin. The nausea rose, irrepressible, and I leaned over the bed, vomiting a mixture of alcohol and bile onto the filthy floor. My whole body trembled, shaken by silent, heaving sobs.

It was supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to be a gift, an act of love. Not this. Not in ethereal oblivion, with a stranger whose face I couldn't even remember, in a sordid bed. I had been stripped of that too. I had my first time stolen from me just as my dignity was taken.

I rose unsteadily, wrapped in the soiled sheet. I gathered my clothes scattered on the floor. My dress, the one I wore for "my surprise," was wrinkled and stained. Every movement was agony. Every breath reminded me of the smell of that room, of that man, of my own degradation.

I dressed hurriedly, my trembling fingers. I didn't want to stay another second here. I exited the room, crossed a shabby little living room, and found myself outside, in broad daylight. The sunlight was cruel, indecent.

I walked, my legs shaky, my body aching, my soul in tatters. The shame of the previous night, Raphaël's betrayal, was now overshadowed, crushed by a deeper, more intimate, dirtier shame.

I snuck into my home. Fortunately, no one was there. I went straight to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were sunken, my face swollen from tears and alcohol. I undressed and slipped under the scalding shower. I scrubbed and scrubbed until my skin was red, raw, as if to tear away the filth, the smell, the memory of that night.

But it wouldn't go away. The pain between my thighs was a constant reminder. The stain on the sheet was burned into my memory.

I thought I had hit rock bottom after Raphaël's betrayal. I was wrong. He had only pushed me to the edge. That night, in that unfamiliar bed, I hit the bottom. A muddy, icy bottom where nothing matters anymore. Where one is nothing.

I collapsed at the bottom of the bathtub, the warm water streaming over a body that was no longer quite mine. And in the roar of the water, a new oath forged itself, darker, more definitive than all the others. An oath of silence, of survival. And of vengeance.

This city, these people, took everything from me. My dignity, my innocence, my hope.

One day, I will return. And I will take everything back.