The car passed through the sleeping streets. Serena sat motionless inside, her fingers laced tightly in her lap, her composed reflection faint in the black glass of the window. Nothing to mirror the broken woman she was just moments earlier.
Each turn of the wheel carried her farther from the glittering cruelty of the ballroom and deeper into the silence of the forgotten quarter where she now belonged.
Outwardly she was composed: her posture perfect, her chin lifted, her eyes fixed on the faint reflection in the window. Inwardly, the night replayed in fragments— the memory of hands on her wrists, the sting of a slap, the shock of Charlton's voice breaking through the dark.
So this is what you've become.
They hurt more than the fear itself.
The humiliation pressed against her chest until breathing felt like an act of will.
