The only peace Benjamin Dumars Martinez—Bennie, back then—ever knew was the memory of a distant park bench, the way the late afternoon sun felt on his face before the darkness found him.
For five years, his world was a cage of cold cinder blocks and locked steel. Five years of waking up in a sweat, tasting the metallic tang of fear, and listening to the low, rasping breaths of the other stolen children. They were commodities, things to be bought and sold by people whose faces he tried not to remember—his captors, his enslavers. They had stripped him of his name, his home, and his childhood, leaving him only with a desperate, singular plea: to be free.
He never fought back in the end. He was too tired. Too small.
The final moment wasn't a struggle; it was just a cold, crushing weight. He remembered the smell of cheap cleaner, the dull thud against the wall, and the heavy, uncaring hand of the man he once thought might be reasoned with. As the world turned into a buzzing, echoing void, Bennie didn't beg for life. He only had one coherent thought, a silent, frantic scream that echoed in his closing mind:
"Please. Just let me be left alone. Just let me have peace."
But even in death, his wish was denied. There was only the cold finality, the deep, burning realization that he was simply trash discarded by the monsters. His story ended not with a bang, but with a choked silence, his desire for peace and freedom tragically unfulfilled.