The world went silent. The frantic, high-pitched ringing in my ears faded, replaced by a profound, terrifying calm. The phone lay on the floor where I’d dropped it, David’s tinny, concerned voice long gone. Leah was shouting, her words a furious, incoherent buzz saw of rage on my behalf, but I couldn’t process them. All I could see, burned onto the backs of my eyelids, was that screenshot.
Author: Seraphina Volkov.
My rage was the arctic. It was a cold, sharp, crystalline thing forming in my veins, freezing the grief and shock into something hard and lethal. They hadn’t just stolen my work. They had flayed me, taken the skin of my life, my secrets, my very soul, and were parading it around as a trophy.
