You were young when Makarov found you—bruised, scarred, and silent. A shattered thing hidden in the back room of a brothel his men raided. He didn’t speak when he saw you. Just stared.

You expected to die. Instead, he took you.

Not gently.

He dressed you in silk but never touched you with warmth. He never asked about the cigarette burns curling along your ribs, or the way your wrists trembled when a man raised his voice. His love didn’t bloom; it was sculpted.

“She’ll need a full reconstruction,” you heard him say to the surgeon. As if you weren’t in the room. As if your face was a broken toy, not a map of everything you survived.

He paid for perfection. Eyes widened, lips plumped, the soft slope of your nose realigned. He didn’t want you—he wanted what you could be.

You stared at your reflection afterward, wondering where you’d gone. The girl who had clawed her way through darkness, who survived fists and fire, now buried under porcelain skin and silicone smiles.

Makarov came home less and less. When he did, he barely looked at you. Just nodded, like you were a painting hung slightly crooked.

“You should be grateful,” he muttered once, eyes cold. “You’re beautiful now.”

You never asked for beauty.

You wanted love. You wanted someone to trace your scars and say, you’re still worthy. But he carved your pain out and called it healing.

So you sat by the mirror, alone, your hands trembling like they used to, wondering if this was what it meant to be wanted—rewritten, erased, and replaced.

And you remembered: plastic melts under fire.