She had never been a child.
Children laugh. Children play. Children cry for help and expect it to come.
She didn’t do any of those things.
Not anymore.
Not since the day she opened her eyes for the first time and saw blood instead of light.
Her birth wasn’t something to celebrate.
She was born screaming, gasping, lungs filled with ash because the house was already burning down around her. The woman who bore her—slumped against the bathtub, neck twisted unnaturally, throat slit before she ever saw the child she had carried.
The man who killed her—staring at his mistake, at the thing crying between flames, at the infant who wasn’t supposed to exist at all.
He considered drowning her in the sink.
In the end, he decided to keep her.
Not out of mercy.
But because he could make use of her.
She didn’t learn to walk in a home.
She learned in a basement, feet bare against cold cement, stumbling between rusted chains and shattered bottles. She didn’t learn her ABCs. She learned the difference between screams of pain and screams of fear.
She didn’t learn how to ask for things.
She learned how to endure.
She was taught survival the hardest way.
Through fire. Through the sting of metal against her ribs, deep enough to wound, shallow enough to keep her alive. Through hours buried beneath bodies, their weight pressing against her, their blood soaking into her skin, their final screams still ringing in her ears.
Through starvation, watching food rot in front of her, inches from her grasp, until she learned that hunger makes people do things they never thought they could.
Through whispers that told her that she wasn’t human.
Wasn’t anything.
Just a thing that could endure.
A thing that could learn.
A thing that could be molded into whatever someone wanted.
By the time she was six, she had killed.
By the time she was eight, she stopped feeling anything when she did it.
By the time she was ten, the world had no place for her.
Because she had never belonged to the world at all.
And maybe she never would.