In hell, I am the sum of my flaws.

This lasts for eternity, though I have no  idea how long eternity really is. There is no time here. A minute, a day, a  century, they are all measured by how much agony can be stuffed into a  single heartbeat.

I scream as my flesh burns and my organs  shrivel. My skin blackens and peels, and flakes of it fall to the floor,  like a rain of ashes. This must be hell’s version of snow. I’m horrified by  my own disintegration, but I never lose consciousness. He won’t let me miss  a moment of my own torture, and he leaves my throat intact, because my  screams are the soundtrack of his triumph, and somehow in hell I never lose  my voice.

What he wants most from me is screaming,  and I have no choice but to deliver.

Then, when there’s so little left of me  that I can’t recognize the charred, twisted remains of my own body, he puts  me back together so he can start from scratch, and there is no end to his  imagination or to the pain it inspires. I cannot think. I cannot breathe. I  cannot sleep. I can do nothing but suffer and scream, and here it becomes  clear that I deserve nothing more. He shows me that I’ve ruined every life I  ever touched, and I will spend eternity paying for every mistake I’ve ever  made. I will pay, and I will pay again, then I will pay some more, and  forever will come and go while I am still paying for sins I’ve long since  forgotten I committed.

He wants to know every part of me. Every  thought in my head and every cell in my body, and he seems to think that  taking me apart one piece at a time—one leg, one finger, one memory, one  thought—will show him how I feel things he can’t possibly understand. Things  like love and pity and compassion, few of which I can even remember, with my  own screams carving canyons through my mind.

But dissecting me won’t help. He will  never understand any human emotion that doesn’t feed his appetite for greed  or for suffering. Hellions don’t have that capacity. And when he figures  that out, his anger swells like the ocean tide until I’m afraid we’ll both  drown in it, and I know his fury should make me happy, for some reason I  can’t quite remember, but it doesn’t, because in this place, his anger only  means my pain. In fact, his pleasure means my pain, and his confusion means  my pain, and his very presence means my pain.

And then, when my pain finally begins to  bore him, hell changes, and I learn all new ways to suffer.

I remember me now. I remember who I was,  when I was something other than this. Other than agony given battered shape  and shrill voice.

I was a daughter. I was a cousin, a niece,  a classmate, a friend, a girlfriend.

I am none of that here, and the pain is  infinitelyworse now that I know what I’ve lost.

He shows me what I’ve missed as I tumble  through eternity, banged and bruised and abraded by my own memories. He  shows me my friends. My family. He shows me that my attempt to save them has  brought them all to ruin.

Hazel eyes, twisting in pain.

Long, thin hair, streaked with  blood.

Black eyes flashing in fury, in  futility.

Tears trailing down pale cheeks.

Grief and anger lead to violence, and  neglect, and relapse, and pain that has no end.

I haven’t freed them—I’ve sentenced them  to an existence of guilt and tribulations I’ve caused but cannot fix from  beyond the grave. And I am so far beyond the  grave now that the thought of being buried in a dark, quiet hole in the  ground feels like mercy.

He shows me that Emma is lost. She is  drowning in the suffering around her, and it takes over her mind until she  can’t think. Can’t form coherent sentences. This time when they lock her up,  I am not there to set her free. She sits in the corner of an empty room and  screams my name over and over. I am the only thought she can still express,  and the pain in her voice rips through my very center, shattering me into  bits too small for the king’s horses and his men to ever find, much less put  back together. And for no reason he will explain to me, Tod is not there. He  does not help her.

Where is Tod?

My captor shows me that Nash has escaped  Emma’s fate. He’s escaped everything, except for a saccharine euphoria and  the memories he lives in, convinced they are reality as his body wastes away  because he’s forgotten about food and rest and life. He pays for his high  with bits of himself, and remembered bits of me, and when those are all  gone, he pays with bits of Sabine, even as he pushes her away.

Months flow like water beneath the bridge  of their lives, and when she cannot wakehimshakehimsavehim, Nash finally lets it all go, and I cannot see the reaper who  comes for his soul, but I know Nash does not resist. He lets the last of his  life fade away while he rides on a vaguely pleasant fog, unaware that it is  dissolving beneath him until he crashes to the ground, to the floor of his  own bedroom, never to rise again. And for no reason I can understand, Tod is  not there. He does not help his brother.

Where is Tod?

Sabine does not go to Nash’s funeral. She  cannot look at him in his coffin, skin molded to the shape of his bones,  cheeks hollow, eyes sunken in dark wells carved out of his skull. But I  cannot look away.

I have done this, and I am not allowed to  forget that. I have led my first love to his ruin, and with him, so many  others fall.