I wake to a noise that isn't a noise—it's a shrill sound that repeats at intervals and hurts, slices my thoughts in half and won't stop. And when I open my eyes, I don't see the ceiling of the cell, but the wall in front of me, drenched in a cold, foreign light that forgives nothing.
A projector.
It sits high up, in a corner, like a soulless witness, and it's playing something I recognize instantly, even as my mind resists, clings, refuses to accept it. The hotel room. That room where I was alive in his arms. The bed. The door. The warm, cinnamon-colored light that once felt like a promise and now looks dirty, fake, as if it had always been a lie.
Me.
I see myself entering the room where Ivar was, naked, my skin still sensitive, my steps unsteady—and I'm laughing. A stupid, messy laugh, born of shock and too much of everything, from a mind desperately trying not to break. Only now the images are cut, slowed down, selected with a sickly care, and my laughter is no longer what it was. On the wall it looks like an invitation. Like a summons. As if I knew exactly what I was doing.
Cut.
I see myself putting on the shirt Ivar gave me, the fabric too big on me, that foolish smile stuck on my face for one second too long, two seconds too long, until, stripped of context, it looks like a smile of complicity, of pleasure—not of dizziness and fear.
Another cut.
I'm bent over Duca's briefcase. My hands search, insist, look determined, and when I emerge holding the black file, the image freezes for a fraction of a second on my face—just enough to make it look like I'm triumphant, like I've won something.
Then Gaston enters.
I see him furious, agitated, shouting, his face red, his gestures wide. I stretch my hand toward him, my mouth open in a scream that can't be heard, because the next frame slices everything away.
A close-up.
The gun.
The finger.
The fire.
The sound of the shot is too loud, too close, too real, and it feels like it slams straight into my chest.
Gaston falls.
And then comes the final image, the one that tears me apart from the inside: my face, caught in a frozen smile—a smile that, torn away from everything before and after it, looks like satisfaction, like pleasure, like guilt.
The projection stops.
Three minutes.
Then it starts again.
The same frames, the same brutal cuts, the same story told crookedly, without a beginning and without the right to an ending.
At first I try not to look. I close my eyes, turn my head away, cling to my breathing—but the sound remains.
The gunshot.
Always the gunshot.
After a while, time comes undone. Minutes stretch, melt, turn into hours, and the images are no longer just on the wall—they're inside me, stuck to the insides of my eyelids. I see them even when I blink.
At some point I can no longer make out faces. I no longer recognize frames.
I hear only the gunshot.
I hear it again and again.
Endlessly. HOURS.
At first I tell myself that I know the truth, that I know what really happened, that the images are just fragments torn from context, carefully edited lies. But after so many replays, something inside me begins to shift the wrong way, like a piece that no longer wants to stay where it belongs.
Maybe I laughed too loudly. Maybe I smiled at exactly the wrong moment. Maybe my hand really did rest on the gun. Have I ever even held a gun in my hand?
These thoughts don't arrive all at once. They seep in slowly, sticky, like a fog sliding under a door and refusing to leave. I start to wonder if my memory has betrayed me, if the shock erased something important, if the truth doesn't look slightly different from the way I remember it.
I hear my own voice in my head, but I'm no longer sure it's mine.
Maybe that's how it was. Maybe that's how they saw me. Maybe that's how I am.
And just as that thought takes root, just as it begins to hurt more than the chains, the door opens without a sound.
I don't flinch. I'm too tired to flinch anymore.
Duca walks in and says nothing at first. The projection keeps running, and the cold light slices his face in two, carving harsh shadows over features I know all too well. He stops by the wall, doesn't look at the images—he looks at me.
He stands there for a few seconds without speaking, his gaze fixed on me, as if weighing once more what's left of me after the hours in which the projection has slowly, methodically, chewed away at everything I was certain of about myself.
Then he turns his head slightly, unhurried, and says over his shoulder in a neutral, almost bored tone, as if giving some trivial instruction:
"Make her cry."
I don't know who he's talking to. I don't see anyone. I only hear the words and the way they land—cold and precise—and for a moment I don't understand what's happening, because a part of me still believes he'll turn back, that he still has something to say, that he can't leave like this.
But he does.
His footsteps recede, calm, controlled. I realize it too late.
"No, wait… Duca!" I shout, my voice breaking, desperate.
The projection keeps running on the wall. Me laughing. Me smiling. Me with the black file in my hand. Me with the gun. Me smiling.
"It was Ivar!" I scream all at once, with all the air I have left. "It was Ivar!"
The words come out chaotic, thrown one over another, but they're clear to me—they're the truth fighting its way to the surface.
"Ivar! He did it! Not me! Not me!" I repeat, until my throat burns and my chest tightens painfully.
I scream at the door, at the walls, at no one, with the irrational hope that he hears me, that he'll stop, that he'll understand, that he'll make the connection I'm seeing now, too late.
The door remains open, and the silence after his footsteps is heavier than my screams. For an absurd moment, I still wait to see him come back, to hear his voice, to say it was just a method, a cruel game, anything. But nothing happens. Duca doesn't return.
From the darkness of the doorway, however, a silhouette detaches itself.
Hugo.
He seems to materialize out of the shadows, slowly, unhurried, and his laughter comes before his steps—a thick, low laugh that crawls along the floor and climbs the walls. His mouth is stretched wide in a horrifying grin, the kind that promises nothing good, and his eyes flash briefly in the projector's light.
This is who Duca told to make me cry. This is who he left here to break me.
I don't get the chance to say anything else. He doesn't even need to touch me. Fear arrives first.
I start crying before he reaches me, a kind of crying that catches me off guard, that shatters my chest from the inside and softens my entire body, as if I'd been held tense for far too long and now everything gives way at once.
The tears run without stopping, hot, filthy, and the sounds that escape me are small, helpless—far too human for a place like this. Hugo stops a few steps away, watches me fall apart on my own, and his laughter deepens, satisfied.
He hasn't touched me yet.
And still, I'm already crying.
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