On that day, after the silence had swallowed her footsteps, something inside me died. I don't know what it was, it had no name or shape, but the void it left behind was heavy and cold. It was dead.

  My life returned to its old routine, but in an uglier version. The children returned to their "game." They would push me, kick me, and spit on me. But I no longer resisted. I no longer screamed. I no longer felt anything. I would let them do whatever they wanted with my body, my mind swimming in a thick grey fog. After a while, they got bored. There was no more fun in beating a corpse that didn't feel pain. So they left me alone.

  A year passed, then two.

  The colors were fading from the world. The grey sky was no longer sad, and the blue moon was no longer beautiful. They were just pale spots on a dark ceiling. The soup no longer had a taste; it was just fuel to keep the body running. The rain no longer had a texture; it was just water that wet my clothes. It wasn't the world that had changed, but the eye that saw it had died.

  At night, my sessions with Ikumi continued. But they had changed too. She would hit me harder, with desperation, as if trying to awaken something dead by force. But my body received the blows like a rock receiving rain, with complete indifference. The pain became just a dull pressure, as if it were happening to another body that I was watching from a distance.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  When force failed, she resorted to words. "Do you remember that little witch?" she whispered one night, her voice like the hiss of a snake. "She screamed so much for you. Do you remember her voice?"

  She waited. She was looking for a spark of anger, a flicker of sadness, anything. But she found only emptiness.

  On another night, after all her attempts had failed, I saw her go to that old drawer and take out the first leather whip. The whip of twisted "love." The tool that had witnessed our most "intimate" moments.

  She used it. The same blows, the same rhythm. She was trying to recreate that sick spark that had been between us. But cold ashes do not ignite.

  That night, something I never expected happened. She stopped in the middle of a strike and threw the whip to the floor. She bent down in front of me, and I saw something strange in her eyes: real despair. Her own despair.

  She had run out of tricks. She had lost her control. She no longer had any effect on me. "I love you, my son," she said in a broken voice, her words a distorted echo of words I had once begged her with. "Can you go back to how you were?"

  I looked at her with empty eyes. I said nothing. There was nothing to be said. A dead heart cannot promise to return to life.

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