Your hands, slick with warm, sticky blood, trembled in a violent rhythm — each strike a desperate punctuation in the cacophony of your fractured soul. The venomous words she spat about your mother didn’t just sting; they tore through the fragile veil of restraint you’d woven around your grief and fury, shredding it to tatters.

Rage was no longer an emotion; it was a physical force, a tempest that consumed reason and blurred the edges of everything you once held sacred. The world narrowed to the savage beat of your fists against her flesh, the metallic tang of blood mingling with the bitter taste of vengeance on your tongue. The crowd’s murmurs faded into a distant echo, swallowed by the roar inside your head.

Then, abruptly, a weight — solid, unyielding — seized your waist, wrenching you backward with a force that sent your breath scattering. Caleb. The name fell from your lips like a fractured prayer — half pleading, half defiant.

His eyes, wide and haunted, met yours with an intensity that cracked the armor of rage you’d donned. The fear in his gaze was raw, visceral — not for himself, but for the fragmenting pieces of you he desperately tried to save.