I ended the call. I had to.
Every second and mile took me further into his world, further away from the life I wanted. Trapped. Suffocated. The chains tightened.
Then the plane shook.
The lights flickered. Panic spread like a virus through the cabin. I looked around, seeing the fear in the eyes of every passenger. I wasn’t the only one suffocating.
The pilot's voice cracked over the intercom, but it was barely audible above the growing chaos. "Passengers, we're experiencing an electrical failure. Please remain calm as our technical team resolves the issue."
Calm? The plane lurched violently. My heart skipped. I turned to the window, desperate to find something familiar, but all I could see were thick clouds swirling like a storm that wouldn’t let me go.
The turbulence increased. The shaking and rattling felt too real—too close. Then, the lights cut out. Everything went dark.
I gasped. Did Alexei do this? Did he curse me?
The cabin erupted. Screams. Desperate voices. Panic. I couldn’t breathe. The air felt too thin, too tight. My cell phone slipped from my hand and crashed to the floor as if mocking my loss of control.
I closed my eyes, trying to block out the chaos. But all I could hear was his voice, still ringing in my ears, "If you don't show up at my house at the scheduled time, say goodbye to your shitty relatives!"
The terror was all-encompassing, suffocating.
I thought back to those words he had hurled at me. His promise. His threat. The invisible chains pulled me back, pulling me deeper into his world, the world I couldn’t escape—the world I had never wanted to be in.
And in that moment, as the plane shook again, I realized I wasn’t just running away from him. I was running from my fear.
But the harder I ran, the tighter the chains pulled.
The pilot's voice came again, but it was muffled, distant, lost amid the panic now consuming everyone.
The plane lurched again, the violence of it slamming into me. This was not just turbulence. This was something else. Something I couldn’t control.
I looked out the window once more, my mind racing. Clouds. Nothing but endless clouds.
The darkness swallowed us whole.
