It had taken her years to trust again, and it wasn’t surprising that Dima was the only one that she could really settle into life with.

Having grown up as the best of friends, Olena took his departure from her life had. The once bright and optimistic girl retreated into herself, refusing to make friends or to open up. Her sisters tried everything they knew, but the loss of his ripped her heart out. And she was broken. In that brokenness, she was the perfect prey. He had been popular, and she had been drunk. Begged him to stop, that night of the party, as he stripped her dress off. She pushed him away, but he was twice her size, and there was no real chance of him stopping. He grinned and laughed at her tears.

It was just the start of her grooming.

Her senior year, she found herself with a guy who suddenly started forcing her to sleep with his friends. Her self-esteem was so low that it didn’t seem like much to keep him happy. And just like that, she was the victim of human sex trafficking without even realizing it. Her body was no longer her own, and she dropped out of high school to follow a boy who brought her to a bigger city. She spent most of her teens and early twenties as a whore, beaten and raped by men who tried to call it ‘paying for services’. But somehow, she found herself pulled from the ring by a secret organization bent on ending trafficking. At 24, she was given a new chance at life.

The transition was rough. But the retreat that the girls recovered in specialized in victims of sexual assault. And eventually, she was able to get her GED and focus on things that made her happy. They found her an apartment to share with two other girls and helped her regain her sense of self. In applying for college classes, it was there that she was reunited with Dima. And between him and regular counselor visits, her demons didn’t seem so bad.

They had tried to start slow, but it was obvious that the budding friendship was more than that. But each time they tried to be more, she pushed away as if flashing back into her days as a hooker. His patience was that of a saint, and when he first asked her to move in, she had a hard time refusing. It was another year before she was able to let her guard down, to trust him wholly and be with him. But even in the comfort of his arms, she would still deal with nightmares. She’d wake up unable to breathe, remembering the hand that had been held over her mouth as she screamed. There were times she would fight against him without knowing, and collapse into a mess the moment she realized that she had caused the red scratches with her nails. Olena often begged him to leave her, but he refused. And his proposal sealed their fate. He wanted her, broken and mending.

Around the anniversary of her rape, the nights were harder. She stayed up after he went asleep, unable to rest her mind. And when she did, the demons would cause her to lose herself in their grasp. The prescription for Ambien had been her doctor’s suggestion. It would help her sleep. And it had. But she hadn’t told Dima about it, because she was partly ashamed of the need for it. She was very well aware of his feelings on chemicals that numb the mind. But, in her mind, this was for sleep. And the drug didn’t have any addictive tendencies. Still, tucked away in her bedside drawer, it was her dirty secret.

It was hard for her to settle into the domestic life, to balance her job in the fashion industry and planning a wedding. There wouldn’t be much of a fuss on that front-- she was making her own dress and she wanted something low key, preferably in front of the small beachfront cottage they’d made their home. But she had taken the fixer-upper and focused her sadness into its decorating, just like he’d poured his patience and frustration into its rebuilding. Together, they had created the perfect life.

Even if she still slept with a knife under her pillow.

With the anniversary just around the corner, she was unable to deny the need for sleeping pills. Each night, she would add one to her normal routine of birth control and nightly vitamins, him completely clueless or not even home to see it. And she’d sleep, and wake up refreshed without a single memory of how she’d slept. His reassurance that her nights had been dream free was simply motivation to keep taking them. At least, to get her through the anniversary. Then, she promised herself, she would stop. 2 more nights, and then she would toss the bottle in the bin and try the natural options her doctor had her on the rest of the year.

Her nightly routine when he was gone was focused on self-care. A lazy bath, sometimes taking over an hour as she refilled the hot water several times to keep it cozy. Then, she’d make herself a cup of tea and settle out on the porch with a book, enjoying the relaxing melody of the ocean combined with a good novel. Once she was sleepy, she would head upstairs to tuck herself into bed. Tonight, she’d decided to finish off the bottle of red wine that she and Dima had opened a week prior. Glass discarded in the kitchen, she was popping her medication and in bed shortly after.

The nightmares were always violent. Rarely centered around the sexual experiences she had lived through, they were more focused on physical abuse. And even after weeks of being nightmare-free, they seemed to rear their ugly head. The noise below only fueled her fear, as if someone else was joining in, to hold her own and beat her. She didn’t know she was actually screaming. Didn’t know she was fighting against the sheets as if they were tying her to the bed.

And she certainly didn’t realize that her hand was wrapped firmly around the hilt of the knife.

Later, during the investigation, her doctor would tell detectives about her PTSD, about the prescription for the sleep aid. On the stand, she would testify that Olena had endured years of abuse. That Ambien and alcohol had the known side effect of a ‘wakeful state’, where nightmares could blend into reality. Her doctor made sure the jury was fully aware of the side effects of the drug, made sure they knew just how easy it was for the lines to blur. And Olena sat and described her past. And through sobs, she would describe the events.

The rushed footfall up the stairs had sounded like the hollow ones that were in the old rickety house she’d ended up in. They sounded like the indicator of someone else, coming to join in on the fun. Fighting against the demons, she saw a menacing man with a gun, which only justified her grip on the small knife in her hands. In that moment, when he touched her, she was still locked in a nightmare, one where the unnamed assailant had come to have his way and then end her life.

The closing argument made a point to reinforce that fact.

As he shook her shoulders, Olena felt like his hands were around her neck. Against him, she started to struggle. The fight for her life was real, and even his words couldn’t break the battle that raged in her mind.

As her airway closed off, she made one last effort to free herself from his grasp. Her arm came up, knife in hand, and it slipped in between his rib cage. The possible wounds were many, from a punctured lung to an injured kidney. But her aim had been true, and the blade completely severed the renal artery. For being such a vital part of the blood supply, it was superficial against the cage.

It was in that moment, she woke from her nightmare.

The medical examiner would quote the statistics of that exact stab wound. It would have been a difficult, fatal wound to blow. More often than not, the ribs offered the protection they were designed to have and a knife wound would bounce off the hard material. And had she left the knife in place, there was the potential for him to have been taken to surgery, where his chances of surviving were high. The knife would have tampenoded the wound to slow the bleeding, had it not been ripped from his back the moment she realized what she’d done.

It took her a second to realize what she’d done, staring at the knife in her hand, then up at him.