"What exactly is he up to?" Anne wondered, her thoughts racing even as her oxygen-deprived brain struggled to function. She had never witnessed her son in such a state of frenzy and violence. It was as if he had become a stranger, unrecognizable from the son she had raised.
"I'm not going to let her go," Paul shouted, his voice strained and distorted by his own inner torment. His grip remained unrelenting, but there was a flicker of indecision in his eyes, a glimmer of the son Anne once knew.
Anne whimpered, her words barely audible as she pleaded, "It's... hurting, Paul." Her voice held a mix of pain and desperation, a mother's plea to her son to release her from his suffocating grasp.
In that moment, a battle raged within Paul's tortured soul. His grip slowly began to loosen, his fingers trembling as they slid away from his mother's throat. He staggered back, his breaths ragged and uneven, as if he had awakened from a dreadful nightmare.
