Pressed against the wall, I stayed still, listening for any hint of sound. Then the lights flicked off.
Pitch black wrapped around me like a heavy blanket. Only the faint glow from the woman’s doorway still pulsed, weak and distant, at the far end of the corridor—and even that started to shrink.
She was closing the door.
A flash of panic thundered through my chest. What if I got locked down here? What if no one came for days? Weeks? I could die of dehydration in this goddamn maze.
“Wait!” The word tore out of me as I sprinted toward the fading light. “Please wait!”
Something caught under my foot. I hit the floor hard, my palms scraping against the cold stone. But I didn’t stop. I got up and kept running.
The glow narrowed into a sliver, a sharp line of light slicing through the black. I reached it just before it disappeared.
“Stop!” I yelled through the crack.
The glow stilled. Then, slowly, the door opened.
There she was: the woman with the long white hair. She looked curious but not surprised.
“That was stupid,” she said as I slipped past her.
I turned to the stone door that she closed behind us. It blended into the wall like a bookshelf hiding a secret room. We walked into her living room.
“What if I didn’t hear you?” she said, glancing back at me. “You could’ve been trapped. The rock doesn’t let sound through. I wouldn’t have heard your screams.”
“I could’ve knocked on the yellow basement door,” I said defensively.
“That connector room is soundproof too,” she said flatly. “Nobody would’ve heard your knocking. Or your sobs.”
“Oh. Well, thanks for not leaving me out there.”
She didn’t answer, just walked past me into the kitchen like she hadn’t heard. My stomach twisted as it all sank in. I was back in this woman’s home.
Was someone keeping her here? Or was I losing my mind?
“Are you . . . real?” I asked.
She grabbed a dustpan from a cabinet and crouched by the coffee table, picking up broken glass. Her hair spilled over her shoulders like liquid silver.
“What kind of question is that? Are you crazy?”
She wasn’t joking. She was genuinely asking if I was mentally unwell.
“I don’t know anymore, to be honest,” I confessed.
She stopped moving. Her gaze locked on mine. It was sharp and steady, as if she were a hawk spotting something twitching in the high grass.
“Well, that’s pathetic,” she said. “So far gone you don’t even know.”
I let that sink in. Anna had tried so hard to make me feel okay, and this woman had shattered those efforts with a single remark.
The woman seemed to notice the shift in me.
“Sit,” she said, pointing at the couch near the coffee table.
In the space around us, everything was clean and high-end. Stainless steel appliances gleamed, and the massive flat-screen TV mounted to the wall looked untouched, like no one really watched it.
I kept her in my line of sight as I crossed the room and lowered myself stiffly onto the edge of the couch. Quickly, I unlocked my phone with my thumb and tapped the record button.
