The closer I got, the sharper their images became. Broad shoulders. Massive height. Stillness that felt sentient. A strangled sound broke from my throat as I stumbled back, hip slamming against the table. The lamp toppled, bulb bursting in a violent, white flash—then nothing.
Shadows swallowed the room. Only the Christmas lights remained, strings of red and green that made everything surreal.
The storm’s reflection sharpened their silhouettes outside. I kept to the shadows, eyes straining. The wind screamed, but they didn’t move.
“Not real,” I whispered, though my voice betrayed me. “You’re not real.” Yet they stayed, those three masked predators cut from night. Unmoving and watching, although I couldn’t see their faces.
In the faint reflection of the window, I caught my face. Wide eyes, parted lips, breath rushing out of me as fear tangled with something hungrier.
The scene I’d imagined so many times unfoldedoutside of the window, the ones I hadn’t yet written. A name, the first one I would have introduced, rose unbidden, burning the back of my tongue.
Roman.
And then the power cut out, and the world went black.
2
The silence had claws.
It crawled under my skin, biting, tasting, devouring. The kind of silence that felt too alive to be safe.
The Christmas lights were the only thing that dared breathe color back into the dark. The generator outside coughed and rattled, keeping them alive. Red and green bled across the walls, soft at first, then pulsing as if the lights had learned how to mimic a heartbeat.
My laptop screen dimmed to a ghostly glow. The cursor blinked at a slow, steady rhythm of something patient. Something waiting. I told myself to move, to do anything. Instead, I stood there listening.
The storm screeched, throwing itself at the cabinas if it wanted in. The wind howled down the chimney, a hollow, hungry sound that made the flames dance wild in the hearth. They swayed and bent under the invisible force, stretching long and thin, but they never went out.
Then came the crunch. Footsteps. Not wind this time. Definite. Deliberate. Every part of me went rigid. I counted to three, then paused, and started counting again. Whoever was outside… They were pacing the porch, making sure I heard all of them.
For a breath, everything died… the lights, sound, even the air froze. All I could focus on was the blue glow of my laptop because it felt like the only proof I was still alive.
I moved to the sink, yanked open the cabinet, and grabbed the flashlight. Its beam carved a trembling path through the dark, catching on the frost, webbing the corners of the windows.
“Who’s there?” I shouted, but the storm devoured the words instantly.
I snatched a butcher knife next, gripping it tight in my other hand. The light shook across the glass, landing on the blurred shapes now standing closer, now only barely a foot from the window.
Snow clung to their coats, to the edges of their masks, like frostbite that belonged there. One ofthem turned his head. It was slow and calculated. My pulse spiked so hard it hurt.
“You need to leave,” I called out, my voice cracking. “You picked the wrong fucking cabin, assholes.”
The generator backfired, a sharp bang that echoed and jolted me. Then it caught itself again. The Christmas lights blinked back to life, red and green bleeding across the glass like veins.
The men didn’t move. They just stood outside, carved from the storm, the colors sliding over their masks as if they were bleeding—terrifying yet arousing all in the same breath.
One wore a mask that was matte black with angular cutouts and a faint metallic sheen. It hid the lower half of his face, but his eyes were trained right on me.
The second one’s mask was a skull, weathered and distressed. And absolutely bone-chilling.
And the third wore the most terrifying one to me… one reminiscent of a stag with violent-looking antlers, each tine sharp and caked with something deep and dark.
I wasn’t the kind of woman who panicked easily. I’d written about murders, obsessions, and men who wore masks for love or for the thrill of fear. I was anerotic romance author. I’d turned danger into desire a hundred times on the page.
But writing it hadn’t prepared me for this… for the sick thrill crawling under my skin now.
I told myself it was adrenaline. It wasn’t. When I pressed my thighs together, heat pulsed sharp and undeniable, and I hated myself for feeling it.
I should’ve been terrified. And I was. But not enough. And under the terror was something else. Something… darkly curious. The air in the cabin felt thicker now the more I thought about what I was feeling. I could almost taste it on my tongue.
