Security footage.
The hallway.
The kitchen.
The garage.
My voice cuts the silence like a blade.
“You tried the garage door last night.”
She stiffens.
“You’ll find it’s wired directly to the mainframe. The moment you touch it again, I’ll know. And next time… you won’t get a warning.”
I toss the tablet beside her, the screen still flashing the frozen image of her reaching for the doorknob barefoot, wearing only one of my shirts.
And then I lean in again.
Close enough for her to see the shadow in my eyes.
Close enough for her to taste it.
“I’ll leave you to clean yourself up,” I whisper, brushing a knuckle across her jaw with mock affection. “But don’t get any ideas about wiping away what I left in you. That was a gift.”
I pause at the door. Let the silence stretch.
“I’ll be back.”
And I don’t mean tonight.
I mean always.
Tahlia
Ilie there long after he leaves, unmoving except for the trembling in my thighs and the slow, sticky ache between them that won’t dissipate.
The scent of him is everywhere—on the sheets, on my skin, inside me where I can’t escape it.
It clings like rot that’s seeped into the fibres.
Like sin that’s become part of my biology.
I should be angry. I should scream until my throat bleeds. Break something. Scream again louder.
But my voice is missing, buried somewhere beneath the cracked ceiling and the soft hiss of the AC vent above me, like even the air circulation system is watching, recording, cataloguing my breakdown.
And I think that’s the worst part—realising I’m not alone even when the door is closed, even in these moments that should be private.
He’s watching.
He’s always watching.
I sit up slowly, and it feels like peeling myself out of someone else’s skin, like shedding an identity I never chose. The shirt I’m wearing—his shirt, because of course it is—sticks to the sweaton my back, and my thighs are streaked with evidence of what he left behind. The humiliation is thick and sharp, coating my tongue like copper. But worse than that is the part of me that feels… empty now that he’s gone, hollow in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
I hate that realisation.
I hate him for creating it.
