I know who she is.
I know she’s mine.
My boots echo against the stone as I stand, each footfall a declaration of intent. The sound carries through the corridor like thunder, like a storm rolling closer with every step, and Iimagine her hearing it in her room, imagine her body going rigid with recognition.
I don’t walk fast. I don’t need to. Speed would suggest urgency, would imply I lack control. The waiting is half the torment, the anticipation half the punishment. I want her to feel it—want the silence to crack under the weight of my approach, want her to know before I even reach the door that I’m coming.
The cameras hum as I pass, their red eyes blinking in the darkness like demonic sentries. My reflection flickers in the black glass of the hallway windows, warped and wrong, distorted by old glass and the absence of light. But I don’t flinch. Monsters don’t need mirrors to recognise themselves. We know what we are.
I stop at her door.
The wood is thick—old oak, centuries old, installed when this house was built to withstand sieges and secrets. Strong. It holds her screams the way a vault holds gold, the way a tomb holds bodies. My palm presses against it, feeling the faint vibration of her shifting inside, feeling the heat of her room seeping through the grain. She’s awake. Of course she is. Waiting. Always waiting for me to decide when our game continues.
My forehead rests against the door for a moment, breath fogging the varnished surface. I close my eyes and imagine it’s her skin beneath my lips, imagine the door dissolving between us. I imagine pressing harder until the wood splinters and my skull breaks through and I can sink my teeth into the silence she’s made, can taste the defiance on her tongue.
But I don’t.
Not yet.
Patience, I remind myself, the word a mantra, a prayer, a promise. Patience is sharper than any blade. Patience is the difference between a quick death and a slow unravelling.
“Little star,” I whisper, voice low enough the wood barely catches it, low enough she might think she imagined it. “You think you’ve found your rebellion. You think you’ve built a fire I can’t put out. But all you’ve done is feed mine. All you’ve done is give me more fuel.”
I curl my fingers against the grain, feeling every ridge and valley of the wood. The urge to wrench it open is violent, undeniable, animal. My teeth ache with it, my jaw clenched so tight I can feel the bones grinding. My blood hums with it, singing a song of possession and violence and need.
I step back.
I want her to break herself tonight. I want her to reach for me in the silence, to beg the walls, to choke on her own voice when I don’t answer. I want her to realise the cage isn’t paper, it isn’t steel, it isn’t the locks on the doors or the cameras or the isolation.
It’s absence.
When I walk through that door tomorrow, she’ll learn that absence is only the beginning. That the real cage is the space I occupy in her mind, the room I’ve carved out in her psyche where she can never evict me.
I turn. Walk away. My boots echo again, slow and deliberate, each step measured and intentional. The cameras hum their lullaby, red eyes blinking in rhythm with hers, with her heartbeat, with the pulse of blood through veins that belong to me.
Behind me, she shifts. I don’t need to see it to know—don’t need the monitors or the cameras or the microphones. I feel it in my bones, in the marrow, in the parts of me that are already fused with her. She feels the silence. She feels me leaving. And she hates it more than anything I could’ve done to her tonight.
Good.
Let her hate me.
Let her miss me.
Let her bleed ink into the sheets and whisper my name like a curse, like a benediction, like the answer to a question she’s too afraid to ask.
Tomorrow, she’ll understand the truth.
Tomorrow, I’ll bring the contract to her bed, spread it across the silk like a shroud.
Tomorrow, she’ll sign it in blood.
The control room hums low when I return, monitors glowing like stained glass in the dark, like icons in a cathedral dedicated to obsession. The equipment fills one wall—screens stacked in a grid, each showing a different angle of her room, of the corridors, of the grounds where nothing moves but shadows and wind.
I sit again, slow, deliberate, blood still drying along the creases of my palm where the forged signature cut me, where paper became blade. The contract lies scattered across the desk, but I don’t need the paper now.
I have her.
The feed flickers. For a heartbeat the screen stutters, static cutting her into jagged shapes, fragmenting her into pieces like a cubist painting—and then she’s whole again, thrashing in the sheets, hair whipping wild as her chest heaves with the force of her scream. Silent on the monitor, but I hear it anyway, feel it vibrating through the floor, through the walls, through the foundations of this house.
