That night, she could not sleep. She lay in her bed, the sheets clean and cool against her skin, and stared into the darkness. Relief was a physical lightness in her limbs. Guilt was a cold stone in her gut. She had wished for this, prayed for it, paid for it with her own blood. Grief for the young man who had carried her through a flood was a tight, sharp ache in her throat. And beneath it all, a current of something new and frighteningly powerful: desire. She thought of Maruz, a silent sentinel in her living room, a magnificent monster who had treated her with more tenderness and respect than her own husband ever had. She clutched the talisman at her neck. It was no longer burning, but it was warm, a solid, constant promise against her skin. She was bound to him, the beautiful, terrible consequence of her own survival. And in the silent darkness of her first night of freedom, she did not know if she should be terrified or thrilled.
The Demon's Gift
Lina woke to silence. It was not the familiar, tense silence of an empty apartment waiting for a key to turn in the lock. It was a profound, hollowed-out quiet, the silence of a space that had been cleansed by fire. The watery morning light filtering through the grimy windowpane seemed less hostile than usual, painting soft gray stripes across the floor. For a long, disoriented moment, she lay perfectly still, convinced the night had been a fever dream, a grand hallucination brought on by bleach fumes and terror. Then she felt it. A slow, steady pulse of heat against her sternum. Her fingers, acting on an instinct older than memory, sought the source. Theyclosed around the blood-dark talisman, its polished stone a living, breathing thing against her skin. It was real. He was real. It was over.
She sat up, the thin sheet pooling around her waist. The air did not feel empty; it felt vacant. Ramon’s oppressive psychic weight, a presence that had lingered in the apartment even when he was a thousand miles away at sea, was gone. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood. Her body felt impossibly light, as if she had been carrying a second person on her shoulders for eight years and had only just set the burden down. She walked out of the bedroom, her bare feet making no sound on the wood floor. The living room was just as she remembered, a small, sad space full of cheap furniture and ghosts. The candles she had lit were all black, waxy puddles on their dishes. The air still carried a faint, unearthly perfume - the sharp tang of ozone after a lightning strike and the intoxicating sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. His scent.
On the kitchen table, where yesterday’s newspaper and a ring of condensation from Ramon’s water bottle had been, sat a single, immaculate manila folder. It had not been there when she had fallen into an exhausted sleep. She approached it as if it were a venomous snake, her hand hovering over its smooth surface. Her fingers trembled, the skin on their tips still chapped and raw. She finally made contact, the crisp paper cool beneath her touch. She opened it.
The first document was a bank statement. Her eyes scanned the columns of numbers, but her mind refused to process them. She saw her name - Lina Delos Santos - and a balance with so many zeroes she had to count them twice. It was a fortune, a sum so vast it felt like a clerical error from another universe. Beneath it was another statement, this one for an investment portfolio, its value even more staggering. She shuffled through the papers, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. A deed to a warehouse at the port. Ownership documents fora small fleet of fishing boats. And finally, tucked at the very back, a life insurance policy taken out by Ramon three years prior. It named her, Lina Delos Santos, as the sole beneficiary. A small, official-looking slip was attached to it with a paperclip. It was a preliminary death certificate.
*Lost at sea. Presumed deceased.*
The ink was still sharp, the paper still warm, as if it had just been printed from a machine that operated outside of time. Her eyes caught the dates stamped across the top of each document - all of them marking a time weeks ahead, as if these papers had been issued from a future that hadn’t yet arrived.
She sank into a kitchen chair, the documents spread before her like the entrails of a sacrifice. This was the architecture of her freedom, built from the bones of Ramon’s secret life. Maruz hadn’t just erased a man; he had audited his sins, liquidated his greed, and delivered the proceeds to her doorstep. A cold, terrifying awe washed over her. The power to unmake a man was one thing. The power to rewrite contracts, to forge histories, to bend the soulless, grinding machinery of human bureaucracy to his will… that was the power of a god. Or a devil.
She had to know if the change was real, if it held outside these four walls. She dressed in a simpledaster,the loose cotton hiding the new, tender mark on her chest where the talisman had burned her, a small, circular brand that was the only physical proof of the night’s events. She slipped on her sandals and forced herself out the door, into the familiar, humid embrace of the barangay morning. The world looked the same - the same stray dogs, the same tangle of electricalwires overhead, the same smell of frying garlic and diesel fumes. But it felt different. The air itself seemed to part for her.
Tita Letty was arranging sachets of shampoo on the wire rack outside her sari-sari store. Her perpetually scanning eyes landed on Lina, and Lina braced herself for the usual barrage of intrusive questions. It never came. The old woman’s expression, usually sharp with a predatory curiosity, softened into a mask of deep, authentic pity. She placed a hand over her heart. “Ay, Lina,anak,” she said, her voice a low, sympathetic murmur. “I heard about Ramon.Diyos ko po.To just leave you like that… these men, they have no souls.” She shook her head, a gesture of profound disappointment with the entire male gender. “You are better off, you know. But still, the shame he has brought on you… If you need anything, anything at all, you come to me.”
Lina could only nod, her throat tight with a confusion so complete it felt like a kind of madness. Tita Letty’s memory had been re-written. The whispers, the knowing looks, the speculation about what Lina had done to provoke her husband - all of it had been erased and replaced with this new, clean narrative of a woman wronged. As she continued toward the market, it was the same everywhere she went. Neighbors who had once crossed the street to avoid her now met her eyes with looks of quiet solidarity. They saw a victim not of a husband’s fists, but of his abandonment.
Near the covered stalls of the fishmongers, a man in the crisp tan uniform of the local police approached her. Lina recognized his face; he had come to their door once about a noise complaint Ramon had made against a neighbor. His expression then had been one of bored impatience. Now, it was professional and somber.
“Mrs. Delos Santos?” he began, his voice respectful. “I am Officer Reyes. I’m so sorry to bother you at a time like this.”
Lina murmured that it was no bother, her mind racing. She was an actor in a play for which she had never seen the script.
“It’s about your husband,” he continued, flipping open a small notebook. “We’ve been looking into his known associates. It seems he was in… significant trouble. Owed a great deal of money to some very unsavory people from the docks.” He cleared his throat, his gaze dropping to his notes. “We also found evidence of several large, undeclared offshore accounts. It appears he liquidated your joint assets and fled the country sometime yesterday evening.”
Her mind flashed to those documents on her table - the ones dated weeks in the future, the ones with the Kapitan’s signature already in place. She understood now: this was all part of the meticulous story Maruz had crafted. The officer’s face softened as he reached into his pocket. “We found this too,” he said, pulling out a folded paper. “A letter from your husband.”
The officer handed her a folded piece of paper from an evidence bag. She took it with a hand that did not shake. It was Ramon’s messy, block-lettered scrawl. It was his signature. It spoke of debts, of fear for his life, of a new start somewhere far away. It apologized for the pain he was causing her. It was a perfect, damning confession.
“We’re treating this as a missing persons case for now,” Officer Reyes said gently. “But frankly, Mrs. Delos Santos… in these situations, they rarely come back. He is most likely on a cargo ship to Panama by now. I’m very sorry.”
She played her part. Her face crumpled with a believable grief. Tears, hot and genuine - for the man he used to be, for the life that was now a lie - welled in her eyes. She thanked the officer in a choked whisper. He patted her arm with awkward sympathy and left her standing amidst the noise and stench of the market, a wealthy widow born from a demon’s meticulous paperwork.
When she returned to the apartment, the world felt thin, a stage set that could be struck down at any moment. She locked the door, the click of the deadbolt a final, definitive sound. She leaned against it, the forged letter still clutched in her hand.
The air beside her shimmered, like heat rising from asphalt. From the empty space, he solidified, coalescing out of shadow and light. Maruz stood before her, his magnificent form seeming to shrink the small room to the size of a box. His bronze skin gleamed, and the sigils beneath its surface moved in slow, hypnotic patterns. The faint scent of jasmine and ozone filled the air, chasing away the last of the bleach. His volcanic eyes took in the documents in her hand, the tracks of her real tears on her cheeks.
“Your husband’s sins have provided well for you,” he said, his voice a low, resonant hum that vibrated in her bones. He gestured to the papers. “His greed was a deep well, Linang. I merely gave you the bucket to draw from it.”
She looked from the forged letter to the beautiful, terrible creature before her. This was not just freedom. It was a kingdom, bought and paid for with a single drop of her blood.
“But this,” Maruz continued, his gaze sweeping the cramped, water-stained apartment with disdain, “is a cage of his making. It is nothing.” A strange, almost tender light entered his fiery eyes. “I have prepared something better.”
Lina stood amidst the irrefutable evidence of her new life, her mind a whirlwind of awe and terror. “Something better?” she whispered, the words lost in the small, shabby room. “Where?”
Maruz did not answer. He simply moved to stand before her and held out his hand, palm up. It was a simple, profound invitation. His hand was a sculpture of bronze and shadow, the long, elegant fingers impossibly perfect, the skin seeming to emit a faint, internal luminescence. To take it felt like the most significant choice she had made since speaking his name into the darkness. She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then placed her small, chapped hand in his.
The contact was not a shock of heat or cold this time. It was a feeling of complete, absolute connection. The moment her skin touched his, the world dissolved. It did not blur or spin. The peeling walls of her apartment, the water-stained ceiling, the scuffed floor - they all simply ceased to be. There was a sensation of falling, not through air, but through a cool, silent void, a velvet darkness that held her suspended outside of time and space. There was no fear, only his hand, a warm, solid anchor in the great nothing.
And then, just as suddenly, reality reasserted itself, crashing in on her senses. The first thing she registered was the sound - the deep, rhythmic roar of waves breaking against rock. Then the scent - clean, sharp salt and the sweet, heavy perfume of hibiscus and plumeria. A cool, gentle breeze kissed her face, a stark contrast to the thick, soupy humidity of Manila she had been breathing moments before. She opened her eyes.
The city was gone. They stood on a bluff of green, windswept grass that ended abruptly in a sheer cliff face. Below, a crescent of perfect white sand was lapped by water of an impossible turquoise hue. The sky above was a vast, cloudless dome of the deepest blue. And perched on the very edge of the cliff, as if it had grown from the rock itself, wasa house. It was a sprawling structure of whitewashed walls and dark, rich wood, its lines clean and modern, with vast sheets of glass that seemed to pull the ocean and sky into the very heart of the building. It was a place of impossible beauty and profound peace, the physical manifestation of a dream she had never been brave enough to have.
