My heart is already racing, thudding a frantic, uneven rhythm against my ribs before I even dare to look at the screen, because some deep, instinctive part of me knows this vibration isn’t normal; it is wrong, too calculated, arriving with a timing so perfectly poised it feels like a physical blow to the chest.
Damien’s eyes drop to my hand, his gaze heavy with a dark, unspoken warning.
“Don’t,” he says, his voice a low, granular rasp that vibrates in the small space between us.
I don’t listen. I cannot. With fingers that feel disconnected from my brain—numb and clumsy—I turn the screen over to face the light.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
One message.
Did he make you cry this time or was that just for me?
The room tilts on its axis, the floor beneath me turning to liquid. My ears begin to ring—a sharp, high-pitched whine like the sound of pressure building behind a dam before the concrete finally bursts under the weight. Slowly—far too slowly, as if he is moving through water—Damien reaches out and takes the phone from my nerveless fingers.
He reads the message once, then again, his jaw tightening until a muscle flicks hard beneath the skin, looking for all the world like he’s biting down on something feral and barely holding it in place.
“No,” he says quietly. It isn’t a denial to me; it is a vow whispered to himself, a low growl of defiance.
He begins to type, his thumb moving with a lethal, practiced precision. I don’t see what he writes, for he turns away from me, shielding the screen with the broad, tense line of his shoulders, his entire frame braced as though he is preparing for a head-on collision.
The phone vibrates again. His breath stops in his lungs, and mine follows suit, trapped in the hollow of my throat. This time, he doesn’t hide it; he turns the screen toward me with a grim finality.
It is a photo. My stomach drops so violently I think I might be sick right there on the rug. It’s me. I am not naked, nor am I posed, but the intimacy of the shot is more intrusive thanif I were. It is me as I was five minutes ago—crying, my face turned helplessly into the pillow, Damien’s hand still resting with possessive weight against the column of my throat. The angle is impossible; it is too high, too intimate, as though it were taken from the rafters above us, or from a ghost hovering in the shadows of our most private collapse.
My hands start shaking, a fine, uncontrollable tremor. “That’s impossible,” I whisper, the words sounding thin and foreign in the quiet room.
Damien doesn’t answer. He simply pinches the screen, zooming in until the corner of the image sharpens into a jagged clarity. And there—reflected faintly in the dark, polished glass of the wardrobe door—is the unmistakable, sickly glow of a screen. Recording. Watching. Live.
Another message cuts through the stillness like a knife.
You always cover her mouth when she cries. That’s new. I like it.
I feel something tear loose in my chest, a structural failure of the heart. Damien exhales slowly through his nose, a sound that is controlled, measured, and utterly terrifying in its lack of heat.
“You’ve been watching,” he says, his voice low and even. The reply is instant, a digital sneer:
You invited me in the moment you stopped locking your doors.
My skin crawls, a thousand invisible insects dancing over my nerves. “I don’t understand,” I whisper, the world blurring at the edges, “Damien, I?—”
He doesn’t look at me. He’s staring at the phone like it might bite him back. Another message arrives, demanding and cold.
Tell her to check her left wrist.
My breath catches. “No,” Damien says flatly, but my body moves before my brain can intervene. I lift my arm. There, stark against the pale, translucent skin, is a faint red mark. A fingerprint. It is not Damien’s; the whorls are too small, the pressure too precise, as though someone had pressed there just long enough to ensure they would be remembered long after the heat of the touch faded.
My vision blurs. “He touched you,” Damien says. It isn’t a question; it is a dark realisation that settles over us like a shroud. The phone vibrates again.
You felt it, didn’t you? That moment when you thought it was him. I didn’t rush. I waited until you let go.
My knees fold. Damien catches me before I hit the floor, pulling me back against the hard heat of his chest, his arms locking around me like a restraint, a shield, and a warning to whoever is lurking on the other side of the glass. His mouth is at my ear when he speaks. “You don’t get to touch her,” he says softly. “Not like that.”
The reply takes longer this time, the silence stretching until the air feels heavy with static. When it comes, it is one line:
You taught me how.
The room goes dead silent. No breathing. No movement. Just that sentence hanging between us like a blade suspended by a single thread. And in that stillness, I realise something that makes my stomach twist even tighter than fear. This wasn’t awarning. This wasn’t a threat. This was proof. River didn’t step forward. He stepped in.
