I don’t remember the act of sitting down. One second my knees buckle, and the next I am on the floor with Damien behind me, his arms locked around my body so tightly it hurts to draw breath. He isn’t doing it to comfort me; he is doing it to anchor me, as if he fears that if he lets go, I’ll slip away into a darkness where he cannot reach.
The phone is still in his hand, a malevolent object that vibrates again. I feel the pulse of it through his chest before I hear it. Another message.
She smells different when she gives up. Did you notice?
I make a sound I don’t recognise—something animal, something torn and jagged. Damien’s grip tightens until my ribs ache under the pressure.
“Don’t answer,” I whisper.
“I’m not,” he says, but his thumb moves anyway.
He doesn’t type. He opens the camera—the front-facing one. He tilts it down so it frames me in the harsh light—bare skin, tear-streaked face, eyes blown wide and empty. Then he lifts his free hand and cups my jaw, forcing my face up toward the lens, making me a witness to my own terror. “Look,” he murmurs. The screen flashes. Sent.
My stomach drops through the floor. “You can see her now,” Damien says with a terrifying, hollow calmness. “Really see her.”
The reply doesn’t come immediately, and the wait is an exquisite torture. Seconds pass—ten, twenty—while my heartbeat starts to roar in my ears. Then, a video arrives. Damien opens it, and I instantly wish he hadn’t.
It is grainy, bathed in a sickly, night-vision green that makes the familiar bedroom look like a tomb. It is shaky for half a second before it steadies on the bed. Not tonight, but another night entirely, a night I thought I was safe. It shows me asleep, curled on my side, wearing an old T-shirt I thought I had lost months ago. The night-vision renders my skin like marble, cold and unmoving.
The camera angle is low, far too close for comfort, positioned right at the edge of the mattress. The footage moves slowly, almost reverently, as a hand enters the frame. It is not Damien’s hand; the fingers are longer, thinner, appearing almost skeletal in the green-tinted light. The hand doesn’t touch me, but it hovers agonisingly close—an inch from my mouth, tracing the line of my throat, hovering over my pulse point at the wrist. It looks as if it is memorising me, as if it is practising a form of lethal restraint, a predator counting the heartbeats of its prey.
The video cuts to black. I scream. It rips out of me without permission, sharp and broken and humiliating. Damien clamps his hand over my mouth instantly, dragging me tighter against him, rocking me once—not to soothe me, but to keep me quiet, because he understands something I don’t yet: noise is a form of vulnerability. Noise is dangerous.
The phone vibrates again.
You slept through it every time. That was my favourite part.
I start shaking so hard my teeth chatter. “He’s lying,” I choke into Damien’s palm. Damien doesn’t answer; he is staring at the screen like it’s a mirror showing him a reflection of a monster he has never seen before.
Another message:
Do you want to know the first night I touched her?
“No,” Damien says, his voice thick with suppressed rage.
The reply is immediate:
She was already yours. She just didn’t know it yet.
Something inside Damien snaps; I feel the literal shift in his posture, the hardening of his muscles. His breathing changes—slowing, dropping into that dangerous, predatory calm that always precedes violence. He lowers his mouth to my ear, his breath hot against my skin. “You don’t get to narrate her life,” he says quietly. “You don’t get to rewrite her body.”
A pause follows, heavy and pregnant with malice. Then comes the message that breaks everything.
I didn’t rewrite it. I edited around you.
My vision tunnels. Edited. Like I am mere text on a page, like I am footage to be manipulated and spliced. I realise then, with absolute, nauseating certainty, that this isn’t about taking me away from Damien. River doesn’t want me separate. He wants me shared. Witnessed. Ruined in layers, like a painting being scraped back to the canvas.
The phone vibrates one last time. Damien doesn’t look at it, but I do.
Check under the bed. I left you something.
“No,” I whisper, clutching at Damien’s shirt. “Damien, please.”
He looks down at me then, really looks at me, and in his eyes, I see the truth before he even says it. If there’s something under the bed, it means River was here after him, in the sanctum of our home while we were oblivious. Damien releases me slowly, not because he wants to, but because whatever is coming next doesn’t belong to him alone. “Don’t touch it,” he says, his voice a warning, but I crawl anyway, my hands shaking as I reach into the dark, suffocating space beneath the bed frame.
My fingers close around fabric—soft, folded, impossibly familiar. It is my T-shirt, the one from the video, the one I had mourned as lost. It is clean and warm, as if it has been held against someone’s skin, as if it hasn’t been gone long at all. Something slips out of the folds and clatters onto the floor: a phone. Not mine. The screen lights up with the front camera already recording, a digital eye wide open. I stare straight into it, my own reflection overlapping with the recording, and somewhere on the other end, I know that River finally breathes.
I don’t breathe. I forget the mechanics of it entirely. The phone under the bed hums softly in my hand like a living thing, a beating heart of glass and silicon. My own face fills the screen—pale, wrecked, eyes blown wide—and behind that reflection is the room itself, with Damien standing there like a statue, watching me watch myself. The recording light blinks a rhythmic, predatory red.
