“I didn’t know,” I whisper, looking at Damien’s back. “Damien, I swear?—”
“I know,” he says, but he still doesn’t turn around.
The phone vibrates:
You always believed she was fragile. That’s why you tried to protect her.
Damien exhales. “She survived because she’s strong.”
No. She survived because she learned when to go still. I recognised that.
Do you want to know the difference between us? You want to keep her. I want to see how far she’ll bend before she breaks.
The phone switches to live video again. The hallway. Our hallway. Now.
Someone is standing just outside the door. I scramble back, heart slamming against my ribs. “No, no, no?—”
Damien moves, pushing me behind him. The video pauses with an overlay:
Relax. I’m not coming in.
The camera tilts down to show a hand lifting my necklace—the one I thought I lost weeks ago in the bathroom.
I told you. I don’t take what isn’t offered.
“How long?” Damien asks, his voice dropping an octave.
Long enough. Ask her about the dreams.
Damien turns to me, his eyes searching. “What dreams?”
I shake my head, but the memory of being awake but unable to move—the dreams where I wake up calm and empty, the air smelling of something I couldn’t place—floods back. “I didn’t think they mattered,” I whisper.
The phone vibrates:
They mattered to me.
The screen goes black with one last message:
You don’t need to choose yet. I’m patient. But next time, I won’t stay on the other side of the door.
The phone dies. Silence crashes down around us like the lid of a casket. Damien catches me as my legs give out. “This isn’t your fault,” he says, but his voice isn’t steady. River didn’t want to scare me; he wanted to introduce himself. And now that he has, nothing in me feels untouched anymore.
I don’t sleep. Damien paces, checking every vent and corner, pulling out drawers, his eyes darting to the shadows. He keeps a hand on me at all times—ankle, wrist, throat—as a constant pulse to prove I am still here. Hours crawl by until a smell—clean, cold, faintly metallic—fills the room. Damien goes still. “Don’t move,” he murmurs.
Beside the bed, a white envelope has appeared on the floor where there was only carpet a moment ago. Damien reaches for it, but the phone on the bedside table lights up: She should open it. You already had your turn.
Inside the envelope is a key and a sheet of paper with an address—the place I stopped talking about because no one believed me. The therapy centre with the high white walls and the boy who whispered about moths and disappeared before the morning.
You learned how to go still there. I learned how to wait. “He’s lying,” I whisper, though the key feels heavy with truth.
The phone responds:
You were fourteen the first time you realised silence could protect you. I was sixteen when I realised it could be used. The boy with moths. The one the doctors told me never existed.
“What did he look like?” Damien asks, his voice tight.
“Tall,” I whisper, my eyes fixed on the past. “Dark hair. He always stood in the shadows, catching the moths that hit the glass.”
