One thing rolled in my mind. I owed that bastard a punch. For her. No one threatens what's mine.
14
ALENA
The apartment wasn't quiet. It was vacant. The kind of silence that rang in my ears like a struck bell, where every creak of the floorboards sounded like footsteps that never arrived, every tick of the clock sounded like a heartbeat that had stopped. Not the comfortable silence we'd shared a thousand times—him reading on the couch while I wrote at my desk, our quiet a language all its own. This was the hollow kind of absence that pressed against my eardrums, made me too aware of my own breathing, my own heartbeat, the spaces where he should be but wasn't.
I sat at my desk, cursor blinking like a dying pulse, and the room felt too big. Too empty. Too cold.
The French doors to the living room stood ajar, letting in the grey London light that always felt like it was apologizing for existing. My coffee had gone cold hours ago, a skin forming on the surface like dead flesh. The sandwich he'd made—raw tuna and avocado, exactly how I liked it—sat untouched on its plate, the bread curling at the edges like something dying.
I couldn't eat. Couldn't drink. To be honest I was still a bit tipsy since I'd returned from Lucy's. I could barely think past the note still sitting on the counter where he'd left it.
I love you, Alena. Wait for me please.
Wait for what, exactly? I'd been waiting seventeen years. What were a few days?
Except it didn't feel like a few days. It felt like a lifetime stretched thin, pulled tight, every minute crawling on broken glass.
He'd left this morning—early, before dawn, before I'd even woken. I'd reached for him in my sleep and found only empty sheets, still warm but cooling fast. Found the note. Found the coffee machine humming to life right on schedule. Found the sandwich wrapped carefully in the fridge, his handwriting on the post-it stuck to the plastic:Eat, baby.
But how was I supposed to eat when my stomach had turned to stone?
I shifted in my chair and winced. The ache between my legs flared—a dull, sweet reminder of last night. Of him inside me. Of the way he'd held me after, palm on my belly, whispering about wanting me mine. The soreness should have been comforting. Instead it just made his absence sharper, more unbearable.
My fingers hovered over the keys, trembling slightly. The story was there, pressing against the inside of my skull like a migraine building pressure, demanding to be let out. The ghosts were already in the room—I could feel them gathering in the corners, watching, waiting. The temperature had dropped at least five degrees the moment I'd sat down to work. My breath came out in faint clouds. The shadows in the corners had thickened, curling like smoke, taking shapes that weren't quite shapes but suggested claws, teeth, hunger.
Write.
The word wasn't spoken aloud, but I heard it anyway—gravel and hunger, the familiar voice that had dictated every book since I was twelve years old. The voice that lived in my head and under my skin, the one that turned silence into stories and loneliness into words on a page.
I started typing.
The injustice bled onto the screen—betrayal, loss, abandonment wrapped in the fiction of necessity. A woman left waiting for a man who might never come back, who'd kissed her forehead and whispered promises and then disappeared into the grey dawn like he'd never been real at all. Funny how art imitated life even when you tried to stop it. Funny how every story I wrote ended up being about the same thing: waiting, wanting, losing.
My eyes flicked to my phone for the hundredth time. Screen dark. No notifications. No missed calls. No messages lighting up the lock screen with his name.
He should have landed by now. The flight was eight hours, maybe nine depending on headwinds. I'd checked. Multiple times. Obsessively. He should have texted when he boarded. Should have texted when he landed. Even a simple arrived safe would have been enough to quiet the panic clawing at my ribs.
Nothing.
Radio silence.
Like he'd vanished into thin air the moment he walked out my door.
I forced my gaze back to the screen, blinking away the sting behind my eyes. Typed faster. The character on the page waited too—waited for a call that didn't come, waited in an empty apartment that felt too big and too cold, waited for a man who had promised forever and then evaporated like morning mist.
My back itched. Then burned.
The first scratch bloomed between my shoulder blades—hot, deliberate, precise as a scalpel cutting through skin. I gasped, arching away from the chair, but there was noescaping it. The pain sharpened, carving deeper, and I felt the warm wetness of blood beginning to trickle down my spine beneath my shirt.
Fuck.
I was bleeding. Already.
It usually took longer than this for the scratches to start. Usually I had at least a day, maybe two, before the ghosts lost patience and started marking me for not writing fast enough, for not telling the story exactly the way they wanted it told. But today they were hungry. Impatient. Or maybe they could smell my distraction, my divided attention, the way half my mind was on the words and half was on the phone that refused to ring.
My hands shook on the keys, but I didn't stop typing. Couldn't. The ghosts wouldn't let me. They never did.
