I tell myself it’s nothing.Just the paranoia again.The ghosts I keep tucked under my skin making noise in the dark.
Then I hear it.
Footsteps.
Heavy.
Slow.
Deliberate.Gravel crunching beneath boots.
Each step echoing down the alley like a countdown I didn’t know had started.
I don’t think.I react.My body spins before my brain catches up, heart slamming against my ribs as if it’s trying to claw its way out.My breath sticks in my throat, sharp and useless.
There’s no time to scream.
No time to run.
A shadow spills from the dark, fast and close.
Something clamps over my mouth before the air can leave my lungs.
A rag, soaked in something sharp and chemical that burns the inside of my nose.My body jerks, fights, thrashes like instinct is trying to outrun inevitability, but it’s already over.My limbs go heavy, and the world starts to tilt.The stars above me blur.The alley spins.My knees buckle.I hear my own breath, rough and useless against fabric.
Then nothing.Just the sound of the world slipping away.
The world returns in fragments.
Every inch of me is heavy, and numb.My head throbs, a slow, pulsing beat that feels like it’s trying to crack open my skull from the inside.My eyelids flutter, but it’s no use.Darkness presses in thick, smothering anything that might’ve passed for light.
My lungs seize.My chest tightens.
Panic wraps around my ribs, and I can’t tell if it’s from this place.
My arms are yanked behind me, wrists twisted in rope that bites deep, raw skin screaming with every twitch.There are metal chains wrapped around my waist that hold me tightly against the chair.Real ones.The kind meant to hold monsters or make you into one.
I shift and feel the cold edge of metal dig into my spine.
A chair.Heavy.Solid.Cruel.The kind meant to hold someone who isn’t supposed to leave.
I try to move.Fight.Strain.But my body won’t play along.
It aches in places I can’t name.A dull, deep kind of pain, layered beneath the sharper ones.My limbs are lead, every joint locked up in protest, every movement answered by agony.
Whatever the hell they gave me is still in my system.My head spins every time I blink.The room tilts even though I can’t see it.
But even in the dark, even through the fog in my brain, I feel him.That cold weight in the air.That familiar static crawling over my skin.
Matteo.
The name slams through me like a punch to the gut.
Because I know without even seeing, without hearing, without proof of him standing in front of me, I know this has his fingerprints all over it.
I feel him.
That same suffocating presence that coils around my ribs as if it were wire, squeezes the breath from my lungs as punishment.A reminder.
