I went inside.
Once, this cottage had been my sanctuary. I tried to ground myself by focusing on the details I remembered: the faded cherry wallpaper, the familiar snick of the door, the sag and groan of the floorboards, every scuffed one holy simply because it was something I wanted that would never really be mine.
Coming to a halt in front of the hall mirror, I stared, desperate to find something of myself in the reflection, instead of the beast. My hair had grown over my ears, my beard was in desperate need of a trim, and dark circles rimmed my eyes… but they were stillmyeyes.
This body was still mine.
“Of course it is.”My reflection smiled.
I clenched my hands into fists at my sides. “Get out,” I whispered.
“You called me here.”The monster’s lazy, reptilian stretch made me shudder.
Is that all I am? A skin, to be molted?
“You’re lying.”
The silence that followed bore the weight of a thousand moments just like this, when I’d reached instinctively for the monster, needing it to bear a weight I couldn’t bear myself. I hatedmyself for being so weak, but my body was heavy, and some days, it took effort just to keep going.
The monster helped with that.
“That’s right.”Like a heartbeat, it gently pulsed in the center of my chest.“I am the one who has walked beside you. I have been there to sit with you in the dark—”
A dark it created.
“I am the home you are looking for. Not this place.”It paused.“Not her.”
I struck the face in the glass.
Pain erupted in my knuckles, the shock of the impact running a current up my arm. A large crack spidered my features in the mirror, fragmenting me from nose to jaw.
“Who’s there?” someone called out. The sound made me jump, and heat washed over me as I realized I wasn’t alone. Tightening my fist, I paced to the kitchen’s open doorway, blood slicking my knuckles beneath my glove.
The intruder stood by the edge of the sink, facing me. In one hand, he held a jar filled to the brim with little blue flowers. In the other, a scoop.
“Connoway?” Shock rippled across his face at the sight of me. Then he shoved the tea to one side and ripped a chef’s knife out of the block on the counter. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The monster’s fury rose in an instant, sinking shards of ice into my bones.“What arewedoing here?”it inwardly seethed.
“Lenny,” I said, the word as cold and dead as a corpse. I didn’t miss the way his grip tightened over the hilt of the knife, or the way his gaze skipped over my shoulder nervously. My eyes narrowed. “Whatcha got there?”
“None of your business.”
I huffed in disbelief, the hairs on the back of my neck lifting in unease.
The monster threw itself at the wall between our wills, clawing for escape until my eyes watered from the strain of holding it back.“He’s in her house!”
I know.
Just seeing him here felt like sacrilege.
“You gonna let me by?” Lenny took a step forward. “Or are you here to finish what you started before you skipped town? It won’t be so easy this time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lenny’s gaze darkened. “The hell you don’t.”
The monster flicked my gaze to the breadboard, where a long serrated knife lay beside a half-eaten loaf of focaccia.“Pick up the knife,”the monster urged.
