To feel something,his voice murmurs, a caress of sound right beside my ear.Anything. Even this.
The blood on Jade’s mouth seems to darken. The car groans, a final, dying breath.
I’ll see you soon,the whisper promises.
I finally find my scream.
I wake up thrashing, tangled in my own sweat-soaked sheets. The scream is trapped in my throat, a raw, silent sob. My apartment is dark, the only light is the faint, grey pre-dawn glow filtering through my window. It’s quiet. The only sound is my own ragged, desperate gasping.
I rip the sheets off me, my body slick with cold sweat. The phantom smell of gasoline and blood is so strong I gag, stumbling out of bed and into the bathroom. I brace my handson the sink and my head hangs low, breathing in the clean, sterile scent of soap and tile, trying to chase the nightmare away, but it won’t go.
When I finally look up, my face in the mirror is a stranger’s. The hollowed-out ghost I’m used to seeing is gone. In her place is a woman with wild, terrified eyes. Her skin pale and clammy, her lips parted in a silent scream. There is color in my cheeks. There are shadows under my eyes. I look alive, I look haunted.
I look like the girl from the bar.
I stare at my reflection, and Cassian’s words echo in the crushing silence of my apartment.
You’re here because I’m the noise now. Aren’t I?
The nightmare wasn’t just about Jade anymore. It wasn’t just a memory. He was there. He had found his way into the most sacred, broken part of me and made it his. Cassian had taken my oldest ghost and wrapped it in his own shadow.
For two years, I have lived in a fortress of silence, a carefully constructed void where nothing could hurt me because I felt nothing. It was a half-life, but it was safe.
Last night, I walked out of that fortress. I chose to feel, and this is the price. The void is gone. The silence is shattered, and the noise that has taken its place is his voice, his eyes, his promises. I am more terrified now than I have ever been in my entire life.
Ten
Aria
Themorninglightisa pale, sickly grey that seeps through my window, offering no warmth, only illumination. It exposes the dust motes dancing in the air, and the profound emptiness of my apartment. The silence is the worst part. It used to be a thick, comforting blanket, a fortress wall. Now it’s a thin, taut wire, vibrating with the echo of Cassian’s voice and the memory of Jade’s empty eyes. The void is gone, and the noisethat has replaced it is a constant, low-grade hum of terror that has settled deep in my bones.
I need to get out. The walls of my fortress are closing in, each familiar corner now seeming to hold a new, menacing shadow.
Work is the only answer. The library is the one place outside my apartment that has its own kind of sacred quiet, a shared silence built from the rustle of turning pages and the weight of a million sleeping stories. It’s order, it’s history. It’s everything he is not. Maybe there, I can find the ghost of my old self again, the one who knew how to be invisible.
I dress mechanically, my movements stiff. I pull on my usual armor—dark jeans, a plain t-shirt, a worn denim jacket—but it feels different today, flimsy, useless. My reflection in the dark screen of the television is a stranger I don’t want to acknowledge. The girl looking back has haunted eyes and color in her cheeks, a flush of fear that makes her look jarringly alive. I turn away, grabbing my tote bag from the floor. The strap feels heavy in my hand.
The walk to the library is a special kind of torture. Every passing car makes my muscles tense. Every person who glances at me on the sidewalk feels like a potential threat. The city, which I have spent two years successfully ignoring, is suddenly hyper-vivid and hostile. I’m not a ghost floating through it anymore; I’m a target, and I feel as though I have a spotlight on me. I find myself scanning faces in the crowd, a knot of dread and something horribly like anticipation tightening in my stomach.Am I looking for him? Am I hoping to see him?The thought is so repulsive I push it down, quickening my pace.
The library’s grand, echoing hall is a welcome relief. The familiar scent of old paper, binding glue and floor polish settles over me, and for a moment, the frantic hum in my brain quiets. I nod to Mr. Abernathy at the main circulation desk, a kind,elderly man with spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He gives me a warm, crinkly-eyed smile.
“Good morning, Aria. The archives are waiting,” he says, his voice a gentle murmur.
“Good morning, Mr. Abernathy,” I reply, the simple, normal exchange feeling like a lifeline back to my old reality.
I make my way to my small wooden desk tucked away in the quietest corner of the archives, a section of the library so rarely visited that the air feels heavy and still. My job is to be a ghost. I sift through fragile documents and forgotten books, cataloging, translating, preserving stories that no one else cares about. It’s quiet, solitary work. It’s perfect.
For hours, it almost works. I lose myself in a stack of letters from the 19th century, written by a woman to her brother, a sailor on a whaling ship. The faded ink on the brittle, cream-colored paper describes a world of steamships and gaslight, of longing and quiet domestic worries. The delicate, looping script is a puzzle and for a little while, it’s the only puzzle that matters. The noise in my head recedes. My breathing evens out. This is my world. He cannot touch me here.
There’s a prickle of unease on the back of my neck.
I try to ignore it, focusing on a particularly difficult word, the ink smudged by what might have been a tear, but the feeling grows. The quiet of the archives no longer feels peaceful. It feels watchful. I feel a shift in the atmosphere, the same way I did in the bar just before he appeared.
A shadow falls over the page.
My head snaps up, and a jolt of pure adrenaline makes my heart slam against my ribs.
He’s standing there, leaning against a towering shelf of historical records, his arms crossed over his chest. He looks like a panther that has wandered into a museum—all coiled muscle, predatory grace, and simmering danger. He is a tear in the fabricof this quiet, orderly place. A few graduate students at a long table fifty feet away have all stopped their work, their faces a mixture of annoyance and alarm. They’re staring at him, and he is utterly oblivious to their existence.
