I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to live like this.
“Bet you’d make a hot ghost,” he said, deadpan. “That’s your whole thing, right? Haunting people.”
“My whole thing is surviving you,” I snapped, and for a moment we just stared at each other, neither of us willing to blink first.
“You think he’ll make us eat each other?” I asked, the words coming out slurred and dreamy.
Caiden’s head jerked up. He glared at me through the film of condensation and grease. “You wish,” he said, but there was no bite left in it.
“You’d taste like shit,” I said, just to keep the silence from congealing around us. “Too bitter.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who’d taste bad. Like old chicken, left in the sun too long. All string and gristle.”
I laughed, or tried to, but it came out as a cough, the sound echoing off the damp stone. “That would be an ironic way to go. Eaten and digested by my childhood enemy.”
He ignored that, retreating into himself again, shoulders hunched and face turned away.
The glass was smeared with our fingerprints, with the oil and sweat of two bodies refusing oblivion.
We didn’t talk much after that. The room crept into night, the only light coming from the jaundiced bulb in the stairwell, barely enough to silhouette the glass divider.
Hours passed.
The quiet was almost absolute, except for the occasional rattle of pipes or the distant, arrhythmic footsteps of the man upstairs.
I wondered what he was doing. Sleeping, maybe. Or sitting at his table, staring into the black, listening to the silence to see if we’d begun to turn on each other yet.
I pressed my ear to the divider. I could hearCaiden’s breath, slow and ragged, and the soft thud of his head as he knocked it against the glass in slow, measured intervals.
Maybe he was counting time, maybe just keeping himself awake. I wondered if he was still awake at all.
I was about to say something—anything, just to break the tension—when the door at the top of the stairs shrieked open.
The sound rumbled through the basement, dragging me up from whatever half-sleep I’d managed to claw out for myself.
Caiden jerked upright, too, eyes snapping to the stairwell. For a second, neither of us moved. The steps came slow, deliberate, as though the man wanted to savor the moment, to make the horror last as long as possible.
The metal stairs groaned under his weight. I felt my pulse spike and my throat close up. In that instant, I wanted to disappear into the concrete, become nothing but bone and dust, something the man wouldn’t bother with.
He stepped into the pool of yellow light, smirking. His teeth were too white, the smile too wide, and he looked at us like a farmer checking his livestock before a slaughter. “Awake?” he called, voice syrupy and false. “Or did my little pets finally wear each other out?”
I said nothing. I watched the way his hands hovered by the buttons on his remote, the way he eyed the divider, calculating, always calculating.
Caiden spat at the floor, baring his teeth. “Come in here and say that, you coward.”
The man’s eyes flashed with something feral. “I said you’d break first, and guess what? You did.”
He stepped forward, knelt so his face was level with mine through the divider.
I wanted to back away, but I couldn’t. My body was a dead weight, fused to the dirty concrete. “You look paler than usual, darling,” he whispered, lowering his voice. “Maybe you need a little special attention.”
His gaze slithered over my face, then dropped lower, cataloguing every tremor, every bruise.
I heard Caiden’s fists battering the glass, a primal bellow ripped from his throat. The man didn’t even flinch. His tongue curled overhis teeth, wetting his lips like he could taste my fear through the glass.
In the sick fluorescence of the basement, his face was a mask. Something below animal.
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” Caiden’s voice was brutal, thunderous, but the divider turned it soft and distant, like a memory of violence instead of the real thing.
