“Yeah. It’s very on-brand for me.”
“You know this is Halloween, right? Not Valentine’s Day?”
She tilts her head, that red satin bow at her throat shifting like an invitation. “Even monsters deserve love sometimes.”
Like a key turning in a lock, she cracks me wide open—violent, irreversible, and I feel it in my fingertips, my teeth, in that deep black thing behind my ribs. The cocaine haze thins another layer, colors still too sharp, sounds too loud, but she’s louder. She’s the loudest fucking thing in the world.
She’s everything.
The crowd moves around us like water around stones, but we stay locked there—two strangers, orbiting, held in place by a heart-shaped lollipop and whatever untethered fuckery is building.
She smiles—full and easy, the smile of someone who has just said something throwaway and means it completely. I’m so entranced, so enthralled, my feet are planted into the concrete.It’s when a friend grabs her elbow and pulls her away, about to vanish into the river of bodies, that I realize I’m not ready for her disappear. I’m not ready to stop looking at her, drowning in her, not ready to let go of whatever the fuck it is she’s making me feel.
So I follow her…not knowing I’ll never stop.
23
SOPHIA
Iremember that night. Not as vividly as he does, but some of it.
I remember the costume—the polka dots, the victory rolls that kept coming undone on one side, the red heels that made me taller and braver than I felt. My basket of lollipops, the heart-shaped ones I buy every year on Halloween because it’s what I do. It’s my thing. It used to be my and my mom’s thing, but when she died, it became…mything. My mom was the one who told me that even monsters deserve love sometimes.
People’s faces always change when I hand them out—this small, confused delight, like they’d been braced for something dark and gotten something sweet instead.
Every year, the color would differ. Red, green, orange, purple. The year he happened, it was pink.
That night, I don’t remember him specifically. That’s the part I keep turning over, sitting here on the floor of this impossible room with my back against the bench and my knees drawn up and the lollipop resting in my palm.
In my memories, there’s a man in face paint; there were dozens of them. But there was this one that was different, a mask of black and white that looked more like heartbreak. Not violent and scary like the others.
Of course I said the same thing to him that I said to everyone else who questioned my heart-shaped lollipops, the throwaway line that came with the colored candy every Halloween since I was eight.
Even monsters deserve love sometimes.
I said it to everyone, but he heard it like it was said only to him. Somehow, something as routine as my Halloween schtick became this big thing for him, changed everything for him. And he left me the clues, pink heart-shaped lollipops all over the house. Why didn’t I see it?Howdid I not see it?
You were in survival mode, Sophia. Give yourself a break.
The cellophane crinkles softly as I close my fingers around the lollipop. It’s the only sound in the room besides my own breathing and the heavy silence that’s lingered since Reth and Ian disappeared behind a closed door hours ago.
I look up at the ceiling. Spring on one side, autumn on the other. This room is the only place in the house that feels like it’s breathing. Whenever my thoughts get too loud, this is where I end up.
And right now, they’re deafening.
Everything’s changed. He’s no longer the villain who took me, who locked me up in this house. Now he’s the broken man who found something soft enough to matter in a life that had none. Me.
I’m too much of a romantic for my own good, because I feel it. All the way to every corner of my heart, knowing that I became important enough for him to want to see stars and shapes and light in a world that’s always been dark.
I still don’t know all the answers, like why he ended up bringing me here. What he’s protecting me from. Or rather, who. I don’t know how deep or how far it went—the stalking.
I know he read my diary.
Well, I suspect he did.
That’s what stalkers do, right? Invade your privacy? I never hid my diary, and it wasn’t one of those with the little locks either. It was just a book with all the pieces of me I didn’t think anyone would get to see. It’s not like my diary is…was…this sacred thing. It was more a dumping ground for stupid thoughts I didn’t know what else to do with. The way a plastic bag catches in a tree and flaps for months, half-translucent and pathetic, and you know you should pull it down but you kind of want to see how long it’ll last. That was my diary.
“This can’t be my favorite room and yours.”
