The new voice is different.
It slices clean through the room before Silas can move.
Every part of me goes rigid.
There is no static in this voice. No distance. No blur of age. Whoever is speaking now is present, listening to us listen, letting the recording do what he wanted it to do before stepping in to make sure we understand he is not some ghost playing with dead things.
Silas stops moving altogether.
Even from the floor, I can see the way the muscles in his arm stand out where he grips the phone. He looks like he is holding himself together by force and hatred alone.
On the line, the man breathes once.
Then he says, with the same awful calm, “Or I’ll gut her next time she steps out of your house.”
The sentence is so quiet it almost doesn’t sound human.
It doesn’t need to be louder. It lands everywhere at once.
My stomach drops so violently I think I’m going to vomit again. The room vanishes around the words. Not because I stop hearing it, but because all the air in it is suddenly gone. Heknows where I am. He knows the house. He knows enough about my life now to say next time, which means he has already been close enough to watch. The thought claws straight up my spine.
Silas turns toward me then, but only half. He cannot stop watching the phone. He cannot stop looking at me. He cannot decide which threat to answer first because both of them are sitting right in front of him.
His face has gone white with rage.
Not hot rage. Not the kind that makes him reckless.
This is the kind that makes him terrifying.
The kind that strips him all the way down to instinct.
Another little sound leaves me, pathetic and involuntary, in the way fear always is when it turns your body against you. I hate it the second it escapes. I hate that whoever is on the phone might be hearing me now the same way I am hearing my younger self, reduced to panic, pain, and proof of what men can do when they think they own you.
Cheyenne’s grip on my shoulder tightens. Maria is shaking her head like she can undo what’s happening if she refuses to accept it. Nobody speaks. Nobody dares.
Because now the whole room understands the same thing.
This isn’t a prank.
This isn’t some cruel joke or a disgusting coincidence. This is targeted.
Then, over the speaker, through the static and the distant sound of my own younger fear, the man lets the silence stretch just long enough to make sure the meaning sinks in.
He wants us to hear what he can do.
He wants me to remember where I came from.
He wants Silas to understand that whatever violent promises are already living in his body, there is now something uglier standing in the middle of them.
And there on my bedroom floor, with my mother’s grave still open in my mind and my own childhood turned into a weapon in a stranger’s hand, only one thing becomes brutally clear.
The dead did not come back to haunt me.
Something living did.
The sound of my own breathing is still wrong in the room, my whole body still trapped somewhere between the floor beneath my knees and the motel years ago. Cheyenne’s hand is fixed on my shoulder. Maria has gone white and glassy-eyed with horror. None of them say anything, because there is nothing to say that could make this less real.
Silas’s voice cuts through it all like a blade.
