The command cuts through the terror just enough for my eyes to find his.
For one second, the room narrows to Silas bleeding in a chair.
That is somehow the worst part. Not waking up bound. Not the motel. Not the monster on the bed. Seeing Silas here, dragged into the geography of my worst years, forced into my old nightmare, his body taped down because even half-conscious and half-killed he still terrifies them enough to require more restraint. He should not be here. He should never have had to breathe this air.
Tears blur him.
“Silas,” I choke out, the sound of his name in my mouth wrecked enough to make his whole body jerk again.
“I’m here,” he says immediately, like the answer has been waiting in his throat for me to ask. “I’m here. Don’t look at him. Look at me.”
The man on the bed laughs softly.
“What a romance.”
The sentence slithers through the room. Every word from him feels like contamination.
My heart is hammering so hard it hurts. The chair digs into my spine. Tape burns at my wrists. The motel wraps around me with its old, suffocating familiarity until I can hardly tell what is memory and what is now. Only Silas remains distinct. Silas bleeding. Silas shaking with rage. Silas refusing to stop calling me back toward him with his eyes, voice, and whatever is left of his body.
The man leans forward slightly, elbows on his knees, studying us like he paid for front-row seats to a show he’s been waiting years to see.
“You really should’ve stayed buried in your nice little college life,” he says to me. “Both of you. But your mother was always bad at finishing what she started.”
A sob catches in my throat. Not because he’s right. Because hearing her invoked here, by him, in this room, makes the whole arc of my life feel like one long punishment she set in motion and never bothered to stop.
Silas jerks violently against the chair again.
“If you say one more word about her,” he says, his voice so cold now it barely sounds human, “I will tear your fucking face off with my teeth.”
The man actually smiles beneath the mask. I can see it in the slight movement of the fabric, the pleased little crinkle at the corners of his eyes.
For one horrible, suspended moment, it becomes clear that this is exactly what he wants. Not just my fear. Not just my recognition. Silas’s fury too. He wants us stripped down to our worst selves in front of him. Wants the room full of all the things that have ever made us weak, broken, monstrous. Wants to sit at the center of it and call himself inevitable.
Revulsion crawls over every inch of my skin.
Another yank at the tape. Another flare of pain at my wrists. Another ragged sound from Silas’s chair as he tries, impossibly, to get free.
This room has become every nightmare at once.
The motel from my childhood.
The violence from his.
The boy I love bleeding in front of me while the man who helped ruin me sits on the bed and smiles like God finally brought his property home.
A fresh scream rises in me, trapped somewhere behind my teeth now, because there is nowhere for it to go.
The man watches me choke on it.
Then, almost leisurely, he lifts both hands to the mask.
“No point in being rude,” he says. “You know me. I know you. Might as well take the costume off.”
“No,” I hear myself say, though it comes out as something thinner than a word, something scraped raw from the bottom of my throat. “No.”
Silas lunges so hard the back legs of his chair slap the floor again. “Don’t touch her,” he snarls. “Don’t fucking look at her.”
The man ignores him, peeling up the mask up slowly, like he wants me to live through every inch of it.
