Don't draw attention.
Don't run.
Don't do anything that marks you as prey.
Gabriel's voice again, or maybe my own, or maybe something I'd read in a book I'd never owned. I couldn't tell anymore. The voices in my head were multiplying, overlapping, bleeding into each other until I couldn't distinguish his from mine from the girl who wasn't there's.
Batch 39.
Had I imagined her?
Or had I imagined being alone?
"There's no one else."
"You're the only one."
"He'll never love you."
"You're not special."
I needed to leave.
I threw cash on the table—more than the bill, enough that the waitress wouldn't follow me out, enough that no one would remember my face—and slid out of the booth. The man at the counter watched me go. I felt his eyes on my back, on my shoulders, on the space between my shoulder blades where a knife would slide in easiest.
Keep walking.
Don't look back.
Don't let him see you're afraid.
I pushed through the door and into the cold.
The street was empty.
The diner's sign flickered behind me, casting weak light on the cracked sidewalk. The city was quiet at this hour—no traffic, no pedestrians, no sound except the distant hum of something I couldn't identify.
The shadow.
I saw it in the window of the closed shop across the street. A figure. Tall. Dark. Standing at the corner, half-hidden by the awning, watching.
I turned.
No one was there.
The street was empty. The corner was empty. The awning cast a shadow that looked like nothing at all, just fabric and gravity and the wind moving through it.
I imagined it.
I was exhausted. Starving. Falling apart.
There was no one following me.
But I couldn't shake the feeling—the prickle at the back of my neck, the weight between my shoulder blades, the certainty that someone was there, someone was watching, someone was waiting for me to lead them somewhere.
Gabriel?
No. Gabriel was gone. Gabriel had left. Gabriel didn't want to be found.
