I was in a different room now. Grey walls. A metal table. A woman sat across from me—blonde, hollow-eyed, her hands wrapped around a cup of something that steamed.
"He called me Bunny too."
Her voice was flat. Tired. The voice of someone who'd stopped hoping for anything.
"Before you. I was Bunny. He said I was the only one. He said I was perfect."
"You're lying."
"Ask him. If you ever see him again. Ask him how many of us there were. Ask him how many he named. Ask him how many he threw away."
"You're lying."
"Maybe."
She smiled, and it was the saddest thing I'd ever seen.
"Maybe I'm not real at all. Maybe I'm just a ghost. Maybe you made me up because you couldn't stand being alone."
I woke up gasping.
The apartment was dark.
The curtains were closed—I remembered closing them, or thought I remembered, or maybe I'd dreamed that too—and theonly light came from the streetlamp outside, bleeding through the gaps at the edges. The ceiling was cracked. The walls were bare. The furniture was minimal: a bed, a dresser, a chair I never sat in.
My apartment.
I'd found it three weeks ago—or four, or five, or maybe just last week. Time had stopped meaning anything. I paid in cash and the landlord didn't ask questions, and the neighbors ignored me, and I ignored them, and we all pretended we didn't exist.
The collar.
I touched my throat. It was bare. It had always been bare. But I could still feel it—the weight, the warmth, the pressure of something that wasn't there.
Another Bunny.
Had there been others?
Had Gabriel named other women before me, called them his perfect girls, promised them forever and then thrown them away?
Or had I dreamed her—the blonde, the one who wasn't there—because I needed to believe I wasn't alone?
I sat up. The sheets were tangled around my legs, damp with sweat. My hands were clean—I'd washed them before bed, or thought I had—but I could still see blood in the creases, phantom stains that wouldn't come out no matter how hard I scrubbed.
Gabriel's voice, cold and certain: "There were no others. There was only ever you."
The blonde's voice, flat and tired: "He called me Bunny too."
Both memories felt real. Both felt like lies. I didn't know which one to believe, and not knowing was worse than knowing the worst possible truth.
I couldn't sleep.
I lay in bed for an hour—or maybe two, or maybe twenty minutes—staring at the ceiling and trying to make my mind go quiet. The cracks in the plaster looked like rivers. The rivers looked like roads. The roads looked like the veins in Gabriel's hands, the ones I used to trace while he slept.
"You're the only one."
"He called me Bunny too."
"You're my perfect girl."
