Page 6

I look back over to Emma, who’s already trying to make her mask look like a rabbit. I hide a smile because she’s doing well. I reach for a strip of newspaper, following Emma’s steps. She looks at me, knowing she’s wrong, but doesn’t call me out of it. This is nice, but it’s only stalling our ending,

Sorrow.

The strip in my fingers trembles, the paper is soft and almost soggy from the paste. I tell myself it’s because of the glue, the way it makes everything slippery and fragile. But my hands are shaking, just a little, and the movement runs down my arms like a current I can’t shut off.

The ink on most of the clippings has dulled, washed-out blacks leaning toward grey. The paper’s edges are curled, browned, and brittle, the texture of old receipts you find at the bottom of a drawer. But the headlines are still sharp enough, bold enough, to cut through the years.

Faces stare back at me from cheap newsprint—frozen smiles that never reached the eyes, school photos with awkward haircuts and stiff uniforms, professional headshots with forced confidence. In the end, it doesn’t matter how they’re posed. They all end up the same way—reduced to a couple of paragraphs and a column of tragedy wedged between supermarket adverts and local politics.

The longer I stand here, the smaller the room feels. The ceiling seems to dip, just slightly. The walls lean in, nudging at the edges of my vision. Every breath feels a fraction heavier, like the air is thickening with old ghosts.

Every strip she tears is another memory dragged out of the dark.

Danny was over six years ago.

On paper, that sounds like a lifetime. People grow up in six years. They get married. They forget things they thought they’d remember forever. But some nights, when it’s quiet enough, I can still smell that hotel lobby as clearly as the glue in front of me.

He took one look at us and decided we were trash. Didn’t even try to hide it. Told us flat-out we could never afford a room there, like we were too stupid to know that already. Maybe we couldn’t. We didn’t want a room. We just needed the toilet.

He could’ve spared his life by letting us piss in peace.

But no. His ego wouldn’t let him.

I remember the way his mouth twisted when he spoke to us, as every word he had to toss in our direction physically offended him. His eyes skimmed over our clothes, lingering just long enough to decide exactly how little we were worth. You can hear judgment in silence when someone looks at you like that.

The lobby had that expensive, hollow smell—polish, perfume, and money. The marble floors gleamed under golden lights, each step echoing a little too loudly. The reception desk was this huge, polished thing, more of a sculpture than furniture, and I remember catching our reflections in it—tiny, distorted, out of place.

We didn’t belong there. At least, not in his eyes.

Maybe that’s what sealed it for him.

Pride is a dangerous thing when you’re standing in front of people like us.

I didn’t even kill him. That part still belongs entirely to Emma.

She took her sweet time while I sat back and watched. I’ve never been prouder of her than I was that night, which probably says more about me than I’d like to admit. There was something hypnotic about her—the way she moved, the way she spoke, the way the entire room seemed to bend toward her. Calm. Focused. Like she had quietly decided everyone’s role and the air had agreed.

I leaned against the wall in that lobby, arms crossed, letting her deal with him. She talked softly at first, all polite smiles, and I watched him flinch at every word that didn’t fit the version of us he had in his head. With every step she took closer, he seemed to shrink, the bravado leaking out of him.

The power shift was intoxicating.

I remember how she made him take us to the top floor, her voice low and steady as she told him exactly what he was going to do. He tried to protest—something about policies, about guests-only access—but then she tilted her head, and he saw something in her eyes that convinced him otherwise.

The elevator ride felt longer than it should have, the machine’s quiet hum filling the silence. None of us spoke. It was just the soft whine of cables, the faint lurch every time we passed another floor, and the sound of his breathing—too fast and too shallow. I could see the numbers blinking above the doors, each one dragging us higher.

By the time we reached the top, sweat had collected at his hairline, glistening under the soft yellow light.

He fumbled with the keycard when we stepped into the corridor. His hands were shaking so badly that it took him three tries to get the green light to flash. The corridor was empty, hush-thick, the kind of quiet that feels padded.

When the door finally opened, it swung inward like a goddamn curtain call.

Our jaws nearly hit the floor.

The first thing I saw was red. Red walls, deep and rich, like old velvet theatre curtains. Then the bed—a huge black thing, dominating the room. Only it wasn’t just a bed. There were points for tying wrists and ankles, leather straps tucked neatly at the corners, and metal rings that glinted under the soft lighting.

This wasn’t a place for sleeping. This was a place for performing dominance.

The lighting was low and moody, running along the edges of the ceiling instead of glaring down from the middle. It cast long shadows along the walls, stretching and bending whenever someone moved. Expensive art was dotted around, all big strokes of color and curves that meant nothing. Velvet curtains hung by a window that ran almost the full length of the wall, framing a view of the city.