Chapter 48 Holland
HOLLAND
A grainy scanned document filled the screen. Handwritten therapist notes and doodles in the margins. At the bottom: a child’s drawing. Sloppy but vivid.
A cage. A small boy inside. A taller figure just outside—red hair, messy. Glasses drawn in jagged lines. And on the boy’s arm, barely visible—a tattoo of a rabbit with its neck snapped.
I froze. The child in the cage slammed me with horrible memories of my own capture.
Ella leaned in. Her eyes narrowed. Then she turned toward Dope. “That tattoo …” she said. “You have that on your arm.”
Dope glanced down, then slowly pushed up his sleeve. Exact same design. Exact same place. “Huh,” he said with a half-laugh. “Yeah. Forgot about that.”
“Why a broken rabbit?” I asked.
He scratched his jaw, suddenly restless. “It was a crazy night when I was seventeen. Got high, blacked out, woke up with it. Didn’t even remember doing it.” He chuckled like it was no big deal.
Ella didn’t push. Neither did I. But something in me shifted. No child would’ve drawn that by accident. And Dope’s tone? Too casual. Too smooth. Like he was playing dumb … or terrified to remember.
Ella glanced at the floor, and I watched her retreat into something unspoken. Then Dope rolled his sleeve back down—too fast. Like he couldn’t bear to look at it.
His hand went to the mouse, but he didn’t close the file.
Instead, he right-clicked the image and dragged it into a folder hidden deep inside his desktop—one I never would’ve seen if I hadn’t been watching. But I was watching.
The folder name flashed for a blink: “Oblivion_Temp”
My spine straightened. My stomach turned. He clicked away like it had never happened. Face blank. Knuckles white.
And just like that, the moment passed.
Except it didn’t.
It lodged itself in the back of my throat like a secret trying to claw its way out. He didn’t know I saw. And I didn’t say a word.
The ripple it left behind stretched through the room, tightening the air like a noose. Dope leaned back in his chair like the world hadn’t just shifted under our feet. Ella remained quiet, lost in whatever haunted her. And I sat frozen—body rigid, pulse skimming the surface of my skin.
That image wouldn’t let me go. The cage. The child. The tattoo that shouldn’t exist.
It made me want to scream, but instead, I swallowed it. Screaming never helped. I’d learned that long ago.
I pushed to my feet, walked toward the wall behind the office desk, and stared out the tiny window. The glow of streetlamps bent in the puddles, stretching like broken halos across the asphalt. It was nearly four in the morning, and the world was quiet—too quiet.
Behind me, Dope cracked his knuckles and pulled up another script. He was already moving on.
“There’s more,” he said. “Whatever P.P. left buried, I’m gonna find it.”
“Be careful what you wake.” Ella didn’t look up, but her voice was steady.
Dope snorted. “What, like he’s watching us from his villain lair? Don’t be dramatic.”
I didn’t respond. But my fingers twitched while I removed my phone from my jeans pocket.
Kip hadn’t texted. Not even a check-in. Not that I expected him to. Not after what he was doing. Where he’d gone. Who he’d gone to see.
Still … silence had a way of unraveling things in me. I sat again, just to feel the weight of the couch beneath me. Solid and real.
“Anything?” I asked.
Dope squinted at the screen. “A lot of encrypted crap. But this …” He clicked open a folder with no name. “… looks like a ghost drive. No metadata. No owner stamp.” He leaned forward. “Could be a live link.”
Ella looked up. “Meaning what?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled up a black terminal window. Empty. No files. Only a blinking cursor at the top. Waiting.
He leaned in. Typed a command. Nothing. Then—
The cursor jumped, flickered, and letters began to form.
WHY ARE YOU STILL LOOKING
The words weren’t typed by Dope. They weren’t part of the code. They simply … appeared. One letter at a time. Like someone else was in the system.
“Uh—” Dope stiffened. “You guys seeing this?”
Ella shot to her feet.
I leaned forward. My throat burned.
Another line followed.
SOME DOORS SHOULD STAY CLOSED
Dope scrambled to disconnect the Wi-Fi, but the mouse froze on the screen.
“I’m locked out,” he muttered.
I SEE YOU
My blood turned to ice.
“Shut it down,” Ella snapped. “Now.”
Dope slammed the laptop closed. The other large screens cut to black.
Silence thundered, and no one said a word. The only sound was my heart hammering in my ears.
We sat that way for what seemed like forever.
Then Dope exhaled before he reopened the laptop.
“It’s offline now,” he said. “Whatever that was, it’s severed.”
Ella crossed her arms. “Not if they already got what they wanted.”
I stared at the black screen. The image of those words burned into my brain.
Something vile had reached through the digital void and touched us.
My body went cold. But my mind? My mind fractured. Not all at once—but in delicate, hairline cracks.
He was still out there. Still orchestrating. Still watching.
And for the first time in years, I felt like prey again.
I clenched my fists until my nails bit deep. My breath stuttered in my chest. Every cell inside me wanted to scream—but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Screaming never saved anyone.
I swallowed it down.
The rage. The terror. The instinct to run.
And somewhere in that storm of silence, something in me twisted.
I wasn’t the same girl he’d marked.
I’d grown teeth in the dark.
Let him come.
I would tear the music from his goddamn throat and bury the fucking flute in his chest.
The silence after felt surgical—like it had cut something out of me.
“There was no IP return. No traceable link,” Dope said. But he didn’t sound convinced.
They weren’t threats. They were warnings. But they didn’t make me want to run.
They made me want to fight.
“He’s still watching,” I said quietly, saying out loud what we were all thinking.
Ella looked at me. “You think it was him?”
“I think it was someone close. Someone with access.”
Dope leaned forward again. His mask was slipping now. No grin and no jokes.
“That wasn’t a script. That wasn’t in the file system. Someone typed that. In real time.”
I glanced at him. “Then they knew we were inside.”
He nodded slowly.
I stared out the window in the basement.
Something about the shadows seemed different now. Not just dark, but hungry.
Thirty minutes passed. Dope stayed quiet. He hadn’t spoken for a while. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his gaze unfocused, flicking occasionally to his forearm where the tattoo lived. Where the boy in the drawing had worn it first.
Dope didn’t say he was scared. He didn’t need to. And I didn’t need to tell him I’d seen him save and hide that file.
Some truths weren’t meant to be dragged into the light—not yet.
But I knew this much:
The Pied Piper wasn’t only a memory. He wasn’t a relic of our pasts. He was still here. Still playing. And we had just stepped a little farther onto his stage.