Chapter 20
VICTORIA
The door creaks like it’s the first scene of a horror movie, afraid to let me inside. I’m afraid to be back here.
Cat doesn’t even wait for me to adjust being back at my apartment—he bolts past my feet, meowing so loud, it sounds like he’s cursing me for disappearing, but I don’t have energy for both him and I.
All I can do is sit here, in the middle of the room, and exist. No collapse, no dramatic exhale of rage that precipitates objects being thrown and glass breaking.
Just that weird feeling of trying to adjust when you stay in unfamiliar hotel rooms, except this isn’t a hotel. This is home. Allegedly.
My bag hits the floor with a dull thud, and my body flinches at the sound, the action startling me. This place feels haunted. Nothing about it resembles the relaxing, quiet place I left behind. Now, the quiet feels like death—God, the silence is so thick it wraps everything, foretelling a bad omen.
“I’m home,” I whisper, but the walls don’t answer.
Cat rubs against my ankles, so I bend down and scoop him up, burying my face in his fur.
“Miss me?” I ask. The old me, seeing the way I seek comfort in an animal, would appraise me.
But not the now-me. Now-me just needs a break from fucking everything. Even from life itself, if possible.
I wander through the apartment like it belongs to someone else, touching surfaces without knowing why.
The couch. The lamp. The edge of the kitchen counter.
It’s like I need tactile confirmation that this is still my life.
My mug is still by the sink, the plants are not dead, and the couch is still scratched from Cat’s artistic talent.
Everything is the same as it used to be. Everything but me.
With nothing else to do, I take the longest bath of my life, staying under the water until my fingers shrivel and my thoughts get too loud to ignore.
And just like every time in the past two days when that happens, I find another distraction.
I get out, dry off, and put on the first clothes I see in the closet.
Then I take them off because something about the way the material touches my body feels uncomfortable, put on different ones, and repeat the process until everything is on the floor.
When I have no other options left, I end up walking around naked.
And all this in under ten minutes. God, why does time pass so slowly?
I stay in bed for hours, then stand just to realize it’s only been twenty minutes.
I go back to the living room and light a candle, questioning why I even have one.
Everything I’m doing is all so mechanical that I don’t even notice I’m doing it—until I do.
A couple of times, I catch myself mid-motion, like waking up inside my body.
Holding a cup of coffee I don’t remember making, sitting down without realizing I stood, shifting from one room to another like a ghost who doesn’t realize she had died.
And through it all, I pretend that I never left this apartment for the mission—or for the Professor’s experiment that changed my life. The girl who hesitated in that hotel room isn’t me. Azrael is just a detour I’m done with, nothing more than a decision taken under poor judgment.
Lie after lie stacks together, building a shaky fortress against a truth I refuse to accept.
The clock says 11:38 a.m.
Then 1:13 p.m.
And somehow it got to 2:11 p.m. in the blink of an eye.
I check the fridge and close it without a reason, just to open it again ten minutes later, like maybe something had changed.
I don’t think about Azrael directly—something in my brain forbids me from thinking of him as the source of my misery.
But it doesn’t mean I don’t look strangely at the scotch bottle on the counter, or how I cover that stupid armchair in clothes just so I don’t see its surface.
I avoid his name, but there he is—in every corner of my house and my brain.
I mop the floor at 5:00 p.m. I don’t remember ever holding a mop in my entire fucking life, but I need the distraction. Anything to keep me borderline sane. I’m almost prepared to move to the windows when my phone lights up.
Azrael: Victoria!
Ignore.
Azrael: This isn’t over.
Not sure who’s more pathetic right now: me for the pity party or him because he is trying to crash it.
If, and only if, he gets near me again, it will be on my own terms and most likely with my blade cutting his fucking throat.
I turn the phone over, face down, like it’s some sort of magic spell that will keep him away from my existence.
But that is not enough for the demon inside him. He calls.
Once. Twice. Three times.
By the seventh attempt, my fingers hover over the screen thinking I should answer.
By the twelfth, I’m laughing like a maniac.
And by the nineteenth, I basically have to restrain my body from going over to his place.
It feels like half of me blames him for fucking me up, and the other half wants to ask him to continue what he started.
Fucking Stockholm syndrome. Does he need me? He knows exactly where to find me.
I open my laptop and write it out the same way I used to in the past when I needed clarity:
Reasons I’m Victoria
I didn’t die.
I left on my terms.
I didn’t answer.
I’m not his.
I don’t need him.
Yes, this is me, the one who doesn’t care. The one that’ll kill just because the perfume is too strong or because someone looked at me for too long.
“Who the fuck needs the Professor? I have my wine, and it’s enough,” I say out loud.
I walk into the kitchen with all the grace of a woman not unraveling while Cat trails behind me. He doesn’t believe it either.
The cabinet is closed. The glasses have gone untouched for ten days now and my version of self-control is sealed in a bottle.
I pop the cork and pour a glass too full; it almost spills onto the floor.
Despite that, it still takes me less than twenty seconds to finish it.
It burns, and I can feel the familiar wave that flows through my body, the sweet sensation of acidity. Pleasure.
The newly refilled glass dangles in my hand as I climb onto the kitchen counter the way I would at the edge of a rooftop.
I tuck my knees in and let the night bleed in through the window.
The city is breathing, headlights blink, and someone on the next street over plays jazz at the wrong volume—loud enough for me to hear, soft enough to still feel alone.
And suddenly—
A sound.
The doorbell rings, again and again. I take a knife from the drawer and my neck stiffens, getting my body ready for action.
At the sound, poor Cat bolts and hides under the couch.
But not me. I’m ready for this. I want the person on the other side of the door to enter.
If they want to try to kill me, good. But not until I finish my wine.
I take another sip and wait, needing to assess the situation and my fucked-up life with a calm mind. My other hand stays curled around the knife handle, blade pointed down, just in case tonight’s situation escalates.
But the ringing stops. Did they leave?
BAM.
Something slams into the door sounding nothing like a knock. The person outside really wants to break in.
Another smash, and I swear even the walls shake.
My heartbeat is steady, and my grip on the knife handle is tight. I’m in control. Whatever is about to happen, it will end just as fast as it starts. If it is him, he’ll learn a valuable lesson tonight. If it isn’t—well, I’ve been craving violence since Tuesday.
Then comes the unmistakable voice.
“Open the fucking door.”
But he does it himself, letting in six-foot-three of fury and obsession, breathing like he’d sprinted through hell to get to me.
“Missed me, love?”