40. Keira
KEIRA
W alls are supposed to keep the monsters out.
Tonight, mine just echo them back—louder, sharper, like they’ve learned how to scream.
The soft snick of the bedroom door closing feels like a lie. I lean my weight against it, bones trembling so violently I half expect the whole frame to splinter beneath me. My knees buckle in slow motion, like they’re not sure whether to give out or hold on. I wait. I breathe. I pretend it’s fine.
It isn’t.
Not when Jayson’s scent is still on my skin.
Not when his voice is still coiled around my spine like barbed wire.
He’d offered to stay. Rough palms on my hips, breath warm against my ear, calm, soothing sounds that sounded like a spell. Or a warning. Or a promise so dangerous it could kill me if I believed in it too hard.
I told him I was fine.
I lied.
And he knew. He knew, because he looked at me like he was watching a storm crawl across the sky and bracing for the moment it broke. He looked at me like he could taste the fear on my tongue. But he still walked away—slow, hesitant steps down a hallway that suddenly felt longer than a lifetime.
The moment I couldn’t hear him anymore, I locked the door. Like that would save me.
Then I crawled under the duvet like a child. Like cotton could protect me from a world gone crazy. How did I get to this moment?
Silence is safety, and that’s the hope I cling to as I lie there now, blinking at the ceiling, heart a savage thing kicking against my ribs. I force myself to recite the truths I know . The ones I wrote in invisible ink across the inside of my skull. I speak them silently, lips barely moving.
—Maddox—whoever he is—is after you.
—Jayson can still dispose of you whenever it suits him.
—Sex isn’t a contract. It’s not protection. It’s not love.
—Unwilling brides make convenient collateral.
—The past doesn’t stay dead. It hunts. It knocks on the wrong fucking door.
Each line slices a little deeper. I repeat them until they rattle around inside me, until the ache lodges under my ribs like shrapnel too twisted to pull free.
My hands are fists beneath the blanket. I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend the dark is empty. It isn’t. It’s a theater. A fucking cinema screen on loop—nightmare edition, full color, Dolby surround sound. And I’m trapped in the front row with no way to look away.
Red leather couch.
Flickering lightbulb.
A girl’s sobs.
The crack of a slap.
Blood pooling under a door.
A man’s voice, calm and final ? —
“She’s a problem.”
I jerk upright, gasping.
My skin is cold. My mouth tastes like cotton. And my own breath feels like it’s been stolen and handed back to me wrong. Too sharp. Too jagged.
I press a hand to my chest like it might stop my ribcage from snapping open. Like maybe, just maybe, it can hold in the pieces I don’t know how to name yet.
Who the hell is Maddox?
Why does that name feel like a stain I can’t scrub out?
Why does hearing it make me want to run barefoot through glass just to escape it?
The silence is thunderous now. Every creak in the house is a threat. Every shadow is a hand. Every breath feels borrowed.
I curl tighter under the covers and stare into the dark.
Jayson would come if I called.
But I don’t.
Because I don’t know if I want him here to protect me…
Or to save me from myself.
The nightmare always starts the same.
Blue door. Brass knob. My hand too small to grip it properly, the metal biting cold, slick with sweat—or blood, maybe. Riley behind me, whispering the same plea she always does.
“Don’t.”
But I always do.
Because the dream isn’t a dream. It’s a memory. It just wears the skin of a nightmare to sneak past my defenses.
Only tonight, the reel jumps.
The rhythm breaks.
It doesn’t stop at the door .
It skips forward—like my brain’s finally decided I’ve earned the rest of the horror. I see the wine cellar, stone walls dripping with condensation, bottles glinting like rows of empty eyes. The light’s yellow and thin, dust-choked.
A man is waiting at the bottom.
A silhouette carved in shadow.
His hand clamps down on my shoulder. Heavy. Proprietary. Like I’m not a child, just something he’s already decided to own. His fingers dig in, and my knees buckle. I’m too scared to cry.
From the shadows, Father’s voice cuts through—twisted by fear, sharp with fury.
“She’ll keep quiet.”
The man doesn’t flinch. “You’d better hope so.”
Then the screen goes black. And I rocket upright with a scream lodged in my throat. Sweat drips down my back, my chest, pooling at my collarbones. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I’m drowning in heat, and the air tastes like mildew and memory and powerlessness.
I blink at the bedside clock. 12:47 a.m.
The room feels wrong. Off-balance. Tilted. Like the past bled into the walls and now it’s watching me.
My legs move without asking.
One second I’m clawing the quilt off my skin like it’s on fire, the next—I’m standing. Barefoot. Shaking.
The door is open. Open. Didn’t I lock that?
I know I did. I heard the snick of the lock, felt it click into place like a ward against whatever waited on the other side. But now it gapes, a yawning mouth in the dark, and I can’t remember opening it. I can’t remember anything after the dream started.
Or maybe… maybe I didn’t lock it.
Maybe I wanted it open.
My body pulls forward, a marionette on strings strung by trauma. The hallway is cold. Dim. Each step is silent, but inside my chest, my heart is pounding slow and thick—like syrup dragging through my veins. Like my blood forgot how to rush. Forgot how to protect me.
I’m descending the back staircase. One hand trails the bannister, knuckles white.
I’m in the mud-room now. The keypad is blinking soft green. The alarm isn’t enabled.
The bolt turns with a hiss so quiet it sounds like guilt. Like the house wants to let me go.
And then I’m there. Door half-open. Night air slashing across my skin like knives dipped in winter. My breath catches. But I don’t step outside. I just stand in the threshold like I’m waiting for something. Or someone. A memory. A ghost. A voice in the dark that used to call me by name.
Keira, be good.
Keira, be quiet.
Keira, smile.
But I’m not that girl anymore.
Am I?
The lawn is slick beneath my bare feet, cold and unwelcoming.
Every step stains my skin with dew and dirt, but I keep going, pulled forward by something I can’t name.
Something that hums in my bones, old and feral and aching.
Like a compass that’s been cracked, spun too many times, and finally given up pretending it knows which way is north.
Beyond the manicured grass, the forest yawns open. A beast with black-teeth and breath like fog. It doesn’t reach for me—it waits. Patient. Knowing I’ll come.
And I do .
Jayson’s shirt clings to my calves, soaked through, whispering against my legs with every slow, ghost-drawn step. My hair hangs in a curtain, shielding my face, a veil for shame I haven’t even begun to unravel.
I should feel fear. But what I feel is familiarity. Like I’ve done this before. Like these trees once watched me break and said nothing.
Halfway to the treeline, a thin red beam slices across my shins. The perimeter laser.
Somewhere, deep in the house, steel breathes awake. Motors growl. A system arms. Jayson’s fortress shifts into defense.
But I barely hear it. I’m already somewhere else. Deeper. The forest calls louder now. And this time, it uses my name.
I step over the laser like it’s nothing.
Then I see it. A small hollow beneath the firs, soft with moss and shadow. Moonlight spills there like milk from a broken bottle—luminous, wasted, sacred.
I don’t decide to fall. My knees just give out. And the earth catches me like it remembers.
The moss is cool, damp, greedy. It drinks my tears without asking questions. Without offering comfort. I press my hands into it like I’m trying to ground myself, but all I feel is memory flooding back in high tide.
A man’s eyes, black and gleaming. Always watching. Always calculating.
His hand—a vise on my shoulder, on my waist, on my throat—holding me in place. Making it normal.
Father, standing to the side. Not interfering. Looking away.
Riley in the hallway, fists in her hair, tears streaming, whispering, “Don’t go down there, Keira, please don’t ? —”
But I did. I did. And now it’s all crawling back out of the dark.
I squeeze my hands over my ears, nails biting into my scalp. I curl in on myself. I rock. I scream without sound. But the reel keeps spinning.
Click-click. Frame by frame. Memory by memory.
Blood on my nightgown.
The smell of dry earth and heartbreak.
A locked door.
A laugh I hated.
And one voice—his voice—always in my head.
“You’ll forget eventually. That’s how this works.”
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And now it's all coming back to claim me.
Twigs crack. A flashlight flares, then dies. Heavy footsteps—too heavy to be a deer, too fast to be a threat I want to meet alone. My heart skitters.
Then his voice, low and coaxing— “Keira.”
I jolt. Terror flashes… then shatters on recognition. I lunge and collide with a chest built like a fortress. My fingers knot in cotton; pinecones bite my knees, but I barely feel them. Jayson’s coat falls around my shoulders like a tent made of warmth and sandalwood.
“I saw him,” I choke. “Dad just—he just let him.”
“I’ve got you,” he promises, rocking us like we’re the only two people in the world with gravity. “We’re going home, Keira. Hold on.”
I nod, bury my face in the curve of his neck. “Don’t give me to them,” I whisper, words hot against his skin.
“They’ll have to carve me open first,” he growls, and the conviction in his voice ties a knot in my throat.
He lifts me—weightless, crushing—and starts back through the trees. Every step thunders through his ribcage straight into mine. Like his body is trying to speak the words neither of us can yet say .
I don’t fight it. This is a man built for war, and right now, I am the battlefield he refuses to abandon.
The forest recedes behind us. But it leaves fingerprints on my skin, memory tangled in my hair. I feel it clinging to me even as he carries me through the blinking laser line, across the wet lawn, back toward walls that were never meant to hold all this hurt.
His heart is a drumbeat beneath my cheek. Not calm or soothing. Just there. Fierce and alive and mine.
He doesn’t ask me what I saw. Doesn’t ask what happened. He already knows it’s not the kind of thing you can say out loud without bleeding everywhere.
When we reach the door, he kicks it open. He doesn’t hesitate; just carries me straight inside, through the house, down the hall, into the room where I should’ve been to begin with. His room. His bed. His breath in my hair like a shield.
He lowers me gently, like setting me down might break me. But I’m already broken. That’s the thing. And he knows it.
He tucks the blanket around me like a question. I answer it with a whisper.
“Don’t leave.”
He doesn’t. He sits beside me, boots still on, muscles rigid, hands stained with rage he hasn’t used yet.
I close my eyes, still trembling. But this time, when the dark closes in—I’m not alone. And maybe that’s not peace. But it’s enough to survive the night.