Chapter 8 #2
The room is spare—nothing warm about it, nothing that breathes the way the kitchen and the bathroom do. But at the foot of the bed, folded in three neat stacks, are clothes.
Sweaters. Tights. Soft cotton shirts. Practical. Neutral. Nothing loud or attention-seeking. The kind of thing I’d choose for myself if I knew I’d be spending time indoors, close to a window, in a place where comfort mattered more than appearances.
My fingers brush the sleeve of the first sweater. The material is soft, almost weightless. When I hold it up against myself, the length is right. The shoulders sit where they should. Not tailored. But close. Close enough that my stomach tightens.
I push the thought away and snatch the first stack of clothing.
I step into black tights, pull the beige turtleneck over my head, and tug on thick socks.
My movements are hurried, almost frantic, like I’m racing against some invisible clock, but I pause long enough to curl my fingers into the sleeves, noticing how perfectly it fits.
What if all this is some twisted mind-game?
What if this is nothing but some sick psychopath who gets off on harming women?
Shit. I need to stop thinking or I’ll drive myself crazy before he gets the chance to.
I’m about to go back downstairs when I glance left, in the direction he always goes. At the end of it stands a door that looks like all the others. Same wood. Same trim. Same brushed brass handle. There’s nothing remarkable about it. And yet…I can’t look away.
It’s not the door itself. It’s the feeling around it. The faint sense that something sits behind it, waiting. The air in that direction feels different. Thicker. Quieter.
I bite the inside of my cheek, rubbing my palm down the side of my thigh as I approach. My pulse ticks hard at the base of my throat as I stop two steps away.
This is stupid. I’ve tried every other door in this house, and they were locked. This one will be too. Despite that logic, I reach out anyway, the beige wool bunching at my wrist, then cascading over my knuckles as my palm meets the doorknob.
The brass chills my skin, and I twist right, then left, the lock not giving in. My shoulder tenses as I lean into it, applying more pressure, but the door remains unmovable as stone.
“That’s what I thought,” I mutter to myself before heading back downstairs.
By the fifth evening, the house feels less like a trap and more like something I haven’t yet learned how to use.
I move through it differently. More aware of the rhythm of the rooms, the shift in the light through the windows, the beat of silence between the breaths of the house.
The fear hasn’t left, but I carry it differently now.
I wear it under my skin instead of around my shoulders.
But it’s the silence that’s beginning to get to me.
It has teeth. It gnaws at the edges of my thoughts, follows me from room to room like something alive.
Five days alone, and I’ve started talking to myself just to hear a voice break through the thick blanket of nothing.
Last night I dropped a spoon in the kitchen, and the clatter made me jump, not because it was loud, but because it felt like trespassing.
Now, I’m sitting on the floor in front of the door that somehow lures me back every few hours. For some reason, the space here, it feels less empty. Maybe it’s the hallway that’s more confined than the wide-open space downstairs that makes me feel less…alone.
Oh God, I’m losing my mind.
I rough my fingers through my hair, raking it all the way to the ends, then stand and walk away.
An hour later, I’m back, staring at the same damn door. Is this what it feels like when boredom slowly drives a person insane?
I exhale slowly and leave again.
That night, after the kitchen has cooled and the sky outside is bleeding into the last colors of sunset, I find myself in front of it a third time. Hair still damp from the shower, sweater sleeves pushed up to my elbows. The house dark except for the low lamps downstairs.
I don’t reach for the handle. I just stand there, listening to the soft, steady tick of the house. The subtle creak of beams cooling. Glass whispering in its frame as wind presses against it. It’s strange how a house can feel like a living thing when you listen closely—breathing, settling, waiting.
With a sigh, I lean forward, pressing my cheek and both palms flat against the wood, like I’m listening for something, some clue of what’s on the other side.
A soft click.
I go very still.
Did that just —
I don’t move for a full breath. Two. Then I drop my gaze to the handle. Did the door just unlock? On its own?
Jesus. This should freak me out. This should make me run in the opposite direction, but instead I wrap my fingers around it and turn.
Maybe I deserve to be kidnapped without an apparent reason, because I sure as hell as can do stupid shit sometimes.
The door gives way beneath my touch, and something inside me lurches—my heart suddenly a trapped bird throwing itself against my ribs.
The space is larger than I expect—wide and open, the air almost reverent in its stillness.
Light spills across the floor in a muted wash of amber, like it’s been ushered inside.
There’s no clutter. No furniture crowding the center.
Just a long wooden bench built into the far wall, facing a single enormous window.
The view steals the rest of my breath.
Snow-peaked mountains layered in soft blue shadow, the sky above them stretched wide and burning—gold melting into rose, rose dissolving into indigo. It looks composed. As if the house was built around this exact angle, this exact quality of dying light.
I step inside without realizing I’ve moved. Entranced by the sight, I forget for a moment that I didn’t choose to be here.
The bench is at the perfect distance—close enough to feel suspended in the view, far enough to sit without pressing against the glass. I lower myself onto it slowly, the way you do with something you’re not sure you’re allowed to have.
The sun sinks lower. The light shifts. And only when the room dims enough for my eyes to adjust do I look up, forgetting how to breathe right.
The ceiling isn’t plain. It’s painted. One half autumn, with deep-amber leaves suspended mid-fall. Branches heavy with fading color—burnt orange, deep rust, muted gold. The sky above them dusky and soft, as if the air itself carries the scent of something ending.
The other half is spring. Branches pale and delicate, blossoms just beginning to open.
Petals caught in a gentle upward drift, light and hopeful against a clean blue sky.
They meet at the center without blending.
Not competing. Just existing side by side, two seasons that should never share a room, sharing one.
My fingers curl into the bench, and I move my gaze back to the window. I have no idea how long I sit there, the light outside turning to night.
Every evening after that, I come back.
I don’t decide to—I just end up here, the way you end up anywhere that asks nothing of you.
The room doesn’t require anything from me.
No vigilance. No performance of survival.
The bench faces the window, and the window faces the mountains, and the mountains don’t care who I am or how I got here, and that turns out to be exactly what I need.
Somewhere between nights spent here, this room starts to feel like mine. I don’t remember the precise moment my pulse stopped quickening at the sound of the lock—only that it happened, gradually, the way all the slow things happen.
Tonight, the snow’s heavier, the wind louder. I stand and walk to the window. Cross my arms. Watch the last of the light drain from the horizon, the mountains going dark and enormous beyond the glass.
My mind’s quiet in the way it only gets here. No case files. No locked doors. Just the dark coming in and the room holding still around me.
“Reth.” The voice comes from behind me. I don’t move. Not outwardly. My heart slams once, violent enough to feel in my throat, and I let it—grip my own elbows tighter, steady my breath, and keep my eyes on the mountains.
“Before I left, you asked my name.”
“Reth?” I repeat quietly. The syllable is strange in my mouth. Incomplete somehow. “Is that short for something?”
A pause.
“No.” His voice is flat. Final. Carrying something underneath. “It’s what’s left.”
I turn, but he’s already gone, the hallway empty, and I’m standing there with a strange sense that I just saw a glimpse of something I shouldn’t have.
It’s what’s left.
I’ve heard voices like that before. The careful detachment of someone who learned early that survival sometimes means carving parts of yourself away.
My chest tightens before I can stop it. It’s instinct, definitely not reason. It’s the part of me that catalogues tone shifts, that notices when silence isn’t defiance but protection. I’m trained to look past behavior and search for fracture.
No.
I can’t afford to do that here. Empathy is dangerous in this house. He stole me. Whatever happened to him doesn’t erase that. But I can’t help the unwelcome thought stirred by his return.
I’m no longer alone.