Chapter 9 Sera
Sera
I’m buried alive, and it’s the most peaceful I’ve felt in years.
Dirt fills my mouth, gritty between my teeth. My lungs burn for air they can’t have. I press my palms against the wooden ceiling of my coffin, feeling splinters drive under my fingernails as I claw at it. The pain is exquisite, real in a way nothing else has been since he took everything from me.
I should be screaming, though no one would hear me six feet under. Instead, my lips curve into a smile around the soil in my mouth.
This is where I belong.
The thought arrives with perfect clarity. Down here in the dark, with the earth pressing in from all sides, I am exactly where I should be. Not hunting. Not hiding. Not pretending to be someone I’m not.
Just buried, waiting. Just becoming something new beneath the surface.
My fingernails peel back as I scrape harder at the wood. Blood mingles with dirt. The pain sharpens everything—my thoughts, my purpose, my hunger for what comes next.
I wake not with a gasp, but with a smile and a thin sheen of sweat coating my skin.
The bedroom is dark, but not as dark as my dream. My sheets are damp, twisted around my legs like restraints. For a moment, I lie perfectly still, letting the feeling of being buried linger in my muscles, in my bones.
Then I hear it.
Scratching, faint but persistent, like fingernails dragging across old wood. It’s coming from below, from the sealed basement door I still haven’t opened.
I’ve been in this house for nearly a week now, and each night, the sounds from the basement grow more insistent. Sometimes it’s scratching. Sometimes it’s a low, rhythmic thumping, like a heartbeat. Sometimes it’s a whisper so quiet I can’t make out any of the words.
My shadow daddy visits me most nights, his presence slipping through vents and under doors. Sometimes he brings me to shuddering orgasms with his cold touch or another wine bottle or my loaded gun. Other times he just watches, a deeper patch of darkness in the corner of my room.
The scratching grows louder, more frantic. Then, suddenly—
KNOCK.
One hard, deliberate sound that absolutely does not come from the basement. It echoes through the house, bouncing off walls and settling in my chest.
The front door. Someone is at my front door at—I check the clock—8:17 in the morning.
I slide out of bed and pull on an oversized T-shirt that barely covers my ass, but I can’t find my panties. Oh well.
I do find my gun, though, and I carry it with me.
The scratching from the basement has stopped. The whole house seems to be holding its breath, waiting.
I pad barefoot down the stairs, my free hand trailing along the banister for balance. The knocking doesn’t come again.
At the front door, I hesitate. Through the peephole, I see nothing. Just my empty porch, lit by the rising sun. No figure waiting.
Still, I lift my gun, unlock the door, and open it a crack, tense and ready to slam it shut again or start shooting, just in case.
The porch is really empty.
Wait, no, not quite empty.
On the porch sits a black velvet box, about the size of a shoebox, tied with a crimson ribbon. The bow is perfect, each loop symmetrical, as if someone spent a long time getting it just right.
I glance around, scanning the tree line, the driveway, the shadows under my car and along the street. Nothing moves, but someone is watching. I’m certain of it.
“I know you’re still there,” I call into the morning, squeezing my gun tightly.
The wind picks up, rustling the dead leaves on the porch, but the breeze carries no response.
I bend and pick up the box. It’s lighter than I expected, though I’m not sure what I was expecting. Something shifts inside, a solid weight sliding from one end to the other. For a moment, I think about leaving it, about closing the door and pretending I never saw it.
But that’s not who I am anymore. I don’t run from dark things. I embrace them.
I bring the box inside and lock the door.
In the kitchen, I place the gun and the box on the counter and stare at it. The velvet is so black it seems to absorb the sunlight streaming through the window. The ribbon is the exact color of blood.
I know I should be cautious. It could be anything—a bomb, a snake, anthrax. But my fingers itch to untie that perfect bow, to lift the lid and see what’s been delivered to me so early in the morning.
I pull one end of the ribbon, and it unravels smoothly, falling away from the box like a crimson waterfall. The lid lifts easily, revealing tissue paper inside, black and rustling as I peel it back.
What’s beneath steals my breath.
A hand.
A man’s hand, severed cleanly at the wrist. It’s pale but not waxy, posed with a strange elegance, fingers slightly curled as if holding something precious. And indeed, nestled in the palm is a small, folded photograph.
With trembling fingers, I pluck the photo from the hand’s grasp. I unfold it, and the room tilts around me.
I know this face. I’ve memorized it, hated it, dreamed of erasing it from existence.
David Farley. His friend. His alibi. The man who testified that I was “confused about what happened” and that Vincent was “a gentleman who would never hurt a woman.”
The hand in the box must’ve surely belonged to him. The fingers that once pointed at me in court, dismissing my truth, are now permanently curled, holding the evidence of his betrayal.
There’s no note. There doesn’t need to be one.
The message is clear: someone knows what Vincent did to me. Someone believes me. And that someone has decided to do something about it.
Does this mean that David is dead? Or just minus one hand?
I sink to the kitchen floor, the box cradled in my lap. My thoughts flicker and shift.
Was this an act of justice…or an attempt to get my attention?
Then a deeper thought surfaces: Does it matter?
Someone saw me—the real me, not the mask I wear now, not the fake identity I’ve constructed. Someone saw Penny beneath Sera’s skin and decided she deserved vengeance.
“You saw me,” I whisper to the hand, to the empty kitchen, to whoever delivered this perverse gift. “You finally saw me.”
I carefully wrap the tissue paper back around the hand, around the photograph. I place the lid back on the box and retie the ribbon, making sure the bow is as perfect as it was when I found it.
There’s a faint scratch from the direction of the basement, like a finger being dragged across a vent. A question, maybe.
I press my palm to the velvet lid and smile. The scratching grows louder, more insistent.
“Yes, I know who it was,” I tell my shadow daddy. “That Scottish guy at the gas station who knows my username. He must know everything.”
It isn’t fear curling in my chest as I sit there with a man’s hand in a box on my lap. It’s something worse…or something much, much better.
I like being chosen like this.
I like being believed.