Scarlett
Iwake wrong.
Not suddenly.
Not gently.
I wake the way the dead would—slow, heavy, dragged back into my body like something pried my soul out overnight and shoved it back in crooked.
My eyelids feel glued together.
My tongue feels thick.
Dry.
Coated.
My skull pulses with a deep, nauseating throb that syncs with my heartbeat in a dull, sick rhythm.
I try to swallow.
It hurts.
My throat feels raw, like I’d spent hours screaming.
I don’t remember screaming.
I don’t remember much of anything.
Just fragments.
Broken pieces.
A voice—low, dark, familiar in the way nightmares are familiar.
A thumb brushing my cheek.
Warm breath at my ear.
The weight of a hand around my ankle.
The scent of pine and smoke and something older than time.
Kai.
The name rips through my mind like lightning and I jolt upright—
—the room tilts violently, my stomach heaves, and my vision fractures into bright shards.
I collapse back onto the pillow, breath stuttering.
Not real.
It wasn’t real.
It couldn’t have been real.
My hands tremble as I lift them to my face.
My palms are clammy.
My fingertips numb.
I force my eyes open slowly, carefully, letting the blur settle into the familiar soft cream and champagne tones of our bedroom. Everything looks too bright. Too quiet. Too… untouched.
No footprints.
No shadows.
No sign of him.
Just the aftermath ripping through my nerves… and the taste of copper still lingering on my lip.
I touch my mouth.
Flinch.
It’s tender.
Sore.
Like someone’s teeth had—
No.
No.
No, that was a dream—it had to be.
“Noah?” I call out, voice hoarse and fragile.
Silence answers me.
The bedside clock reads 09:42.
Late morning.
I must’ve slept through hours.
Entire worlds.
Dragging myself up takes everything I have. My legs feel rubbery, uncooperative. My head swims as I stand, gripping the bedpost until the wave passes.
My robe hangs on the door.
I pull it on with hands that won’t stop shaking.
Walking feels like learning how to move again—slow, unsteady steps across polished wooden floors that glint as sunlight spills through the hallway skylight.
The house feels wrong.
Not unsafe.
Not disturbed.
Just… wrong.
Like someone had breathed inside these walls who shouldn’t have.
Like the air hasn’t settled yet.
“Noah?” I try again, louder this time.
Nothing.
His shoes are gone from beside the door.
His jacket too.
Ice prickles down my spine.
Maybe he went to work.
Maybe he went to the gym.
Maybe he’s angry.
Maybe…
Maybe he left.
The idea hits harder than it should.
I walk into the kitchen.
Stop dead.
On the marble island sits a box.
Small.
Black.
Wrapped with a thin crimson ribbon tied perfectly once—no loops, no frills, no softness.
Just tension.
My stomach drops.
My pulse spikes.
Not again.
Not here.
Not today.
A note sits on top of it, a single piece of thick card with handwriting I don’t recognise but feel like I’ve seen a hundred times in my dreams.
Not slanted.
Not hurried.
Precise.
Sharp.
Obsessive.
My name scrawled across the front:
Scarlett
My fingers tighten on the edge of the countertop. The room tilts again, but I grip the cold marble until it steadies under my palms.
“No,” I whisper. “No, no… it’s not—”
But I already know.
I knew the second my eyes touched the ribbon.
Kai.
I squeeze my eyes shut as a memory slams into me—A hand sliding through my hair.
My name breaking in a voice I haven’t heard in years.
Warm breath at my cheek.
“Don’t say his name.”
I choke on my own inhale.
It wasn’t a dream.
Or if it was… it was too real to be dismissed. Too vivid. Too specific. My body remembers even if my mind is trying to rewrite it.
“Kai,” I breathe, the name catching like a thorn in my throat.
The sunlight refracts off the marble counter, throwing shards of brightness across the cabinets and floor. The whole kitchen looks too pristine, too staged—like a showroom, not a home. Like a place you pose in for pictures to prove you’re happy.
I stare at the box.
It stares back.
The house holds its breath.
I reach out with shaking hands and lift the note.
My vision swims again, but I force myself to focus as I flip it over.
There’s only one sentence inside, written in the same precise, carved handwriting:
You taste the same.
My legs almost give out.
Tears burn behind my eyes—not from sadness, but from sheer, bone-deep fear tangled with something darker. Something I don’t want to name because the thing that terrifies me most isn’t that Kai was here.
It’s that I’m not sure I want to convince myself he wasn’t.
The box waits.
Still.
Quiet.
Like a pulse.
I swallow hard, fingers hovering over the ribbon.
I want to walk away.
I want to throw it out.
I want to scream.
Instead, I untie it.
Slow.
Silent.
The lid lifts.
Inside, nestled in dark velvet, lies a little gold locket.
My breath freezes.
Not new.
Not shiny.
Old.
Scratched.
Worn.
Familiar.
A locket I wore when I was eighteen—the one Kai bought me at that stupid county fair the night he held my hand on the Ferris wheel and told me he’d never let anything happen to me.
I remember dropping it during the trial.
I remember not being allowed to pick it back up.
I remember thinking it was lost forever.
It’s here.
He kept it.
For four years.
And he’s returned it.
Inside the lid, etched in the metal, is a message that wasn’t there before:
Mine
My knees hit the stool.
My breath shatters.
And suddenly I don’t know whether I’m shaking because I’m scared…or because a part of me—the part I buried, drowned, smothered—remembers exactly what it felt like to be his.
The locket sits in my palm like a living thing.
Warm.
Heavy.
Wrong.
A piece of someone I buried being forced back into my hand like a punishment.
My thumb drags across the metal, over the tiny scratches I used to trace when I was bored, over the dent he made the night we ran into a fence trying to sneak home drunk, over the edge where my name used to be engraved before I scratched it out in a moment of anger I pretended was strength.
“Mine.”
The word might as well be carved into my skin instead of the metal.
My vision blurs, the kitchen tilting sideways again. The marble counter pulses beneath my fingertips, cool against my overheated palms. I blink hard, but the room keeps swaying, shifting like it’s made of water.
The drug hasn’t fully left me.
My body remembers it before I do.
A sour, metallic taste coats the back of my tongue. My throat feels thick, my stomach roiling dangerously close to revolt. Light throbs behind my eyes, beating in time with a headache that feels stitched into my skull.
My legs almost buckle again.
I grip the counter.
Harder.
The veins in my arms stand out.
“Get a grip,” I whisper to myself, voice cracking. “It’s just a locket. It’s just… a memory.”
A lie.
Even the house knows it’s a lie.
The air feels heavier now, as if something in the walls has shifted, like the foundation itself is holding its breath waiting for what I do next.
I look down at the locket again.
“Mine.”
A tremor ripples through me.
No.
No, it wasn’t real.
He wasn’t here.
He couldn’t have been.
I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing the heel of my palm to my forehead.
But then—
A whisper.
A breath.
A shadow leaning over me in the dark.
A thumb brushing the corner of my mouth.
A voice that slid into my veins like he’d never left.
You taste the same.
My heart kicks so hard I almost double forward.
“No,” I breathe, shaking my head. “That didn’t happen. That wasn’t real. That was a dream. A—hallucination. A drugged hallucination.
But then my fingers drift to my lip.
It stings.
Sore.
Bruised.
Bitten.
I gasp and jerk away from my own hand like it burned me.
That did not happen in a dream.
I turn sharply, scanning the kitchen, looking for anything—anything—that feels out of place.
The fruit bowl sits exactly where I left it.
The chairs are even, tucked neatly under the table.
No muddy footprints.
No open doors.
No sign of intrusion.
Except—The back door lock.
Turned the wrong way.
My stomach plummets.
I step closer, dizziness hitting me like a wave, but I grip the doorframe hard enough to steady myself.
The lock is turned inward.
I stand staring at it, cold creeping into my bones, crawling slow and deliberate up my spine.
I locked that door last night.
I remember locking that door.
Noah doesn’t forget locks. He checks them twice, sometimes three times, even when he thinks I’m not paying attention.
So who—
“Kai,” I whisper.
The name falls out of me like a confession.
My breath turns shallow, thin, almost frantic.
“No. No, no, no, no—”
I turn away from the door too fast, the room spinning like it’s on a faulty axis. I brace myself against the table, breath stuttering, palms sweating.
My pulse is a frantic animal in my throat.
I stumble to the sink, gripping the edge, the steel biting into my fingers.
The window above the basin stares out into the garden—the trimmed hedges, the perfect flowerbeds, the neat little stone path…
…and the mouth of the woods at the back of the property.
Trees standing close.
Dark.
Watching.
Waiting.
Like someone else had been.
I swallow hard.
The drug is still tugging at my limbs, making everything feel slow, fogged, out of sync, but beneath that haze something sharp slices through—
Instinct.
Fear.
Memory.
Want.
I press my forehead to the cool glass of the window.
“What did I do?” I whisper.
Because the truth sits like a stone in my chest:
I called for him.
I went into the woods and begged for him like a lunatic.
I screamed for a ghost that wasn’t supposed to be real anymore.
And he answered.
He always answers me.
Noah isn’t home.
The empty house aches around me, humming with something invisible, something charged. Like the walls are holding onto Kai’s breath, storing it, feeding it back to me with every inhale.
My eyes drop to the counter again.
To the box.
To the locket.
To the note.