Kai #2
He thinks drugging her makes her manageable. Slows her down. Softens the edges of the girl I knew, the girl who would snarl at anyone who tried to cage her.
All he’s doing is making it easier for me to walk in and take everything that’s mine.
I flick a look at the old analogue clock hanging crooked by the door.
Nearly midday.
He left in a hurry this morning—too fast, too messy, too guilty. That’s something I’m going to enjoy later. Picking apart his schedule. Making him late to meetings he thinks are important. Rearranging his nice, neat life the way he’s been rearranging hers.
But not yet.
Today isn’t about him.
Today’s about her.
I grab the marker from the windowsill—black, half-dried—and drag a line from the woods to the back of the house on the floor plan. The route I took. The route I’ll take again. I mark the kitchen with a little cross. The place I left the box. The note.
You taste the same.
A low sound leaves my chest that probably used to be a laugh before prison fucked with all my edges.
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” I murmur to the empty room. “You put it on. Of course you did.”
I can see it in my head—her fingers trembling as she fastens the clasp, the chain lying cold across her collarbones, the pendant against that soft skin I’ve had my hands around a hundred times in every version of my fantasies.
She kept the locket when she should have thrown it away.
She called when she should have blocked me.
She confessed when she should’ve kept pretending.
She’s mine.
She’s always been mine.
I step back, take in the wall as a whole. It looks obsessive, even to me.
Good.
It is.
There’s a photo dead centre, at eye level—the last one we took together before everything went to shit. We’re on the hood of my car, her legs over mine, his hoodie on her shoulders, summer air hot and heavy around us. She’s laughing at something I said. I’m looking at her instead of the camera.
I always looked at her instead of the camera.
I reach out and tap the glass over her face with two fingers.
“You want to know why I’m really coming back?” I ask her. The room doesn’t answer, but my pulse does. “Because you broke me,” I say calmly, “and I’m going to make you watch while I break this life you built on top of my bones.”
It doesn’t sound like rage.
It sounds like certainty.
I cross back to the nest of letters on the floor, crouch down, and sift through until I find a blank envelope at the bottom of one of the boxes. Greyside’s return address is still printed in the corner.
Cute.
Poetic.
I grab a pen. The cheap ballpoint scratches against the paper as I write her name in the centre.
Scarlett
Underneath it, smaller:
Summer.
I don’t need to post it.
The postman has had enough of us.
I’m going to hand-deliver this one like I did the last.
Inside, I slide a single sheet of paper.
No explanations.
No pleas.
No apologies.
Just one sentence.
You don’t get to drown alone.
I fold it once. Slide it in. Seal the envelope with my thumb pressed hard against the gum.
When I straighten, my phone lights up on the floor where I left it.
Screen locked.
No new notifications.
I still feel her.
Like an ache in the back of my teeth. Like a ghost walking her manicured kitchen, locket warm against her throat, listening to my message until her ears ring with it.
“I’m coming back for you,” I’d told her.
That wasn’t a threat.
It was a promise I made years ago, lying on that shitty mattress in my cell, staring at the ceiling, counting the days in cycles of court transcripts and her name scratched into the underside of my bunk.
Scarlett wanted to save me.
She failed.
Now it’s my turn.
I’m going to save her from this pretty little lie she’s living.
Even if I have to burn Noah out of it.
Even if I have to drag her kicking and screaming through every memory she tried to bury.
Even if she hates me for it.
I bend, pick up my phone, and hit play on her voicemail one more time, just to hear it—the line that makes everything else worth it.
I still love you.
I close my eyes.
Let it sink in.
Let it settle.
Let it chain itself around every ugly thing I’ve become.
“Yeah,” I murmur, voice low, sure, already hearing how I’ll make her say it when she’s sober. “You’re going to tell me that again, little sister.” I slip the envelope into my jacket. “And this time,” I add, heading for the door, “you won’t have the excuse of being drunk.”
I don’t leave right away.
My hand is on the doorknob, jacket half-pulled on, envelope pressed flat against my chest like a second heartbeat — and something stops me.
A pull.
A tether.
Her.
I turn my head, and my eyes land on the space above the mattress where the wallpaper’s been ripped away. I did that the first night I got out — tore at it with my bare hands until my fingers bled. Underneath it, in black paint I stole from a construction site, I wrote one word:
SUMMER.
Big.
Ugly.
Obsessive.
Too much.
Just like me.
The letters stare back at me now, dripping at the edges like they never dried properly.
I step toward them.
My fingers graze the wall, tracing the curve of the S, then the U — slow, deliberate strokes, like I’m touching her skin instead of plaster and grit and old paint.
“You shouldn’t have called me,” I say out loud, voice low enough that the radiator seems to lean in to hear it. “You shouldn’t have said any of that.”
My throat works around something sharp.
My hand tightens on the wall.
“You shouldn’t have loved me.”
A laugh breaks out of me — not light, not free. A scraped sound, dragged up from somewhere deep and damaged.
“But you did. And you fucking still do.”
My pulse claws at my ribs.
I picture her — hair wild from sleep, mouth swollen from my teeth, wine stains on her robe, tears dried on her cheeks. I picture her clutching the phone like it’s me, replaying my voice over and over until she’s shaking.
She’s scared of me.
She wants me.
She hates herself for both.
Good.
Fear and want taste the same on her tongue.
I’ve always known how to read them.
I pull my hand off the wall and stare at my fingers. They’re trembling. Not from adrenaline — from restraint. From not taking what I want the second I fucking want it. From holding myself back because the part of me that still believes in consequences whispers that I need to be patient.
But patience died in prison.
What’s left is hunger.
Rotted.
Twisted.
Teeth and bone and her name.
The house creaks.
Timber shifts.
Somewhere outside, a dog barks once and then goes silent.
I cross the room again, pacing slow, measured steps over the scattered envelopes. My boot crushes one — the sound sharp, papery, satisfying. I pick it up, rip it fully in half, then in half again. The pieces fall like snow.
“These were lies,” I say under my breath. “You pretending you didn’t want me. You pretending you were better without me. You pretending Noah was enough.”
I spit Noah’s name like it tastes foul.
He’s not enough.
He never was.
Not for her.
Not for the version of her that used to curl under my arm in the back seat of my car and whisper that she didn’t care what the world thought — that she’d burn it down if it tried to take me away.
That girl is still in there.
Buried under diamonds and dinners and designer fucking charity dresses.
I’m going to dig her out with my teeth if I have to.
My jaw flexes.
The envelope in my pocket feels heavier the longer I wait. Like it knows its destination. Like it wants to be in her hands already, pressed against her heartbeat, feeding the panic I planted in her this morning.
I imagine her right now — stumbling around that pretty house barefoot, the locket hitting her collarbones, wine on her breath, voicemail carved behind her eyes like scripture.
I imagine her whispering my name in the empty kitchen.
Not Noah’s.
Mine.
Something hot tightens beneath my sternum. Almost painful.
“She still loves me,” I say into the dim room, and the admission tastes like blood and victory.
I grab my jacket fully, shrug it over my shoulders, shove my phone into the pocket.
But I don’t leave.
Because then I see it.
The corner.
The box.
The thing I don’t like looking at — not because I’m ashamed, but because it sets off something so violent in me I have to steady myself not to act on instinct.
It’s a small chest the size of a bedside drawer. Wood. Black. Heavy. The lock on it massive, industrial, one I bought because it reminded me of the sound cell doors make when they slam shut.
I crouch.
Unlock it.
Slow.
The lid lifts with a stiff groan.
Inside?
Everything I stole back.
Her perfume bottle — half-empty, cap cracked.
A napkin from the coffee shop she used to work in, her doodles in the corner.
A bracelet she lost at seventeen.
A hair tie.
A torn corner of her favourite sweatshirt.
The lipstick she used the night before the arrest.
And—
The Polaroid.
The one from the lake.
Her on my shoulders, laughing, water dripping down her legs, hands in my hair.
Me looking up at her like she hung the fucking moon.
My thumb brushes her image.
My pulse pounds.
“You shouldn’t have left that night,” I whisper to the picture. “You shouldn’t have run. You shouldn’t have let them talk you into betraying me.” A muscle jumps in my cheek. “But you’re going to tell me why, sweetheart. And you’re going to do it while you’re looking at me.”
The house around me thickens — the air dense, heavy, almost humid. My breath leaves a faint fog in the cold patch of light spilling from the single lamp.
I close the box.
Click the lock.
Stand.
Envelope in pocket.
Phone charged.
Her voicemail still echoing in the back of my skull like a heartbeat out of rhythm.
I grip the doorknob again — and this time I turn it.
The wind hits my face immediately — cold, sharp, soaked in the smell of wet pine and damp earth. The woods rustle in the distance like they recognise me.
I step outside.
The door clicks shut.
The plan is simple.
Walk the perimeter.
Watch the house.
Wait for the moment she’s alone enough for me to send the next thing.
Something worse.
Something better.
Something she’ll feel between her legs and in her lungs and in her nightmares.
My boots crunch through gravel as I start walking.
The woods loom ahead — dark, patient, familiar.
I slip into them like they’re an old coat.
Her house glows in the distance — warm, golden, perfect, too big for the life she pretends to have.
One window on the second floor is still lit.
Her room.
Her shadow moves once behind the curtains.
My breath leaves me slow and controlled.
“There you are,” I murmur into the cold, the words fogging in front of me. “My fucking liar.”
My hands flex at my sides.
“She’s waiting for me,” I tell the trees. “She doesn’t know it yet. But she is.”
I take one more step toward the house.
Then another.
Then—
A thought hits me, vicious and electric.
She’s drunk.
She’s unraveling.
She’s alone.
She left me a voicemail.
I left her one back.
But I didn’t see her hear it.
And the idea that she might have collapsed on that perfect white sofa with my voice playing in her ear?
That she might have cried with my name on her lips?
That she might have whispered come back with no one to hear it but the walls?
It hits me like a fist under my ribs.
My heartbeat spikes.
My breath stutters.
I swallow hard.
“Fuck,” I breathe. “I should’ve been there to watch.”
The wind howls through the branches like agreement.
My fingers curl.
I take another step toward the house — slow, steady, razor-sharp — and the obsession claws up my spine all over again.
“I’m coming back in,” I tell the dark. “Tonight. Tomorrow. Doesn’t matter.”
A promise.
A sentence.
A sentence she’ll serve with me.
“And the next time she says she loves me,” I whisper, grin cutting sharp across my face, “I’m going to be close enough to feel her breath when she says it.”
I walk deeper into the trees.
Toward her.
Toward the house she’s slowly falling apart inside.
Toward the life I’m going to take back piece by piece.
And under my breath, soft enough that only the night hears it, I say her name one more time.
“Scarlett.”
My little sister.
My little liar.
My unfinished sin.
I’m not done with her.
Not even close.