Chapter 15
Ghosts in Silk Robes
—Kira—
Iwoke to the sound of movement outside—muffled voices, the hum of a car engine idling, a door shutting with too much force.
I swung my legs out of bed and pulled on a sweater and trousers with clumsy fingers, my movements rushed and uncoordinated, as if my body had decided to act before my mind caught up.
I didn’t bother with a mirror. I crossed the room barefoot, and went straight to the tall window overlooking the front drive.
That was when I saw the car.
A black car sat below, neatly parked. It wasn’t one of ours, not part of the usual choreography of drivers and security.
Its windows were tinted so deeply they reflected nothing back, swallowing the pale light of early morning.
Two men stood beside it in dark coats, their posture rigid.
A woman lingered a few steps away, a clipboard pressed to her chest, her expression carefully neutral.
My stomach dropped.
Something about it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t yet explain, a wrongness that slid under my ribs and lodged there. I stepped back from the window, my pulse already climbing, and bolted for the door.
The stairs blurred beneath my feet as I ran, gripping the banister as I took them too fast, my breath turning shallow with every step. By the time I reached the ground floor, the house felt enormous and hostile, its polished silence suddenly full of threat.
A door at the second floor creaked open, and even before I saw her, I knew—it was my mother’s.
I heard the uneven drag of feet on the stairs, the pause between each step unnatural, strained.
When I looked up, my breath caught. Two men flanked her, nearly carrying her—each gripping an arm, her body slack between them.
For a second, my mind refused to process what I was seeing.
She looked smaller than she ever had, her shoulders slumped, her spine curved inward as if gravity had suddenly doubled.
Her hair, usually some careless approximation of styled chaos, hung limp around her face.
Her robe was belted wrong, twisted at the waist.
She wasn’t drunk and she wasn’t on her usual drugs which made her the way she sometimes was—loopy, giggling, unpredictable.
This was different. Her eyes were open, but empty, fixed somewhere near the floor as if she were studying her own shoes with desperate concentration.
When she stepped, it was with the careful, delayed obedience of someone whose body had been shut down from the inside.
Someone had given her something.
I moved before I thought.
“Wait,” I said, my voice too loud in the quiet hallway. “Stop. What are you doing?”
They didn’t stop.
My bare feet hit the floor harder as I broke into a run, the world narrowing to my mother’s bowed head, to the awful, wrong stillness of her. “Where are you taking her?” I demanded, grabbing at one man’s sleeve. “You can’t just—she’s my mother. What’s going on?”
The woman with the clipboard finally looked at me, her eyes flicking over my face with brief, professional annoyance. “Please step back,” she said calmly. “This has been authorized.”
Authorized.
The word hit like a slap.
My mother swayed, her knees buckling slightly, and one of the men tightened his grip just enough to keep her upright. She didn’t react. She didn’t look up. She didn’t say my name.
“Mama,” I whispered, panic slicing through me sharp and sudden. I reached for her arm, wrapping my hands around her sleeve, feeling the bone beneath it, too thin, too fragile. “Mama, look at me. Please.”
Nothing.
It was like hugging a body that was already halfway gone.
Something inside me broke loose then, feral and screaming, and I spun around, my gaze snapping to my father.
He stood a few steps back, perfectly composed, already dressed, already prepared, speaking to one of the staff members who had come to collect my mother.
His expression carried mild irritation, like a meeting running long.
As if this were an administrative inconvenience rather than the dismantling of a human being.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, my voice cracking as I moved toward him. “What the hell are you doing to her?”
He didn’t raise his voice. He never did.
“This should have happened a long time ago, my dear,” he said gently, as if he were consoling me.
His hand settled over mine, thumb brushing my knuckles in a slow, almost affectionate gesture that made my stomach twist. “Your mother has embarrassed herself—and us—for years. Last night was simply the final confirmation that she no longer understands how to behave.”
“She spoke,” I said wildly. “Once. She spoke once. That’s it. She won’t do it again, I swear. I’ll make sure—please—”
He turned fully toward me then, his gaze suddenly sharp. “You don’t get to make promises on her behalf,” he said.
I shook my head, tears blurring my vision. “She didn’t offend anyone. She just—tried to defend me. You can’t punish her for that. You can’t lock her away like this.”
His mouth curled, not quite into a smile. “On the contrary. I can. And I am.”
He stepped closer, lowering his voice, each word pressed carefully into me like a warning brand. “You should be grateful. This is for her own good. And for yours. We cannot have guests witnessing instability in this house.”
My breath came too fast. “Felix,” I spat. “This is about Felix.”
His eyes hardened. “Felix is our future,” he said. “And if your mother continues to interfere, you will find that future becoming much more… restrictive than you might like.”
I understood him then.
This wasn’t about her illness. This wasn’t about care.
This was punishment.
I turned and ran back to my mother, throwing my arms around her, pressing my face into her shoulder. “I’m coming back for you,” I sobbed, my voice breaking completely now. “I promise. Just—just stay. Please stay. I love you. I love you so much.”
She smelled like antiseptic and something chemical beneath it, sharp and wrong. Her body sagged against mine, unresponsive. Her eyes stayed fixed on the floor, glassy and distant, like she’d already been taught not to fight.
I barely had time to register my father’s grip before the impact came.
He swung me to face him—then the slap came, sudden and brutal, snapping my head sideways with a sting that bloomed hot across my cheek. “Shut up,” he hissed. “Stop embarrassing me.”
I looked at him, waiting—stupidly—for something. Guilt. Anger. Anything human. There was nothing there. Not even a flicker. Just calculation, cold and intact.
I didn’t scream. I just cried—loud, ugly, uncontrollable—as he dragged me backward, away from her, away from the last solid thing I had left in this house.
They walked her out.
I watched from the doorway, shaking, helpless, as they guided her into the car, her head dipping low enough that she nearly disappeared into the dark interior. The door closed with a final, clinical click.
The engine started.
And then she was gone.
I stood there long after the car disappeared down the drive, my chest heaving, my face burning, my hands empty and useless. The house felt cavernous around me, too clean, too quiet, like it had already swallowed the evidence of what had just happened.
I didn’t look at my father again.
I turned and ran.
I ran up the stairs, down the corridor, into my room, slamming the door behind me and collapsing against it as if it were the only thing holding me upright.
My mother was gone.
I slid down to the floor and pressed my face into my hands, the sobs tearing out of me with no grace, no control.
I cried like a child, loud and broken and unfiltered, because something inside me had snapped so cleanly I wasn’t sure it would ever fuse back together.
I couldn’t stop seeing her—the way her body moved without purpose, her eyes fixed on nothing, her mouth slack with whatever they’d injected her with.
The sound of her silence, that unbearable silence, was louder than any scream.
She didn’t even look at me.
I curled onto my side and rocked slightly, trying to calm the tremors that wracked my chest. But nothing helped. Because I couldn’t stop thinking—not just about the hollow shell they dragged out of this house this morning, but the woman she used to be. The woman no one but me ever really saw.
Had she even had a single happy day in her life?
I remembered walking through the garden with her when I was little—tiny legs struggling to keep up, but her hand always wrapped around mine.
We weren’t allowed to go out often. We weren’t even supposed to be alone.
But she used to sneak me outside in the early evenings.
That was when she first showed me the service gate at the far end of the garden—the one with a blind spot in the cameras she had discovered years earlier.
From there we could slip out without anyone noticing.
We’d pick flowers that weren’t really flowers—just stubborn weeds—and pretend we were in some storybook forest. Sometimes, when the weather was good, she would bring a blanket and we would sit in the grass like it was some secret picnic.
She’d read to me from whatever book she had hidden in her bag while I lay beside her, listening to her voice and watching the sky through the trees.
Those afternoons became some of my favorite memories of her.
Back then, she smelled like jasmine and fresh nail polish. She laughed sometimes. Not often, not loudly, but real enough for me to believe it. I don’t think anyone else in this house ever heard her laugh.
Then that night happened.
The night everything changed.