Chapter 25 #2
Concrete, dust. Faint and old. At the bottom, there it was, mounted on the wall.
A small box, plain, easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it, but I was.
I stared at it for a second, long enough for something to settle into place in my head.
I stepped forward, reached out, and flipped it.
The house above us died, just like that.
The television cut mid sound, mid laugh, mid whatever the fuck it was saying, and the silence dropped hard.
We didn’t move; we just stood there in it. Letting it settle, letting it become real. Then, simultaneously, we pulled the balaclavas on.
Fabric sliding over skin, tight and comforting. We moved under the stairs, pressed into the space just enough to disappear into the dark, and we waited. You feel that, little Ghost?
That moment where time starts dragging in a way that makes you feel sick? Yeah, stay in that feeling a little longer, don’t rush it.
The sound came first. Upstairs, a chair scraping lightly against the floor. Footsteps, slow and unaware. Then, the door. The one we had just come through. It opened, light spilled down the staircase in a thin, trembling line. Her voice followed, soft and a little confused, talking to someone.
“... the power just went out, I don’t, no, no, it’s fine. I’ll check the breaker…”
Her footsteps shifted, coming closer down the stairs.
“I’ll call you back in a second, okay?”
A short pause, then a soft exhale, and the click of the call ending.
The light from her phone appeared next. A narrow beam, shaking slightly as it moved.
Catching the edges of the walls, the railing, the steps as she started down.
One step, then another. The light flickered over the stairs above us, too close, too fucking close.
Her foot hit the last step, and the light steadied, right at our level.
The light hit my chest first, not my face, my chest. Like she was aiming lower, like instinct told her not to look too high too fast, like if she kept it there she could pretend it was nothing.
Just a fuse, just a switch, just something normal she could fix and go back upstairs and keep living whatever normal life she had before we stepped into it.
I moved before I really thought about it.
Not fast, that’s the thing. It wasn’t a lunge or anything violent, just a step forward out of the dark, enough for her to see me properly, enough for the outline of me to show up in front of her instead of staying something half-hidden and deniable.
And then, she saw me.
Her whole body just… stopped, like a deer caught in headlights.
The light from her phone lifted, slowly, like it didn’t belong to her anymore, like her hand wasn’t fully under her control, until it found my face.
Or what it could see of it anyway. And her eyes, they didn’t widen, didn’t dart around.
They locked, right into mine. I didn’t expect that.
I thought she’d look away, look past me, look for a way out.
But she didn’t. She stayed there, staring.
Trying to understand what she was looking at, like if she just held on long enough, it would make sense. And I froze.
Not because I was scared, it was something else.
Something… off. Like stepping wrong on a stair you thought was there and realizing mid-motion that it isn’t.
That drop in your stomach. That moment where your body doesn’t know whether to keep going or pull back.
She looked… normal. That’s a stupid thing to notice, I know, but it’s what hit me.
Hair slightly messy like she’d been sitting down for a while, clothes soft and worn in the way people wear things at home, not expecting anyone to see them.
There was nothing about her that fit into what we were doing.
Nothing that made it make sense. Her lips parted, like she was trying to say something.
Or maybe scream, I don’t know. It happened behind her so quickly I barely processed it before something slammed into the side of her head.
Her body went slack right in front of my eyes.
The phone slipped from her hand, light spinning across the wall as it fell, and she folded in on herself in a way that didn’t look natural, like something had been cut loose inside her all at once.
She didn’t make a sound, just a small, broken exhale as she hit the ground.
For a second, everything felt wrong in a completely different way.
Like something that should have happened slower had been ripped past. I looked at him, too stunned to say anything.
Zwierek stood there, something heavy still in his hand, a piece of concrete, I think, or a brick, I didn’t look long enough to register it properly, and he just met my stare like he’d been expecting it.
“Well,” he said, almost conversational, like we weren’t standing over a dead body on a basement floor. Like this was just some minor inconvenience we’d dealt with. “That was going nowhere, wasn’t it?”
My jaw tightened, muscles pulling in a way that made my teeth ache.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” he added after a beat, tilting his head, that edge creeping into his voice again. “You handled that beautifully.”
That tone. The one that dug into my skin and further into my veins. I exhaled through my nose, slowly, but it didn’t do anything to bleed the heat out of my chest.
“You’re fucked in the head,” I said. Something flickered across his face, subtle, but I saw it.
“Yeah?” he muttered, rolling his shoulders like the words hadn’t touched him, even if they had. “And yet here I am, fixing your mistakes again.” He gestured vaguely toward her with the object still in his hand before dropping it to the side. “You should really start appreciating that, Rowan.”
I let out a short breath that wasn’t quite a laugh, more like something bitter caught halfway out.
“Appreciating what?” I shot back, finally looking at him properly now.
“That you jump straight to murder and chaos every time? That you don’t even stop and think about it?
” My voice lowered on its own, and there was something in it now that hadn’t been there a second ago. “You’re not helping, you’re just…”
I paused, searching for the word and landing on the one I knew would hit.
“A fucking psychopathic freak, Zwierek.”
This time, it stayed on his face a fraction longer. It wasn’t anger. It felt uglier than that, too exposed somehow, like he let something slip out that he usually kept buried. But it disappeared almost immediately, gone before I could really look at it for too long.
“A freak,” he repeated, almost thoughtful, like he was trying to figure out how the word felt out loud. Then a small, humorless huff. “Right.” His eyes lifted back to mine, steady again. “Good thing your ‘freak’ is the one keeping you out of prison.”
I opened my mouth to respond, and stopped. A sound cut through the space, sudden and out of place. A notification. I looked down.
Her phone.
Still on the floor, screen lighting up the concrete in a pale rectangle. I bent, picked it up. The lock screen was already open from before, the message sitting there like it had been waiting. From him.
Did you get the power back on?
For a second, I just stared at it. Then I let out a slow breath, straightening up and tossing the phone toward Zwierek without looking at him.
“Answer it,” I said. He caught it easily.
“Mm. What do you want me to say?”
“Tell him you can’t figure it out,” I replied, already turning away, eyes flickering toward the stairs like I could see through them. “Ask him to come home. Make it sound normal.”
There was the faint tapping of his fingers against the screen. He tilted the phone slightly, glancing at it.
“He’s quick,” he murmured. “Yeah, I’m leaving the office in ten,” he read aloud, voice flattening just enough to mimic the message without fully mocking it. “Good,” I said. My pulse had shifted again. “Send another one.”
“What now?”
“That you’re downstairs,” I said. “That you’re checking the breaker.”
Silence for a second, then the soft sound of typing again.
“There,” Zwierek said after a moment, tossing the phone lightly in his hand before stilling it. “Done.”
I nodded once, didn’t look at him, didn’t look at her either. Just stood there, listening to the house above us. Waiting for something that hadn’t happened yet, but was already on its way.