This house didn't creak the way old houses were supposed to — as though warning you, whispering be careful, something lives here. No. It was quieter than that. Heavier. Like it had learned, a long time ago, to keep its mouth shut.
I understood why, now.
Nana Rose had walked me through everything that afternoon with the kind of efficiency that told me she had done this before — stood in this exact spot, with a girl exactly like me, and recited these exact words to someone who had absolutely no idea what she'd stepped into.
"Tuesdays are yours," she said, her hands folded neatly in front of her as we stood at the kitchen doorway. Her voice carried no warmth, but no cruelty either — just the flat, measured tone of a woman who had long stopped softening things for people. "The dishes. All of them. Don't leave a single cup sitting."
"Yes, ma'am."
My eyes kept wandering — to the dark mahogany walls, to the ceilings that seemed to swallow the light whole rather than hold it, to the corridors that stretched further than they should have for a house this quiet.
"Fridays, I'll give you a full written list." She turned to look at me directly then, and something in her gaze made me straighten instinctively. "Keep it close to you. Lose it —" a pause, deliberate — "and you'll find out very quickly what inconvenience really means."
I nodded again. Said nothing.
She walked me through the rest — the rooms I was permitted to enter, the ones I was not, the long corridors that ended at doors that stayed locked without explanation, without apology. She never told me why certain things were the way they were. She simply stated them, the way you state the weather. It is cold. It will rain. These doors stay closed.
She didn't have to explain.
I felt it the moment I crossed the threshold of this place — in the way the windows didn't face the street, in the way the staff moved through the halls like people who had been trained never to look at anything too long, in the way the whole house seemed to hold something in, like a breath never fully released. Malakai was not a man who kept secrets carelessly. He built his world around them — deliberately, precisely, the way architects build walls — and this house was what that looked like in stone and shadow.
A fortress.
And I was living inside it now.
By the time evening came and swallowed the last bruised light from the sky, the house had folded itself into silence.
Bridget and Malakai had left hours ago. I'd heard the car — low, sleek, expensive — pull away on the gravel and disappear so quickly it felt like I might have imagined them being here at all. The staff had drifted to their own quarters. Nana Rose's footsteps had faded somewhere deep down the east corridor and gone still.
I was alone.
I lay on the bed and stared up at the canopy above me — grey linen, heavy, beautiful in the way expensive sad things are beautiful — and thought about how strange it was to be in a room this generous and feel this small. The lamp on the carved side table threw a warm, struggling gold across the walls, the kind of light that tried its best but couldn't quite push back the dark.
My phone sat face down on the far edge of the mattress.
I didn't want it near me.
I reached for my book instead — an old paperback, spine cracked, pages worn soft from years of being held — and I let it take me somewhere else. Word by word, the room dissolved. The locked doors. The heavy air. The strange, watching quality of this place, like the walls had eyes that had simply learned patience.
For a little while — a quiet, merciful little while — I forgot where I was.
I forgot who I was.
Then my phone buzzed.
I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
Probably nothing. An automated message. Some forgotten app. Nothing that needed me.
I turned a page.
Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.
I exhaled through my nose, reached over without looking, turned the screen face up —
And froze.
GROUP CHAT CREATED
Group Name: 🦋 Freedom from the Freak 🦋
Alyssa added you.
The cold started in my fingers and moved inward.
I sat up slowly. The book slid from my chest to the sheets. I didn't notice. I was already reading.
Alyssa 👑
Finally. The freak is GONE gone. Like actually gone 😭😭 I can breathe again omgggg
Tay 💅
LMAO wait gone where tho??
Alisa 👑
some old man's house lmaoo. she can stay there and rot honestly
+1 (347) 882-XXXX
lmaooo serves her right. she always gave off the most desperate weird vibes 🤢 like calm down nobody wants u here
Nia 🌸
she used to stare at people in the hallways omg.. like that blank creepy stare. girl who RAISED you 💀
Alyssa 👑
nobody apparently 🤣🤣 like dad literally forgot she existed for years and she STILL used to follow him around like a little lost dog begging for scraps
Tay 💅
omg STOP I am actually crying 😂😂😂
+1 (347) 882-XXXX
honestly the best thing that ever happened to your family. pure deadweight. GONE.
Alyssa 👑
EXACTLY. maybe now mom can actually breathe. Kiera had this thing where she just.. sucked everything out of a room the second she walked in. So exhausting. So draining. Just existing near her was a lot.
Nia 🌸
the way she used to try so hard and still just be so... nothing 😭 like I almost feel bad
Alyssa 👑
don't. seriously don't. she made her bed.
let her lay in it. 🤷🏽♀️
I should have closed it.
I knew I should have closed it. Should have put it back face down and gone back to my book and pretended the notification never came through. But I didn't. I kept reading — every single word — the way you press your thumb hard into a bruise to confirm it's still there. The way you stand at the edge of something dark and steep and look all the way down anyway, even when every sensible part of you screams not to.
Deadweight.
My jaw tightened.
Sucking everything out of a room.
Something compressed in my chest — slow and crushing, like a hand closing around my ribs.
She used to try so hard and still just be so... nothing.
I blinked. Hard. Tilted my head back slightly — that stupid, desperate, instinctive thing — as if gravity could push tears back where they came from if you just angled yourself right. My eyes were burning. My throat had sealed itself into something tight and useless.
No.
Not here. Not over this. Not over her, not over a group chat she made with my name turned into a punchline, not in this room, not in this house, not —
My hand moved.
I didn't decide to throw it. It just — left my hand. Left my grip like something that had made up its own mind. The phone hit the wall near the door with a crack so sharp, so violent, it split the silence of the whole room clean open — and then it was on the floor. In pieces. Screen shattered and dark.
The room held its breath.
Then the door opened.
Malakai was standing in the doorway.
Still in his coat. Dark, fitted, completely unreadable — and his eyes went immediately to the broken phone on the floor. Stayed there for a moment. Then traveled, slowly and deliberately, up to me.
My stomach fell.
Wasn't he meant to be out now?
Did he come back?
What was he doing here?
"I — I'm so sorry," I said, the words tripping over each other, my voice too high, too fast, too much. "I didn't know you were there — I wasn't trying to — it wasn't — I'm sorry, I'll replace it, I —"
He wasn't listening.
Or maybe he was, and it simply didn't change anything on his face. His gaze had returned to the phone on the floor and he looked at it the way I suspected he looked at most things — quietly, completely, without a single wasted reaction. Then he stepped over it, moved into the room, and walked toward the bed.
I stopped breathing entirely.
He reached the edge and sat down. Not close enough to crowd me — just there, elbows resting on his knees, coat still on, like a man who had only paused briefly on his way to somewhere more important.
The silence between us was the size of something I couldn't measure.
I sat completely still inside it. Both hands pressed flat against the linen. Heart beating so loudly against my ribs that I was genuinely afraid he could hear it.
He turned his head and looked at me.
"Are you okay?"
Low. Even. Quiet. No edge to it — no irritation, no accusation, no what is wrong with you, throwing things in my house. Just the three words, set down between us plainly, like he actually wanted to know.
I opened my mouth.
"Yes," I said. "I'm fine."
And I heard it — the moment it left me I heard exactly what it was. Hollow. Structureless. A word that had been used so many times to cover something real that it had worn completely through.
My body didn't wait for permission.
My eyes filled — flooded — without warning, without mercy, and before I could turn away one tear slid down my cheek and gave me away entirely.
I turned my face from him. Fast. Fixed my eyes on the lamp, on the wall, on anything that wasn't his face because if I looked at him for one more second I was going to come apart completely and I refused — I refused — to do that. Not here. Not in front of him.
I heard him exhale.
Soft. Barely there. The sound of someone absorbing something without comment.
I made myself look back.
He was watching me — and the expression on his face was something I couldn't quite name. It wasn't pity. I was certain of that and I was grateful, because pity would have destroyed me. It was something quieter, something heavier. Something that looked almost like recognition — like a man standing at a particular kind of wound and knowing its shape because he had felt it from the inside before, in some private place he kept sealed behind locked doors of his own.
He held my gaze for just a moment.
Then he stood.
"I don't appreciate lies."
No it'll be okay. No who did this to you. No I understand. He just rose, adjusted his coat with one clean, unhurried motion, walked to the door, and pulled it shut behind him.
Click.
Gentle. Almost careful.
Like he knew the room needed the quiet.
The silence came back all at once, pressing in from every wall.
I sat in it. Didn't move. The lamp still burned its small uncertain gold. The book lay open and abandoned on the sheets. The broken phone was still near the door — pieces of it scattered like something that had finally given up trying to hold itself together.
Then I pulled my knees to my chest, pressed my face into the grey linen, and let it come.
All of it.
Every word from that chat. Alyssa's voice living inside each message, bright and unbothered and so completely sure of herself, so sure I was something to be laughed at, catalogued, relieved of. Every year I spent in a house where I was physically present but never quite real — where I sat at the table but never belonged to the meal, where I existed in the background of a family portrait that wasn't mine. Every morning I told myself today is different. Every time I made myself quieter, smaller, less — so that maybe, maybe, someone would look at me and decide I was worth keeping.
She used to try so hard and still just be so... nothing.
Deadweight.
She made her bed. Let her lay in it.
I lay there in the dark — in this house full of locked doors and held secrets and a man who asked if I was okay and then left before I could tell him the truth — and I let myself think about my life. The whole shape of it. The long, exhausting, unwitnessed shape of it.
And in the terrible quiet, in the space between one breath and the next —
I wondered if they were right.
Not because I believed it.
But because when something is said often enough, in enough voices, by enough people who were supposed to love you —
it starts to sound less like cruelty.
And more like fact.
The lamp flickered once against the dark. The house breathed, slow and indifferent. And outside, the world went on — not knowing, not caring, not stopping for even a second.
It never did.