Chapter Text
You slip once, knee slamming into a frozen mound of earth. You bite your tongue to keep from crying out. Blood fills your mouth and you swallow it, a coppery jolt of reality. You push off the ground, hands and knees, and keep going.
There’s a thicket at the property’s edge. You dive into it, the branches clawing at your sweater, snagging your hair, and for a second you’re convinced you won’t make it—then you burst through, tumbling onto the back driveway.
And there she is.
You see Wednesday standing dead center in the driveway, a beam of moonlight glinting off the slick black of her braids, her face a calm, impassive mask that feels alien in the charged air. Her left hand rests in her coat pocket, but her right grips a flashlight, angled down to illuminate nothing but grimy ice at your feet.
She looks as if she’s been waiting her entire life for this exact moment—suspended between one world and the next, her eyes sharp and impossible to read. Her gaze slides over you with recognition, as if you’re just another piece in some elaborate puzzle only she knows the shape of. It isn’t until you stagger into her circle of light, legs shaking with fatigue and terror, that Wednesday’s expression flickers from bland apathy to razor-sharp wit.
The ground shifts beneath you as you hit the edge of the driveway, lungs screaming for air. You skid to a stop—your boots doing little to keep you from sliding across the ice. The cold burns your cheeks and throat, your hands numb, but you raise them anyway—palms open and trembling, a universal plea for mercy.
“Help,” you choke out, salt and mucus clogging your nose. You double over, dizzy, pain sparking behind your eyes with every heartbeat.
Wednesday arches a single eyebrow, the slow, deliberate movement of someone already bored with melodrama. “Did you bring company?” Her voice is as flat as a tombstone’s face. A flicker of interest crosses her features, gone as quickly as it came, leaving only the barest smirk. Before you can answer, the night fractures and Wednesday sees a flash of black.
Morticia explodes from the shadows, barely visible until she’s already clutching your throat with shocking, inhuman strength. You spin backward, boots scraping across the icy concrete, and your head collides with the driveway’s edge in a white-hot burst of pain. The world flickers between black and blue. All you can register is Morticia’s grip crushing your windpipe, the sickly-sweet tang of her perfume, the weight of her body pinning you down.
Her face hovers inches from yours, lips peeled back in a snarl, eyes glittering like obsidian. Her breath is cold and fast, flecks of saliva spattering your cheeks. “You,” she hisses, voice trembling with something that might be love—or hate. “You are not leaving me.”
You can’t speak. You can barely breathe. You claw at her wrists, feeling the delicate bones shift beneath your fingers, but Morticia only squeezes tighter, her nails biting into the tender flesh under your jaw. The world contracts to a pinpoint—her face, her breath, her hands, the unyielding pressure closing in from all sides.
Then Larissa is there. You don’t see her approach, don’t even hear the engine until the tires squeal on the ice. Morticia’s car skids onto the drive, slamming into park with a grinding crash. Larissa is out of the car before it stops, long coat billowing behind her like a dark flag. In three desperate strides she reaches Morticia, grabs her shoulders, and tugs with all the force of someone who has nothing left to lose.
Morticia doesn’t budge. Both arms and now both legs wrap you tight, anchoring you to her. Larissa pulls one way, Morticia another, and you feel yourself sliding on the icy concrete, under the two women in a sadistic ritual. Panting, swearing, the wet gasps of someone dying on their feet fill the air.
Above the chaos, Wednesday’s voice rings out. “You’re making quite the spectacle. Should I call the police, or would you prefer a family therapist?”
“Get off her! Let go!” Larissa shouts, nails digging into Morticia’s arm until blood wells, but Morticia only holds on tighter—she is hurricane, undertow, midnight current dragging you down.
In that instant, Morticia’s eyes flick to Wednesday. A flash of calculation, something wounded and ancient, before Morticia reaches into her robe and withdraws a compact matte-black gun. She levels it at Wednesday, finger half-cocked on the trigger.
“You wanted honesty, Wednesday?” Morticia’s voice drops to a deceptively calm, almost sweet tone. “This is the truest version of myself. Are you delighted, dear?”
Wednesday remains statuesque, but you see the tension coil beneath her stillness. The flashlight beam wobbles, throwing cruel shadows across Morticia’s face. Larissa freezes, hands still locked on Morticia; you hang under them, a hostage in a war of obsession.
Morticia leans close, the cold metal pressed against your temple. She whispers in your ear, voice silk and venom both: “I cheated on your father. I kidnapped her. I’ve hurt people. But I would do it a thousand times over if it means she stays mine.” Her lips brush your ear—an almost loving caress that makes bile rise in your throat.
She stands, hauling you up as a shield, her body a barrier between Wednesday and Larissa. You can’t stop shaking, can’t stop the warm trickle between your legs—another layer of humiliation in this nightmare.
Larissa is crying openly now. “Please, Wednesday—just go. She’ll kill her. She’ll kill us all.”
Wednesday doesn’t blink. Her hands slip into her coat pockets, fingers flexing against something unseen.
Morticia lifts her chin and addresses Wednesday. “If you don’t leave, I will shoot her. Is that what you want, darling? To see me erase the one thing in this world that makes me feel alive? You can’t imagine what I’d be like without her.”
The threat hangs in the icy air like a curse.
Your mind is fog. You know Morticia is bleeding, your face is slick with tears and snot, and your hands tremble so violently you can’t keep them down. You try to find Larissa’s eyes, but Morticia jerks your head back, forcing your gaze upward to the roiling clouds.
“Look at me,” Morticia whispers, quiet but deadly. “Look at me, and tell me you love me—and this all stops.”
Your voice is gone, erased by months of terror, years of yearning, the metallic taste of blood.
Wednesday shifts her weight. The silence grows heavier. Three statues on a stage, waiting for the final act.
Then you hear it: a car engine. Faint at first, then growing, headlights swinging across the icy yard. Morticia’s grip tightens, dragging you backward toward the house, one arm locked around your neck, the other gun aimed at your head.
The car pulls up. Gomez steps out, face pale with confusion and fear, hands raised. His eyes take in the tableau: you in Morticia’s vise, Morticia holding a gun to your head, Larissa wild-eyed on the periphery.
Morticia’s voice rises in a tremulous song. “See, darling? The family is all here.” She laughs, then sobs, pressing the gun harder against your temple until you scream.
Gomez edges forward, voice calm, desperate. “Tish, let’s talk. We can fix—”
“No,” Morticia cuts him off, a dismissive gesture. “You don’t get to fix this.”
Larissa lunges—but Morticia sees her coming. She swings the gun in a vicious arc, catching Larissa across the jaw. Larissa crumples into the snow.
The blow with the gun lands on Larissa’s jaw with a wet, sickening crack, as if she’s breaking a wishbone. You watch in horror as Larissa crumples in a heap, her knees folding in slow, surreal increments, her face slack and briefly expressionless before the pain arrives, rippling through her features with a childlike shock.
At the same instant, Morticia fires upward, the gunshot splitting the world in half: the sound is thunder in your chest, an electric shock splitting your eardrums, and the air—already tense with the stench of ozone and desperation—turns to black powder and ringing silence.
You don’t even think. You react, pivoting instinctively, and wrap your arms around Morticia’s petite, trembling frame. She’s so much smaller than you, yet somehow the epicenter of every force in this universe—her body radiates a heat that burns through the cold, through your coat, through your skin, as if she’s pure energy.
You hold her as if bracing for an earthquake, as if you might be able to smother the violence in her bones with the pressure of your own body. Gomez ducks low, arms over his head, while Larissa—still on the ground, hands pressed to her face—flinches without moving, the whites of her eyes bright and huge in the darkness.
The gunshot’s echo has barely died when Morticia realizes you’re holding her. She seems momentarily confused, as if she’d forgotten you were there, and then a wild, radiant smile breaks across her face. She turns in your arms, tucks herself against your chest, and hugs you back, fiercely but with a sickly tenderness that makes your stomach clench.
“Tell me, my love,” she whispers, her voice barely more than a dry rattle. “Tell mommy that you love her. I need you to.” She’s shaking so hard that her teeth chatter, but her hands are steady as they trace slow circles along your spine, her nails biting through the fabric.
You try to speak, but your mouth only opens and closes, soundless, the words trapped behind the fear and the snot and the metallic taste of blood. You can feel the muzzle of the gun digging into your ribs, the cold of it, Morticia’s hand flexing around the grip as she clings to you with all the suffocating need of a drowning woman.
Before you can muster a reply, Gomez does. His voice cuts through the air, careful and deliberate, each word placed with the precision of a bomb technician. “Tish,” he says, “we can make this all go away if you just let her go. This doesn’t have to end like this.”
Morticia’s head turns just enough to look at him; her body remains locked to yours, her cheek pressed to your hair, her tears soaking through to your scalp. “But I love her,” she whispers and then sobs, “I love her!” the words barely human, as if ripped from the marrow of her bones. Her nose beginning to get stuffy like yours.
For a moment, you think she might collapse from the force of her own misery. Gomez softens, his posture open, hands raised in the classic pose of negotiation. He tells her, quietly, that it’s okay to love you, but not like this—not with a gun, not with blood on her hands. He reminds her that she could go to prison, that her life could be over, that Wednesday would be alone.
Morticia doesn’t appear to hear him. She holds you tighter, swaying now, and buries her face in your neck. “I can’t,” she chokes, “I can’t let go. Not after everything.” Her breath is hot and feral in your ear, and her tears burn like battery acid. The gun digs deeper into your side, and you realize she’s clutching it not as a weapon but as a last anchor to sanity.
You feel another presence in the circle. Larissa, face bloodied, is upright again, standing on the ice, her eyes fixed on Morticia. She’s calculating, you can see it; even concussed, she’s measuring the distance, the angles, the flickering shadow of Morticia’s right hand. Larissa is a tactician. She’s not out of this yet.
It’s so cold now you can see everyone’s breath, even Wednesday’s—she stands at the edge of the driveway, a silent and statuesque witness, her gaze flicking from face to face, her expression a mask of intellectual curiosity and faint disappointment. But Morticia’s body, pressed against yours, is a furnace. Her adrenaline has turned her into a heat source that consumes you both.
Morticia’s voice rises again, and this time it surprises you—she’s not talking to you, but to Gomez, her words a tangled thread of love and accusation. “I am in love with you, Gomez, but you know what I am. You always have. There’s a part of me that only she understands.” She kisses your neck, gentle and ruined. “I need her. I need her like I need to breathe. I can’t let her go.”
You shudder, and she raises her head to look at you, her mascara running in gothic rivers down her face. “Tell me you love me, cara mia,” she says, and before you can recoil she presses her lips to yours.
The kiss is soft, infinitely gentle, completely at odds with the violence of the last hour. It’s the same way she kissed you when you were younger, when you thought you loved her, when the world was still a place you wanted to live in. For a split second, you want to kiss her back. Maybe you even do. But then the taste of gunpowder and bile and terror floods your mouth.
You pull away and say, “You kidnapped me, beat me, raped me. I could never love you the way I once did.”
The words are a grenade. She stops swaying. Morticia’s face contorts, the fissures of heartbreak and rage spiderwebbing through her features. For a moment, she is silent, and then she explodes.
She howls and tries to drag you to the ground, but Gomez—sensing something—lunges and tackles her, pulling her bodily off of you. In the confusion, the gun goes flying, arcing into the darkness. Morticia thrashes, all lithe muscle and insane fury; Gomez, larger but older, struggles to keep her pinned. Larissa, seeing her chance, launches herself forward and kicks the gun across the ice, sending it skittering towards Wednesday.
Wednesday stoops and plucks it off the ground in one fluid motion. She doesn’t even look at it at first, just weighs it in her palm, her face unreadable.
On the driveway, Gomez and Morticia are locked in a grotesque waltz. She claws at his face, his neck; he grunts and tries to hold her wrists but she is relentless, her legs kicking, her teeth snapping inches from his ear. You watch in a daze as Morticia nearly manages to buck him off despite his superior size—her strength is monstrous, unearthly, as if she’s running on pure, unfiltered passion and hate.
“Don’t go,” she screams, not sure to whom she’s speaking. “Don’t leave me, don’t—Get the fuck off of me, Gomez!!” She stretches his name, clearly getting tired of fighting him.
“No,” Gomez shouts, voice breaking. “Tish, it’s over.”
Larissa snatches you up by the arm, pulling you away from the melee. Her hands are slick with blood—hers and probably yours, too. She doesn’t say anything, just hauls you toward the running car, not even caring that it’s Morticia’s, not even checking to see if you’re intact.
Behind you, Morticia’s shrieks are losing coherence, dissolving into wordless, animal moans. She’s sobbing now, all the breath gone from her body, and Gomez is holding her, both of them collapsed in the snow, as if he’s the last lifeline she has left. Wednesday, meanwhile, watches with cold detachment, the gun dangling from her fingers like a prop in an amateur play. Her eyes flicker to you, and there’s a peculiar sadness there—almost pity.
You can’t process any of this. Your body is moving on instinct, your mind a cinder block tied to a rope and thrown into a black lake.
As Larissa jams her finger in the push to start, Gomez shouts after you, “Promise me!” You turn and look back.
“Promise me, that you’ll keep her name out of this, and I’ll make sure you live comfortably… both of you.” You look at Larissa and the back at him and a begging, sobbing Morticia, you nod.
“Take her and go! Get out of here now!” Gomez shouts.
Larissa slams the door and floors the gas. The tires spin on the ice before catching, and the car fishtails across the driveway, shuddering with every bump. You look out the back window and see Morticia on her knees, hands outstretched, mouth open in a silent wail. She looks like a ruined woman, her black robe spread around her in the snow, her face a mask of grief and rage and utter, absolute loss.
“She’s going to come after us,” you say, your voice trembling.
“Yeah,” Larissa agrees, not looking at you. “But not tonight.”
The world blurs past, streetlights rattling overhead, your blood still pounding in your head. Your hands are shaking so badly you can barely unbuckle your seatbelt when Larissa pulls off the road at the edge of the woods.
Larissa wipes her mouth, and for a moment you think she’s going to throw up, but she just laughs—a harsh, brittle sound. “You’re going to be okay, I hope to see you again, Y/N.” she says, though neither of you believes it.
You stumble out of the car.
She drives off.
You don’t remember walking from the car to the edge of town, but you must have. Your feet are wet, your lungs burn, and you still taste blood when you lick your lips. It’s only when you see the green glow of the Jericho police station sign that reality flickers back on: you’re alive, you’re free, you’re walking through the double doors under the humming lights like a ghost who doesn’t remember her own death.
Inside it’s warmer than you expect, drowning you in a sterile artificial glow that makes you feel like your skin’s about to peel off. The world has gone grainy at the edges—every movement is both too loud and far away, like you’re watching your own life through a cracked security camera. The dispatcher at the front desk—middle-aged, hair in a rigid helmet of honey-blonde—looks up from her screen and stares at you, her face draining of color so fast you wonder if she’s going to faint.
She doesn’t, though. Instead, her hand flies to her mouth and she blurts out a series of frantic ten-codes into the radio, her voice cycling from disbelief to panic to military-grade efficiency in seconds. You hear the echo of your own name—your full name—followed by a chorus of shouts and the thunder of boots on linoleum. Three officers round the corner, hands hovering near their weapons, eyes flicking between your face and the bloody crust on your shirt and the bruises around your wrists.
One of them, a woman with sharp cheekbones and a brown strip of hair at her temple, approaches with exaggerated caution. Her gold badge reads Lt. J. Romero. You think she says, “You’re safe now,” but her voice is muffled by the roaring in your skull. Someone else is shouting for Detective Harris. Someone else is dialing for an ambulance. Your knees buckle, and you’re instantly surrounded by bodies—maybe you’re on the floor, maybe you’re still standing, but either way you’re not alone anymore.
You sit in a haze on a cracked vinyl chair in the station’s lobby, every surface thrumming with fluorescent hum. There’s a poster with your instagram photo and the word MISSING in block letters. You wonder if they’ll ever take it down, or if they’ll leave it up for the next version of you that walks through these doors.
The EMTs arrive in a tornado of latex gloves and clipped urgency. They take your pulse, your blood pressure, ask you questions you can’t answer, shining a penlight into your eyes. There are forms to fill out, names to confirm, insurance cards you don’t have. You try to tell them that you’re fine, that you just want to go home, but the words collapse into each other and you’re already being loaded onto a gurney, rolling backwards through the lobby, past the dispatcher who’s still staring at you with something like awe.
The world outside is a shock of cold and sirens. The ambulance is womb-warm and full of antiseptic, and you clutch the thin blanket they give you like a lifeline. The EMT—her name is Noreen, according to her tag—tries not to look at your wounds, but she can’t help it. You see her eyes skitter over the bruising, the old and new, the split lip, the gash on your scalp you didn’t even know you had.
At the hospital they process you like luggage. Strip, examine, swab. The nurse’s gloved hands are gentle but clinical, her mouth set in a line that says she’s seen worse. You lie under white sheets while the doctor barks words like “assault,” “kidnapping,” and “sexual trauma” into his dictaphone. They catalog everything: the crescent-shaped nail imprints on your thighs, the ligature marks on your wrists, the black-and-blue map of your body. You want to tell them that it’s not as bad as it looks, but the pain sharpens every time you breathe.
Detective Harris shows up before the morphine hits. He’s younger than you expected, no-nonsense, with a voice like gravel and a forehead already creased with worry lines. He brings a notebook and a hard plastic chair, which he sets right beside your bed. His first questions are softballs: “Can you tell me your name? Do you remember what happened?” You do, but you don’t. You remember the inside of Morticia’s house, the smell of her perfume, the whisper of her hair across your face. You remember the walls painted black and the velvet sheets and her voice, always her voice, winding around your brain like a vine.
You shake your head and say you don’t know who took you. You say it was a man. You’re not sure if Harris believes you, but he writes it down anyway. You watch the words form on the page in smeary ink: “victim states abductor was male.” You want to laugh, but you don’t.
The nurse returns to draw blood, and you stare at the tiled ceiling, its pattern repeating like the days you spent in captivity. You wonder if anyone will ever see the real story—the one where you and Morticia were in love, or something like it, and now it’s over and you’re supposed to be grateful. The one where you made her pick, and she picked wrong, and now you’re here, and she’s out there, and nobody knows anything.
Romero and Harris step outside your room to confer in the hallway, but the walls are thin and you hear everything.
“She’s lying,” Harris says, and Romero sighs, the sound of it heavy and maternal.
“I know. But she’s not ready yet.”
“Did you see the bruises?” Harris asks.
“That’s not from one hit. That’s weeks maybe months.”
“She’s been missing for months,” Romero says. “God knows what she went through.”
“She was probably raped,” Harris mutters, but Romero shakes her head.
“No semen. Either it’s too old, or…” She trails off, and they both glance through the window at you.
“Or it was objects or another a woman,” Harris finishes. “Check her old girlfriends.”
Romero nods, and you close your eyes.
You’re discharged at sunrise, bandaged and battered but alive. The nurses give you a set of donated scrubs to wear home—too big, but soft—and a plastic bag with your ruined clothes. You sit outside the ER entrance, breathing in air that tastes like freedom and hospital exhaust, until a battered Buick pulls to the curb and the driver rolls down the window.
It’s Zeke. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, beard a scrim of grey, eyes red as raw meat. He gets out, circles the car, and stands in front of you with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, like he’s afraid to touch you, or maybe afraid you’re not really there.
“Hey, oh my gosh,” he says, voice breaking on the second word. He tries to smile, but his face won’t quite cooperate.
You want to hug him, but you don’t trust your own body right now, so you just nod. “Hey yourself.”
He wordlessly opens the passenger door and you slide in, wincing at every movement. The warmth of the car makes your wounds throb, but you’re grateful for it. Zeke drives without speaking, knuckles white on the wheel, glancing over at you every few seconds like he’s checking for signs of expiration.
You’re halfway home before he finally speaks. “I saw the news,” he says. “They said you were dead.”
You shrug. “I was. Almost.”
He swallows hard, the silence stretching out between you. “You tell the cops anything?”
“Not really.”
Zeke nods, seems to relax a fraction, but you feel his eyes on you, measuring, cataloguing the person you’ve become in the time you were gone. You both know the police aren’t going to find anything. Morticia’s world is sealed tight, and your part in it—a secret so heavy it nearly drowned you—will wash away in the next rain.
When you get home, there’s a casserole on the porch and a stack of envelopes shoved in the doorjamb. Zeke sweeps the food aside and unlocks the door with a practiced hand. Inside, nothing has changed—the same beige furniture, the same thrift store lamps, the same threadbare carpet—but you feel like an intruder, a refugee stumbling into a life that doesn’t belong to you anymore.
Your room is just as you left it. The bed is made, the window cracked open a finger’s width, the air stale with the perfume of absence. You sit on the edge of the mattress and let the numbness creep back in. Zeke stands in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for you to say something. When you don’t, he sighs and disappears into the kitchen. You hear the kettle click on, the refrigerator door slam, the scrape of a chair on linoleum.
You stare at the ceiling, tracing the hairline cracks that branch out like rivers on a map. You think about Morticia, about her hands and her voice and the way she made you feel both precious and poisoned at the same time. You think about the gun, the way it felt against your ribs, the heat of her body pressed to yours. You wonder if she’s thinking about you, or if she’s already moved on, sunk her teeth into someone else.
You drift in and out of sleep for hours, waking each time to the growl of Zeke’s voice in the next room talking on the phone.
You keep your head down for the next two weeks after the hospital, learning to live with the prickle of eyes on you whenever you step outside the apartment.
The people in your building look at you differently now—some with pity, some with suspicion, a few with the clinical interest of people who watch true crime documentaries before bed.
You avoid them all. Even Zeke, who spent the first three days hovering like a worried stork, eventually gives up and goes back to work, leaving you alone with your thoughts and the stack of unopened mail on the kitchen table.
You exist in a strange limbo, sleeping in fits and starts, showering only when the memory of Morticia’s touch becomes so vivid you can smell her ghost on your skin. You eat what you can keep down—toast, black coffee, the occasional banana—but mostly you stare at the wall, counting the cracks.
You want to text Larissa or Wednesday, but you don’t know what you’d say. You want to scream at Morticia, or maybe run back to her, but both impulses dissolve into the same pit of shame and longing. You wonder if she’s watching you. Sometimes, at night, you feel her eyes on the back of your neck, as if the air itself is a conduit for her attention.
You don’t tell the police anything. You keep your promise to Gomez, because you know what’s at stake if you don’t. You don’t need reminders; you see the threat in every unfamiliar car that drives past the apartment, in every wrong number that echoes through the phone. You tell yourself you’re safe, but you know better.
On the fourteenth morning, you open the door to find a letter taped to the outside. Your name is written in blue ink, the handwriting slanted and unmistakable. You rip it open with trembling fingers.
The letter is short. It’s from Gomez, though he signs it only with the initial “G.”
You’re to go downtown, to a bank you’ve never heard of, and ask for a safety deposit box under the name “Miss V.” There’s a key taped to the bottom of the page. The instructions are precise, bordering on obsessive. Gomez’s way of communicating has always been equal parts elegance and paranoia. You’re not to tell anyone, not even Zeke. Especially not Zeke.
You go, because you know you don’t have a choice.
The bank is old, the marble floor scuffed and yellowed, the teller’s smile brittle. You recite the instructions in your head until it feels like the words are carved into your mouth. The box is bigger than you expected. Inside, you find an envelope filled with cash—ten thousand dollars, in neat stacks of twenties and fifties. There’s also a disposable phone, still in its plastic packaging, and a note that says: Keep up appearances. You will get more in a month. Don’t disappoint us. -G
The money is clean, neither new nor old, with nothing to tie it back to the Addamses or to you. You pocket the phone, close the box, and leave the bank with your head down, the envelope pressed against your chest like a second heart.
You know what it means. It’s hush money, but it’s also a leash. You’re not sure which is worse.
You take a cab home, even though it’s only six blocks, because you can’t shake the feeling that someone is following you. At every stoplight, you check the rearview mirror for familiar faces, searching for Morticia’s silhouette in the glass. You think you see her, once, walking with a man in a charcoal suit, but when you look again, she’s gone.
You don’t tell Zeke about the money. You stash the cash in a shoebox under your bed, along with the burner phone and the instructions. You delete the email account Gomez used to contact you, burn the letter in the kitchen sink, and scrub the ash from your hands until your knuckles almost bleed.
You try to convince yourself that you’re free now. That you can start over.
But Zeke won’t let it go. He keeps asking you about the details of your abduction, keeps pushing you for names, for descriptions, for anything that will help him make sense of what happened. Every night at dinner, he circles back to it, gently at first, then with more urgency as the days go by.
“I just want to help,” he says, poking at his homemade chili with a plastic spoon. “I just want to understand what you went through.”
You keep your eyes on your own bowl. “There’s nothing to understand.”
“That’s bullshit,” Zeke snaps. “People don’t just disappear for months and come back with—” He gestures at your arms, your face, your body, as if the scars are some kind of accusation.
You push your chair back from the table. “Drop it, Zeke.”
He tries to apologize, but the conversation always ends the same way: you leaving the room, him staring after you, helpless.
You start going for walks at night, just to get away from him. You walk the perimeter of your neighborhood, counting the streetlights, the cracks in the sidewalk, the number of steps it takes to get from the corner store to your building. Sometimes you see couples holding hands, or old men walking dogs, but mostly the streets are empty. You feel invisible, and you like it that way.
One night, you walk past a bar and see a woman inside who looks exactly like Morticia. Same long black hair, same elegant posture, same predatory smile. You freeze, your heart pounding against your ribs, but when you blink, she’s gone.
You start sleeping with a knife under your pillow.
The dreams get worse. Sometimes you relive the last night at Morticia’s house, the way she pressed the gun against your head and whispered sweetness into your ear. Sometimes you dream that she’s waiting for you at the foot of your bed, her dress pooling on the floor like a spreading bruise. She always calls you Wildflower. You always wake up gasping, clutching at the sheets.
You try therapy, once. The counselor is a woman in her fifties, with a soft voice and an office filled with houseplants. She asks you about your childhood, your relationships, your trauma. You tell her the bare minimum. She keeps using the word “safe space,” as if saying it enough times will make you believe it. You don’t go back.
One afternoon, you get a package in the mail. It’s addressed to you, no return address, postmarked from out of state. Inside is an envelope filled with cash—another ten thousand, just like before.
Tucked inside is a Polaroid of you and Morticia, taken in the garden behind her house. You don’t remember the photo being taken, but you remember the clothes you were wearing, the way her arm curled possessively around your waist. On the back, in Morticia’s handwriting: I miss you. -M
You burn the photo, but keep the cash.
You start to plan your escape.
It takes two weeks to get everything in order. You buy a fake passport, book a one-way bus ticket to Vancouver, and pack everything you own into a single duffel bag. Zeke is at work when you leave.
You write him a note—sorry, can’t do this anymore, don’t try to find me—and tape it to the fridge. It’s fucked up and you know it but your trauma and his won’t mix any further. And the constant pushing…
The bus ride north is a blur of forests and gas stations and bad coffee. You keep your head down, your hoodie pulled tight around your face. You don’t talk to anyone. At the border, the customs agent glances at your ID, asks a few questions, then waves you through. You don’t breathe until you’re five miles inside Canada.
You rent a room in a cheap apartment near the university. The landlord doesn’t ask questions, and you pay in cash. You get a job at a coffee shop, pouring lattes for students and insomniac writers. It’s boring and repetitive but safe, and you like it that way.
For the first time in months, nobody knows who you are.
You meet a girl at work. Her name is Desiree. She’s tall, with a halo of curly hair and a laugh that feels like sunlight. She’s the first person who makes you feel seen, not as a victim but as a person. You start hanging out after shifts, making fun of the customers, watching old movies in her tiny studio. You don’t tell her about Morticia, or about what happened before. You just let her be the blank page you need.
Three months pass. You move in with Desiree. Life settles into something almost normal.
Then, one night, you close up the coffee shop late. You’re humming “Wildflower” by Billie Eilish—a song you loved until that day—when you see a shadow flicker past the frosted glass of the front door. You freeze, muscles tensing, all your old instincts snapping back to life.
You lock the door, double-check the windows, and turn off the lights. You stand there for a moment, heart hammering, then tell yourself it’s nothing. Just nerves.
You walk home, hugging your jacket tight around your body, your mind replaying the glimpse of the shadow over and over. When you get to your building, you stand outside for a full two minutes, scanning the street. No one is there.
You let yourself in, lock the door behind you, and call Desiree. She answers on the second ring, voice sleepy and warm
“Hey, babe,” she says. “What’s up?
“Are you sleeping at Angel’s tonight?” you ask, your voice thin and stretched as a violin string.
There’s a pause, and on the other end Desiree’s breath hitches before she answers, “Yeah, babe. Why?” Her tone sharpens, instantly alert. “You okay?”
You hesitate, caught between the urge to protect her from your own spiraling and the desperate need for an anchor. “I don’t know,” you say, and the words come out in a rush. “I just—I’ve been having this god-awful feeling. Like someone’s watching me.” You grip the phone so tightly your knuckles feel ready to split.
Desiree doesn’t laugh it off. She never does. “Tell me what happened.” Her voice is the only thing holding you to the present.
For the first time, you obey. Not just the sanitized version, not the vague references you hand out to therapists or the cops or Zeke. You tell her everything. You tell her about the almost year you spent as Morticia’s captive, every sickening detail you’ve never spoken aloud. The suffocating darkness, the precise schedule of your punishments, the way Morticia stroked your hair with one hand and held a gun to your skull with the other.
You tell her about the way Morticia’s perfume would choke the air, the way her lips would brush your ear as she whispered, “Wildflower, you’re mine forever.” You even tell her about the hush money, and how you kept the cash. You even send her links to the articles of you being missing and declared dead.
You’re sobbing by the end of it, knees pulled up to your chest on the tiled kitchen floor. You don’t remember collapsing, only that you can’t seem to get back up now. The phone is slick in your palm, your breath coming in jagged, wet gasps.
“Oh my god,” Desiree says. There’s a rustling on the other end, then Angel’s voice, low and urgent, crackling through the earpiece. Desiree must have put you on speaker.
“We’re coming to you,” Angel says. “Just hang on, okay?”
“No, please,” you protest, even as you crave the comfort. “It’s late. You don’t have to—”
But Desiree cuts you off. “We’re on our way. Angel’s driving.” You hear the clatter of keys, the grind of the apartment door. “Stay on the line with me, babe. Just keep talking.”
You’re not sure how long you stay rooted in place, the phone pressed to your ear like a talisman, listening to the sound of Desiree’s voice as she narrates every mile of their drive. You feel a little safer with each highway exit, each update that brings them closer. You keep the lights off, except for a single lamp over the sink that casts strange shadows on the ceiling. You do what Desiree tells you: you make tea, you lock the doors again, you check the windows. She even convinces you to draw a bath, so you’ll have a reason to get up, to move your body instead of curling in on yourself.
You try to ignore the way your reflection looks back at you in the bathroom mirror, all wild eyes and salt-stained cheeks. You try to ignore the way Morticia’s name seems to pulse inside your skull with every heartbeat.
For a moment, you think you might be okay. The water is warm, the steam thick and comforting. You let your head loll back, the world narrowing to just you, the tub, and the low murmur of Desiree’s voice still on speaker from your phone’s perch on the sink. You know Desiree is worried, you hear it in the careful way she talks, but you also hear the steady thrum of her love and you let yourself lean into it.
You don’t hear the crash at first. Just the abrupt silence, then Desiree’s panicked voice: “Babe? Can you hear me? Something happened. Angel—Angel, are you okay?” There’s a low groan, the sound of glass skittering over asphalt. It takes you a second to realize what’s happened. They’ve been in an accident. The line goes dead, and you’re left alone with the hiss of cooling bathwater and the sudden, absolute certainty that tonight is not going to end well.
For a while, you can’t move. Paralyzed, you just sit, letting the water turn cold and your skin prune. You want to call Desiree back, but your hands shake too much. You want to call the police, but you don’t know what you’d even tell them: “My ex-kidnapper might be stalking me, and my only friends just skidded off the road on their way to save me.” Instead, you clutch your phone and stare at the door, half-expecting it to swing open at any moment.
It doesn’t. Not yet.
You eventually force yourself out of the tub, wrapping your body in a towel and shivering as you stumble down the hall to your bedroom. You dress yourself on autopilot, every sense tuned to the possibility of approaching footsteps, the scrape of leather soles on linoleum. When you finally sit on your bed, you unlock your phone and see three texts from Desiree:
9:49 PM: “We’re okay. Just a fender bender. Waiting for tow.”
9:50 PM: “Don’t freak out. We’re coming as soon as we can.”
10:12 PM: “I love you. Lock the doors.”
You read and re-read the last message, holding onto it like it’s the only thing real.
You decide you need to sleep, even though you know you won’t. You double-check the deadbolt, wedge a chair beneath the doorknob. You put the knife under your pillow, just in case. When you finally close your eyes, you think you hear the soft click of high heels echoing in the hallway, but you convince yourself it’s just the tap of water in the pipes.
You wake to darkness, your phone dead and cold against your chest. The apartment is unnatural in its quiet, as if the air itself has thickened into a warning. You reach for the lamp but it doesn’t flick on. Power’s out. You fumble for your phone charger but remember it doesn’t matter; without power, the phone is just a useless rectangle.
You sit in the dark for a moment, listening to your own heartbeat, when you hear it: a deliberate, measured tapping just outside your door. Not the bumbling shuffle of a neighbor, but something—someone—waiting.
You hold your breath. The tapping stops. You dare to peek through the peephole and see nothing, but you can feel it: something on the other side, the way an animal senses a predator in the dark. You back away, retracing your steps into the bathroom, where you slam the door and lock it.
There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then, impossibly, the doorknob rattles. Once, twice, then a slow, steady pressure as if whoever is on the other side knows exactly what they’re doing. You brace your back against the tub, heart jackhammering.
Then you hear a familiar voice, low and coiling by the bathroom door: “Cara Mia? Open the door.”
It’s Morticia. You know it before she even says the name she gave you.
You freeze, every muscle seizing. You want to scream or run, but you’re trapped. You see the shadow of her heels under the door, the flick of her dress as she paces.
She doesn’t knock again. Instead, you hear the soft rustle of something metallic, the unmistakable click of a lockpick. The door swings open with slow, surgical precision.
Morticia stands there in a new black dress—same style, hair glossy and straight, lips painted a plum so dark it’s almost blue. She looks exactly as she did in your nightmares. Her smile is too wide. Her eyes are glittering.
“Hello, darling,” she purrs.
You lunge for the knife you stashed beneath the sink, but Morticia is faster. You don’t even see her move; you just feel the sharp sting in your neck, the electric snap of a taser, and then your whole body folds in on itself, paralyzed and useless.
You crumple to the tile, spasming, the world narrowing to a pinhole as Morticia leans down and strokes your cheek with the back of her hand.
“You shouldn’t have left me,” she whispers, voice like honey laced with strychnine.
Then darkness swallows you whole.