This is a line, the last one. The cameras were protection, the surveillance was necessity, and the years of watching were something I told myself looked like love.
This is just hunger, just need, just the certainty that has lived in my bones for twelve years: she belongs to me, and I'm done waiting for her to realize it.
I move toward the bathroom. Each step calculated, weight distributed to avoid sound. The door to the jack-and-jill stands ajar. Chesca's bubble bath on one side of the counter, Angelina's things on the other, everything cast in soft amber by the night light. I slip through without pushing the door wider.
The pill pack sits in its usual spot, right corner, aligned with the tile edge. Fourteen slots empty. I've been counting since day one.
The replacement comes out of my pocket. Same brand, same markings, same number popped to match where she is.
But these dissolve to nothing.
The original disappears into my pocket. My hands don't shake.
I stand in her bathroom in the dark, replacing her pills so I can fuck a baby into her without her knowledge, and the wrongness of this registers as heat, not guilt, not hesitation, but the low pull behind my zipper I make no move to relieve.
There's no protocol for this. No fucking protocol for standing in her bathroom wanting to ruin her and call it love.
The code I was raised on has no clause for this. I write one.
I return the way I came. Seven steps across her bedroom floor.
At the door, I pause and look back.
Her breathing hasn't changed. Slow and even, the covers rising and falling in that same rhythm.
I do not step closer to check. I do not watch longer than three seconds. I do not consider the possibility that—
No. She's asleep. The house has been silent for two hours. I know her patterns better than she does.
The door closes with a soft click.
The left hallway stretches toward Chesca's door, ocean waves still murmuring behind it. I turn the other way, cross the landing, and return to the right wing. The monitoring station is the first door from the landing.
The screens glow blue in the darkness. Her kitchen, her living room, her front door. No bedroom.Some lines even I won't cross.
I sink into the chair and let the feeds cycle. The original pill pack presses against my thigh through the fabric, small and damning.
Twenty-three days.
I will keep her alive long enough for her to hate me. That is enough. That has to be enough.
thirteen
Angelina
I've been awake since 3:07 AM.
The click of my bedroom door opening pulled me out of the dreamless dark. It was soft, deliberate, the kind of sound that sends ice through your veins when you've learned what men do in the dark.
I didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't do anything except lie there with my heart slamming against my ribs while footsteps crossed my bedroom floor.
Pretend you're asleep. Make your breathing slow. Don't give him a reason to—
The thoughts came from somewhere old, somewhere I thought I'd buried. Three years of marriage taught me how to make my body go soft and still, how to fake the rhythm of unconscious breathing, how to become invisible in my own bed.
Adrian never touched me when I was sleeping. He wanted me awake, wanted to see my face, wanted the fear in my eyes when he—
Stop. That's not Adrian. That's Cole.