He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. He simply watches me with those empty eyes that somehow still manage to convey appetite, a focused, consuming attention that makes it impossible to pretend I’m not the center of it. As his gaze holds mine, something inside me shifts, loosens, and then begins to pull free.
Fear drains out of me in a slow, awful tide.
It isn’t a metaphor.
I can feel it happening, a steady siphoning sensation that starts behind my sore ribs and spreads outward, tugging at every instinct screaming for me to run. My heartbeat stutters, then accelerates, breath coming in shallow, uneven gasps as panic spikes, and with it, the pull intensifies.
The more terrified I become, the stronger the presence beyond the door feels, the air growing heavier, thicker, as though he’s drawing nourishment straight from my unraveling thoughts.
I try to look away.
I try to scream.
I try to do anything except sit frozen on the cot while a monster feeds on my terror through a narrow slot in a steel door.
But my body refuses to cooperate.
And my muscles lock, my breath catching painfully in my chest as my lungs forget the rhythm they’ve followed my entire life. My vision blurs at the edges, spots dancing while my mind fractures under the certainty that this thing could take me apart without ever touching me. That it could eat me slowly, not flesh first, but fear, sanity, will, leaving whatever remained to die afterward.
This is real.
The realization crashes over me harder than the fear itself. This isn’t speed, strength, or ice bending the laws of nature from a distance. This is something happening inside me, something I can’t shield against or reason away.
Monsters aren’t just real.
They can reach in and take pieces of you while you’re still breathing.
And then, just as suddenly as it began, it stops.
The pressure eases.
The pull releases.
Whatever had been clawing through my chest loosens its grip, and fear floods back into me all at once, crashing home in a violent rush that leaves me gasping. My muscles unlock in stages, a tremor rippling through my body while sensation returns, breath shuddering in and out of lungs that finally remember how to work.
And the viewing slot slides shut.
The sound lands heavy in the silence, final and deliberate, and the absence that follows is dizzying, like stepping off a moving floor. I fold forward, my heart hammering, every nerve screaming now that it belongs to me again, shaking with the certainty that he didn’t just leave.
He let me go.
I drag in a harsh, broken gasp, lungs burning as they remember their job too late, while oxygen finally floods back into my system. My hands shake violently, fingers curling in on themselves as I press them to my face, only registering the wetness when I pull them away and see tears streaked across my palms.
I don’t remember starting to cry.
The footsteps retreat down the corridor, heavy and unhurried, that same scraping sound trailing after them, and not once does Wreck say a word.
He doesn’t have to.
He’s already taken what he came for.
Time continues its meaningless march.
The bulb flickers, my ribs throb, and blood crusts in my hair. And slowly, so slowly, I almost don’t notice it happening, something inside me begins to shift.
Terror is exhausting.
Fear can only run at maximum intensity for so long before the body can’t sustain it.