I stare at the wine bottle still clutched in my hand.
“I’m operational,” I say, and that is the first real lie I’ve told all week.
“Yeah, that’s not what I asked.”
But I don’t answer, and I am pretty sure he is not waiting for one. He just wants to point out the facts, and I have no intention of debating this subject now.
Another beat passes before he speaks again, “You can try again…just not with him. That’s the first mistake.”
And that’s the last thing he says before he hangs up and the line goes dead.
I stare at the screen for a moment, trying to process what he just said, but there is nothing.
Just the wine and silence.
CHAPTER 20
VICTORIA
The door creaks like it’s the first scene of a horror movie, afraid to let me inside. I’m afraid to be back here.
Cat doesn’t even wait for me to adjust being back at my apartment—he bolts past my feet, meowing so loud, it sounds like he’s cursing me for disappearing, but I don’t have energy for both him and I. All I can do is sit here, in the middle of the room, and exist. No collapse, no dramatic exhale of rage that precipitates objects being thrown and glass breaking. Just that weird feeling of trying to adjust when you stay in unfamiliar hotel rooms, except this isn’t a hotel. This is home. Allegedly.
My bag hits the floor with a dull thud, and my body flinches at the sound, the action startling me. This place feels haunted. Nothing about it resembles the relaxing, quiet place I left behind. Now, the quiet feels like death—God, the silence is so thick it wraps everything, foretelling a bad omen.
“I’m home,” I whisper, but the walls don’t answer.
Cat rubs against my ankles, so I bend down and scoop him up, burying my face in his fur.
“Miss me?” I ask. The old me, seeing the way I seek comfort in an animal, would appraise me.
But not the now-me. Now-me just needs a break from fucking everything. Even from life itself, if possible.
I wander through the apartment like it belongs to someone else, touching surfaces without knowing why. The couch. The lamp. The edge of the kitchen counter. It’s like I need tactile confirmation that this is still my life. My mug is still by the sink, the plants are not dead, and the couch is still scratched from Cat’s artistic talent. Everything is the same as it used to be. Everything but me.
With nothing else to do, I take the longest bath of my life, staying under the water until my fingers shrivel and my thoughts get too loud to ignore. And just like every time in the past two days when that happens, I find another distraction. I get out, dry off, and put on the first clothes I see in the closet. Then I take them off because something about the way the material touches my body feels uncomfortable, put on different ones, and repeat the process until everything is on the floor. When I have no other options left, I end up walking around naked. And all this in under ten minutes. God, why does time pass so slowly?
I stay in bed for hours, then stand just to realize it’s only been twenty minutes. I go back to the living room and light a candle, questioning why I even have one. Everything I’m doing is all so mechanical that I don’t even notice I’m doing it—until I do. A couple of times, I catch myself mid-motion, like waking up inside my body. Holding a cup of coffee I don’t remember making, sitting down without realizing I stood, shifting from one room to another like a ghost who doesn’t realize she had died.
And through it all, I pretend that I never left this apartment for the mission—or for the Professor’s experiment that changed my life. The girl who hesitated in that hotel room isn’t me. Azraelis just a detour I’m done with, nothing more than a decision taken under poor judgment.
Lie after lie stacks together, building a shaky fortress against a truth I refuse to accept.
The clock says 11:38 a.m.
Then 1:13 p.m.
And somehow it got to 2:11 p.m. in the blink of an eye.
I check the fridge and close it without a reason, just to open it again ten minutes later, like maybe something had changed.
I don’t think about Azrael directly—something in my brain forbids me from thinking of him as the source of my misery. But it doesn’t mean I don’t look strangely at the scotch bottle on the counter, or how I cover that stupid armchair in clothes just so I don’t see its surface. I avoid his name, but there he is—in every corner of my house and my brain.
I mop the floor at 5:00 p.m. I don’t remember ever holding a mop in my entire fucking life, but I need the distraction. Anything to keep me borderline sane. I’m almost prepared to move to the windows when my phone lights up.
Azrael: Victoria!
Ignore.