Chapter 1: The Wrong Sister
The key turned, sticking a little in the deadbolt the way it always did, and Matt leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the door. Home. He fumbled it open, the familiar click a solace against the jagged symphony still buzzing in his veins. The hallway light was off, which was weird. Sophie always left the hall light on for him, a little beacon of her quiet worry.
“Sophe? I’m back. Sorry I’m late,” he called out, his voice too loud in the silent dark.
He toed off his ruined sneakers, the left one sticking to his sock with something he didn’t want to identify. The usual scent of the apartment—lavender soap from the discount store, the faint, clean ghost of fabric softener—was gone. Replaced. Underneath the stale cigarette smoke was something sharper, metallic, like the smell of a handful of old pennies.
The living room was a pool of shadow cut by the cold blue glow of the streetlamp outside. He could make out the shape of the sofa, the television, the bookshelf lined with Sophie’s paperbacks. And someone sitting in her armchair.
“Soph?” he tried again, squinting.
A lighter flicked. The small flame illuminated a face from below, carving deep shadows under the cheekbones and hollowing the eyes. It was Sophie’s face. But it wasn’t. The features were arranged all wrong. The mouth held the cigarette in a way Sophie never would, loose and contemptuous. The eyes watching him over the flame were flat, like chips of dirty glass.
The lighter snapped shut, plunging the lower half of the face back into darkness, leaving only the orange ember of the cigarette floating in the gloom.
“You’re later than I thought you’d be,” the voice said. It was Sophie’s voice, the same pitch, the same slight rasp from a childhood bout of bronchitis that never fully left. But the rhythm was all wrong. It dragged, languid and cruel. “Was the product good tonight? You look jittery.”
Matt’s blood, already thrumming, went cold. This wasn’t right. This was a bad trip. It had to be. He’d taken something questionable from a new guy, and now he was hallucinating his sister acting like some fucking horror movie villain.
“What’s… what’s with the cigarettes? You hate these.” He groped for the wall switch, his fingers slick with sweat.
“Don’t,” the voice commanded, sharp as a slap.
His hand froze.
The ember traced an arc through the air as the figure in the chair took a long, savoring drag. The exhale was a slow, deliberate cloud that caught the streetlight’s beam. “Sophie does hate them. Smells like regret and weak lungs, she thinks.” A low, amused chuckle. “I don’t mind it.”
I. Not she. Matt’s stomach twisted.
“Who are you?” The question came out a whisper, shredded by dread.
The figure stood up. It was Sophie’s body, dressed in her usual sleep pants and an old university sweatshirt. But the posture was alien. A predatory, rolling grace as it crossed the room towards him, each step deliberate. The streetlight caught the glint of steel in its hand. Something long and thin.
A paring knife. From Sophie’s wooden block by the fruit bowl.
It stopped a foot away. The scent of wrongness intensified—sweat, smoke, that coppery tang. Up close, he could see the details that shattered any hope this was a hallucination. A faint, yellowish bruise on Sophie’s temple she hadn’t had this morning. A small, healing cut on her lip. Her hair, always neat, was lank and pushed carelessly behind her ears.
And her eyes. God, her eyes. They were Sophie’s hazel, but the person looking out from behind them was a stranger. A bored, vicious stranger.
“Who am I?” it mimicked, tilting Sophie’s head. “I’m the consequence, kiddo. I’m the receipt for all the shit you’ve bought on credit.” It smiled then, a wide, unpleasant stretching of Sophie’s lips that showed too many teeth. “Your sister’s not home right now. She’s… taking a break. Let’s call it that. So it’s just you and me.”
It raised the knife, not to strike, but to examine the blade in the slivered light. “Sophie kept these things so dull. Pathetic.” It looked back at Matt, the smile not fading. “You know, she’s in here. Watching. Can you imagine? Seeing everything. Hearing everything. Knowing her little brother is too whacked out and scared to do a damn thing.”
The words sank in, cold and septic. She’s in here. Watching. The horror of it unfolded inside him, vast and paralyzing. This wasn’t possession, not in the movie sense. This was a violation. A kidnapping in the most intimate space imaginable.
“What did you do to her?” Matt breathed, nausea rising in his throat.
“Me? Nothing. You did this.” The entity—Chris, a name surfaced from the void of his panic, though he didn’t know how he knew it—gestured around the apartment with the knife. “All that desperate wishing. All that ‘I’d do anything, I’d trade anything.’ The universe just called your bluff, Matthew.”
Chris took a final step forward, invading the last of his personal space. He could smell the tobacco on Sophie’s breath. The knife came up slowly, and the flat, cold side of the blade rested against Matt’s cheek. He flinched, but couldn’t move.
Chris leaned in, close enough to kiss, and whispered with Sophie’s mouth. The words were soft, almost intimate.
“You really fucked up this time, little brother.”
The blade turned, the edge now a faint, promising line of pressure against his skin. Somewhere, buried deep behind those vacant eyes, his sister was screaming. He was sure of it. And he was too terrified to even hear it.
And he was too terrified to even hear it.
The pressure of the blade left his cheek. Chris stepped back, that wrong smile still plastered on Sophie’s face, and wandered over to the cracked mirror hanging by the door. He examined his—her—reflection, tilting his head.
“She hated this mirror, you know,” Chris said, conversationally. “Thought it made the place look cheap. I like it. It’s honest. Shows all the cracks.”
He turned from the mirror and slid into the sofa, spreading Sophie’s limbs in a languid, masculine sprawl. He picked up the cigarette from where he’d left it smoldering on the coffee table, took a drag, and pointed the knife handle at Matt. “Sit. You’re swaying. It’s annoying.”
Matt’s legs gave out. He crumpled into the worn armchair opposite, the one his dad used to sit in. The fabric felt like a trap.
“What do you want?” Matt’s voice was thin, gutted.
“Want?” Chris laughed, a short, harsh bark. “I wanted not to get cornered in a shitty warehouse with three cops and my partner’s brains on my favorite jacket. That ship has sailed.” He tapped ash onto Sophie’s clean floor. “Now I’m here. And you’re the reason.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You chanted, kid. You begged. You got on your fucking knees in some back room reeking of piss and incense and you traded your soul for a fix.” Chris’s eyes, Sophie’s eyes, locked onto him. “But souls are tricky. Messy. The guys you were dealing with… they’re artisans. They said a clean swap was cleaner. More stable. They just needed a vessel. A compatible one.”
A cold, heavy understanding began to seep into Matt’s bones, colder than the drugs leaving his system. “A vessel.”
“A body.” Chris grinned. “Not mine. Mine was about to have a very complicated relationship with several bullets. Hers, though…” He gestured down at himself with the knife. “Healthy. Stable. Nobody looking too close. And connected to you. That was the key. Your desperate, screaming connection to her. That was the anchor they used to pry her out.”
The room tilted. Matt gripped the arms of the chair.
“She was home,” Chris continued, his tone light, almost nostalgic. “Washing dishes. Thinking about a bill or some shit. Then I’m just… here. And she’s not. Well, not gone.” He tapped Sophie’s temple with a blunt fingernail. “She’s in here. A little ghost in the machine. At first, she fought. Oh, she fought.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his voice dropped to a mock-confidential whisper. “You should have heard her. The begging. It was pathetic. ‘Please, don’t, he’s my brother, I’ll do anything, don’t use me like this, please, not with him—’”
Matt flinched as if struck.
“She was crying,” Chris said, watching him with clinical interest. “Real tears. Sobbing. Trying to claw her way back to the steering wheel. It was fucking loud.” He sat back, sighing as if recalling a minor inconvenience. “They’d given me the reins, though. And the rules. I keep the vessel alive. I maintain the life. No drawing attention. But as for the rest…” He shrugged Sophie’s slender shoulders. “I get to live. And you…” He leveled the knife at Matt again. “You get to watch what your life does to her now.”
The truth was a physical weight, crushing his lungs. He had done this. His weakness, his need, had been the open door. And Sophie had seen it coming. She had felt herself being ripped away and she had begged them, begged them, not to use her against her brother.
Chris stood up, stretching, and walked to the kitchen. Matt heard the fridge open, the clink of a bottle. He returned with one of Sophie’s hard seltzers, popped the tab with a crisp fizz, and took a long swallow. He made a face. “Tastes like bubbly disappointment. She’s gonna hate the hangover.”
He drained the can, crushed it in his fist—a gesture so violently foreign in Sophie’s hand—and tossed it toward the trash. It missed, rattling on the linoleum.
“We’re gonna have some new house rules, little brother,” Chris said, wiping Sophie’s mouth with the back of her wrist. “Number one: you don’t look at me like I’m her. I’m not. Number two: you don’t ask me where she is. You know where she is. Number three: you live your life. You go to your shitty job. You pay the rent. You keep this boring little ship afloat. And in return,” he said, stepping close again, the sweet-and-sour smell of the seltzer on his breath, “I don’t start cutting pieces off this face you love so much. She’ll feel it. Every. Single. Cut.”
He let that hang in the smoke-thick air. Then he patted Matt’s cheek with a cold, damp hand. It was a grotesque parody of affection.
“Now,” Chris said, turning and walking toward Sophie’s bedroom. “I’m going to sleep in her bed. You stay out here. And think about the new terms of your debt.”
The bedroom door clicked shut.
Matt sat in the silence, which was worse than the talking. The only sound was the distant traffic and the frantic, jackhammer rhythm of his own heart. He looked at the crushed seltzer can on the floor. At the cigarette butt ground into the rug. At the knife, left casually on the coffee table like a TV remote.
And in the quiet, he finally heard it. Not with his ears, but in the marrow of his bones. The echo of her screaming. The echo of her begging them not to do this.
It was a sound that would never leave him.
It was a sound that would never leave him.
He sat frozen in the armchair for what felt like hours. The apartment was a tomb, save for the irregular, muffled thumps coming from behind Sophie’s bedroom door. Objects being moved. Drawers opened and shut. A low, tuneless humming that was not his sister’s.
Eventually, the numbness in his legs turned to pins and needles, forcing him to move. He stood, his joints crackling, and crept toward the hallway. He stopped in front of her door. The faded floral decal she’d stuck there years ago smiled back at him, a grotesque parody of domestic calm. He pressed his ear to the wood, listening, hoping for a sob, a gasp, any sign that she was fighting in there. Any proof that she was still she.
What he heard instead was a low, rhythmic sound. Sophie’s voice, but strained, choked. A moan. Not of pain, but of something else. Something private and violated. It was followed by a hushed, self-satisfied chuckle—a masculine sound coming from her throat.
Matt stumbled back from the door as if scalded. His stomach heaved. He turned and fled to the living room, collapsing onto the sofa. He pulled a cushion over his head, pressed his palms against his ears, and squeezed his eyes shut until he saw spirals of color in the dark. He tried to force his mind to go blank, to build a wall of white noise against the images the sounds painted. He focused on the hum of the refrigerator, the distant wail of a siren, anything else.
He must have passed out from exhaustion, because the next thing he knew, gray morning light was filtering through the blinds, painting bars across the ugly, ashy carpet.
The smell of burnt toast hit him first.
He jerked upright, stiff and disoriented. The knife was gone from the coffee table. The crushed seltzer can had been picked up. For a wild, breathless second, the previous night solidified into the cold, hard edges of a bad dream. The monster, the threats, the moaning—all just a toxic figment of a chemicalled brain. Relief, sweet and dizzying, flooded his veins.
He followed the smell to the kitchen.
Sophie was sitting at the small kitchen table. She wore one of her soft, cable-knit cardigans over a simple tank top. Her hair was damp, brushed back neatly. She was scrolling through her phone with one hand, nibbling on a piece of charred toast with the other. The scene was so perfectly, mundanely her that Matt’s heart cracked open.
“Hey,” he croaked, his voice thick with sleep and residual dread.
She looked up. Sophie’s eyes met his. They were calm. Tired, but calm. A faint, familiar smile touched her lips. “Morning. You crashed out hard on the couch. You okay?”
The nightmare vaporized. It had to have been a dream. A horrific, hyper-real dream born of guilt and bad substances. The relief was so profound it felt like vertigo. He crossed the linoleum floor in two strides and wrapped his arms around her from behind, burying his face in the clean, lavender-smelling dampness of her hair.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled into her neck, his voice breaking. “I’m so sorry, Sophe. I had the worst dream.”
Her body was rigid for a half-second, a fleeting instinct before she relaxed into the hug. She even brought one hand up and patted his arm. “It’s okay. Just a dream.” Her tone was soft, reassuring. It was everything he needed to hear.
He held on too tight, too long, breathing her in, anchoring himself in her normalcy. She tolerated it, patiently patting his arm until he finally let go, wiping at his eyes with a sheepish laugh.
“God, I’m a mess. You want coffee? I’ll make it.” He turned toward the cupboard, babbling, the world stitching itself back together. “I thought… I dreamed you were… it was crazy.”
“Yeah?” she said behind him. The tone had shifted. The softness was gone, replaced by a flat, curious boredom. “What did you dream?”
He got the mugs out, his back to her. “Just, like, that you weren’t you. That some guy was in here. Talking crazy. It felt so real.” He laughed, a brittle sound. “Messed up, right?”
Silence.
Then a sound he would come to dread more than any shout: a low, wet chuckle.
He turned slowly, the mugs forgotten in his hands.
Sophie—the thing wearing Sophie—was leaning back in the chair, ankles crossed. The reassuring softness had evaporated from her face like steam. Her expression was one of pure, undisguised amusement. She took another deliberate bite of toast, crunching loudly.
“That’s cute,” Chris said through a full mouth, Sophie’s jaw working in a way that was suddenly, violently wrong. “You really thought you’d get that lucky, huh? Wake up and it’s all sunshine and sisterly love?”
The mugs slipped from Matt’s hands. They hit the linoleum with a double crack, shattering. Brown ceramic skittered across the floor.
Chris didn’t flinch. He just watched Matt’s devastation unfold, chewing slowly. He swallowed and brushed a crumb from Sophie’s sweater.
“The hug was a nice touch,” Chris continued, his voice a conversational drawl. “Very tender. She was screaming the whole time, you know. In here.” He tapped Sophie’s temple. “Well, more like sobbing. ‘Don’t hug him, don’t touch him, you monster.’ It was kind of pathetic.”
Matt couldn’t breathe. The world narrowed to the cruel smile on his sister’s face.
“Why?” was all he could manage, a shattered whisper.
“Why pretend?” Chris shrugged. “Had to check the perimeter. Make sure the performance was convincing. Can’t have you running to the cops on day one, talking about body-snatchers.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, Sophie’s kind face now a mask of cold analysis. “And it was fun. Seeing the hope just… pour out of you. Like watching a balloon deflate.”
He stood up, walked around the table, and stepped carefully over the broken ceramic. He stopped inches from Matt, looking up at him with Sophie’s eyes.
“Lesson one,” Chris said quietly, the mockery gone, replaced by something utterly cold and practical. “Hope is the thing that’s going to hurt the most. So let’s kill it now. She’s not coming back unless I say so. This,” he gestured down at himself, “is mine. You live with it. You look at it. You make it breakfast.” He smiled again, a thin, cruel line. “Now clean up this mess you made. And make me a real coffee. Two sugars. The way I like it.”
He turned and walked back toward the bedroom, pausing at the hallway.
“Oh, and Matt?” he said, without looking back. “We need groceries. Your sister’s fridge is a sad, healthy wasteland. I want steaks. The thick ones. And cigarettes. She’s going to hate the smell in her clothes.” The door clicked shut behind him.
Matt stood amidst the broken pieces of what was left of his world, the smell of burnt toast and his own hopelessness thick in the air.
Matt stood amidst the broken pieces of what was left of his world, the smell of burnt toast and his own hopelessness thick in the air.
He cleaned up the mug shards mechanically, his hands moving while his mind whirred in a dizzy, desperate loop. None of this made sense. Soul swaps? Mobsters? It was the kind of crazy shit from a late-night horror flick, not from his life. His life was just a boring, sad parade of disappointments and relapses. This was too big, too fucking elaborate.
A thought, fragile and desperate, threaded its way through the panic.
Maybe this was all just an act. An extreme, fucked-up intervention Sophie was putting on to make him feel guilty. To scare him straight. She was capable of a lot for him—she’d given up everything for him—but this? The cold eyes, the knife, the moaning from her room… that was a line she’d never cross. Would she?
He dumped the ceramic fragments into the trash, the clatter too loud in the silent apartment. He leaned against the counter, the cool laminate against his palms. It made a twisted kind of sense. He’d hit a new low. He’d stolen from her, again, just last week. Maybe she’d finally snapped. Hired some acting coach, learned some method shit, decided to give him a taste of a nightmare so he’d appreciate his reality. It was insane. But was it more insane than actual possession?
He needed a test.
He waited until he heard the shower turn on in her bathroom. Chris—or Sophie—was humming again, that same tuneless, off-key drone. Matt moved quickly, quietly, down the hall to her bedroom. The door was open a crack.
The room was a disaster. Her neatly made bed was a tangle of sheets. Her dresser drawers were pulled out, her carefully folded clothes rumpled and spilling onto the floor. The framed photo of their parents that sat on her nightstand was face down. But it was the wall that stopped him cold. The small, framed cross-stitch their grandma had made, the one that said “Bless This Nest”, was hanging crooked. Behind it, a fist-sized hole had been punched in the drywall. Flecks of paint and plaster dust littered the carpet below.
Sophie would never do that. She loved this apartment. She’d saved for years to get it. She’d painted this wall herself. She wouldn’t…
The shower cut off.
Matt backed out of the room, his heart hammering against his ribs. He retreated to the living room, the image of the hole burning behind his eyes. It was too much. Destroying her own home? No. His doubt hardened into a terrified conviction. It wasn’t her.
The bathroom door opened. Steam billowed into the hall. Chris walked out, a towel wrapped around Sophie’s hair, another around her body. She—he—paused, looking straight at Matt standing frozen by the sofa.
“You were in my room,” Chris said. It wasn’t a question.
“The wall,” Matt whispered.
Chris smiled. He walked over to the cracked mirror by the door, adjusting the towel on his head. “Oh, that. Had a moment last night. She was being loud. Annoying. Pounding on the walls of her own skull.” He met Matt’s eyes in the reflection. “I had to pound back. Quieted her right down.”
He dropped the body towel then, right there in the hallway. Matt flinched, turning his head away, a hot bolt of shame and violation shooting through him. He heard the rustle of clothes being pulled on.
“Get used to it,” Chris’s voice came, now closer. Matt forced himself to look. He was dressed in Sophie’s clothes—her good black slacks and a simple silk blouse she saved for job interviews. They hung on her frame differently now. The button was done up wrong. “This is the vessel. You’re gonna see it. You’re gonna have to look at it.”
“What do you want?” Matt asked again, the question hollow.
“Today? Steaks. Cigarettes. And you’re driving.” Chris picked up Sophie’s purse from the hook by the door, slung it over her shoulder. “My hands are still getting used to the fine motor control. Driving seems… suboptimal.”
“I have work at four.”
“You’re sick. Call in.” Chris was already at the door, holding it open. The morning light from the hallway cut across his face, highlighting the perfect, ordinary features that were now a cage. “Come on, little brother. We’ve got errands. And you need to learn how the world sees us now.”
The grocery store was a surreal theater of normalcy. Chris pushed the cart with a casual, slouching arrogance, completely indifferent to the dissonance of his posture in Sophie’s body. He threw two ribeye steaks into the cart, then a cheap bottle of bourbon.
“Sophie doesn’t drink that,” Matt mumbled, staring at the cart.
“Sophie didn’t,” Chris corrected, adding a pack of reds. He stopped in front of the herbal tea section, smirked, and tossed a box in. “See? Balance.”
At the checkout, the elderly cashier, Mrs. Gable, who’d known them for years, beamed at Chris. “Well, don’t you look nice today, Sophie! Going for an interview?”
Chris leaned on the conveyor belt, locking onto the old woman’s kindly face. A slow, wide smile spread across Sophie’s lips. It was a perfect imitation of Sophie’s polite, closed-mouth smile. “Something like that, Jean. Just helping my brother here get his life together. You know how it is.”
His voice was pitch-perfect. Warm. Concerned. A sister’s gentle, weary love.
Mrs. Gable’s eyes crinkled with sympathy, flicking to Matt. “You’re a good girl. He’s lucky to have you.”
“I tell him that every day,” Chris said, sighing with a feigned, fond exasperation that made Matt’s skin crawl.
As they bagged the groceries in the parking lot, the persona vanished. Chris’s face went slack, bored. “See?” he said, his voice back to its gravelly drag. “Easy. They see what they expect to see. A tired big sister. A fuck-up little brother. The world is lazy. Use it.”
Back in the car, Matt finally broke. The performance for Mrs. Gable had been too flawless, too chilling. “Stop it. Just stop. What’s the endgame here? You can’t just… be her forever.”
Chris lit a cigarette, rolling down the window. “Why not? It’s a step up from a drainage ditch. I’ve got a roof. An identity. A built-in caretaker.” He blew smoke out the window. “And as for forever… who knows? But for now, this is the deal. You play house with me, or I make her life a living hell. Starting with things she cares about.” He looked at Matt. “Starting with you.”
He pointed to a hardware store across the street. “Pull in there. Need a few things.”
“What things?”
“Things to make the nest more comfortable,” Chris said, his smile not reaching his eyes.
Twenty minutes later, they were back in the apartment. Chris unpacked the hardware store bag on the coffee table. A heavy-duty lock. A set of bolts. A small, inconspicuous motion sensor.
“What are those for?” Matt asked, dread coiling in his gut.
“My room,” Chris said, picking up the lock. “Privacy is important. For my work.”
“What work?”
Chris didn’t answer. He carried the supplies down the hall. Matt heard the drill whine, the sound of screws biting into wood. Solid, final sounds.
When Chris returned, he wiped Sophie’s hands on her slacks. “There. Now,” he said, checking his watch—Sophie’s watch, “I’ve got a call to make. Don’t listen at the door. It’s boring business stuff. Old business.” He walked toward the now-fortified bedroom, then paused. “Oh, and Matt? Make the steak. Medium rare. I want to taste the blood.”
The door clicked shut. The deadbolt, new and heavy, slid home with a decisive thunk.
Matt stood in the center of the living room, the silence pressing in. He looked at the grocery bags on the floor, the stupid box of herbal tea sitting on top. He looked at the locked door at the end of the hall.
A thought, weak but persistent, broke through again. This was too detailed. Too sustained. The hole in the wall, the locked door, the performance… Sophie was stubborn, but she wasn’t cruel. She wouldn’t do this. She couldn’t maintain this level of malicious theater for this long. Unless… unless the point was to break him completely. To make him so guilty, so terrified, that he’d never touch a pill again. To save him by becoming the monster he feared.
It was his last, desperate clutch at sanity.
He walked to the bedroom door. He could hear the low murmur of a voice inside. Chris was talking to someone, his tone sharp, commanding. Matt raised a fist. He didn’t knock. He spoke to the wood, his voice trembling but clear.
“Sophie,” he said. “Please. If this is you… if this is some fucked-up lesson, just stop. You win. I’m broken. I’m so scared. Please, just come out and be my sister again. I’ll do anything. I’ll go to rehab tomorrow. I’ll get a second job. Just please… stop acting.”
The murmuring inside stopped.
There was a long, heavy silence.
Then a laugh. A soft, genuine chuckle that grew into a full, rolling laugh of pure delight.
The deadbolt slid back. The door opened.
Chris stood there, Sophie’s phone in his hand. His expression was one of awe, of amusement so deep it was almost respect. He shook Sophie’s head slowly.
“Oh, kid,” Chris sighed, wiping a non-existent tear from the corner of her eye. “You are truly something else. That might be the saddest, most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.” He leaned in the doorway. “Acting? You think this is a performance? You think she’s in there directing?” He gestured behind him into the room. “She’s not writing this script, Matt. She’s enduring it.”
He stepped forward, forcing Matt to step back. “Let’s kill this last bit of hope, okay? Let’s make it concrete.” He reached out with Sophie’s hand, quick as a snake, and grabbed Matt’s left wrist. His grip was frighteningly strong. He yanked Matt’s hand up between them, staring at his own fingers with a clinical detachment.
“She bit her nails, right? Always had. A nervous habit.”
Sophie’s nails were, in fact, bitten short, the cuticles ragged.
“She hated this,” Chris murmured. Then, deliberately, he brought Matt’s index finger to Sophie’s mouth. Matt tried to pull back, but the grip was iron. He watched, horrified, as Chris parted Sophie’s lips and took the tip of Matt’s finger between her teeth.
“Stop—” Matt choked.
Chris bit down. Not hard enough to break the skin, but with a steady, increasing pressure that was unmistakably a threat. The pressure built, a dull, insistent pain. Matt could feel the wet warmth of her mouth, the hard line of her teeth. He saw the focused, blank intent in her eyes.
Just before the pain became sharp, Chris released him. He let go of Matt’s wrist.
“She is screaming right now,” Chris said calmly. “She is begging me to stop, to not use her mouth to hurt you. She’s sobbing. She’s hysterical.” He leaned in, his voice a venomous whisper. “That wasn’t acting. That was a demonstration. The body is mine. I decide what it touches. What it breaks. What it tastes.”
He straightened up, smoothing down Sophie’s blouse. “Now. Go make the steak. And while you’re in there,” he added, turning back toward his locked room, “think about this: the next time you come to this door hoping for your sister, I’ll use these teeth for real. And you’ll have to explain to the ER how your fragile, caring sister bit your fucking finger off.”
The door shut. The bolt slid home, a sound as final as a tomb sealing.
Matt stared at his finger. The skin was blanched white from the pressure, indented with the clear, precise arc of her teeth. The ghost of the pain throbbed, a small, insistent echo.
There was no doubt left. Only the imprint, and the silence.