Page 22 of Cracked Doll

"I'm neither of those pathetic little titles." Something dark moves behind his voice. "I'm the only thing in this world that's ever actually seen you, Ophelia. Every doctor on that list you rang today would spend a decade poking at you with soft questions and getting nowhere. I don't need a decade. I already know exactly what's broken. I intend to fix it myself."

My whole body goes cold. "You heard me. Calling those places."

"I hear everything you do." No shame in it at all. Not even the pretense of shame. “And darling, don't you just know how to smell… delicious. You smell so fucking good, it makes me want to eat you.”

"Why would I want you to fix anything?" My voice cracks, rising. "You stalk me. You break into my house. You put a knife to my throat two nights running. Why would I ever trust someone like that with something this—"

"Because," he says, simply, "no one else has ever bothered to try."

I don't have an answer for that. For one terrible second I feel something in my chest crack right down the center — and then I shove him, hard, and run.

I don't stop for my coat. I grip the candle tight and I run, out through the kitchen, down the narrow hall, my father's shape nowhere to be found, the shop door left swinging on its hinges exactly the way he left it. I push through it and out into the dark street, the wind snatching at the little flame until it finally guts out entirely, and still I run, still clutching the useless, blackened wick like it might save me somehow.

I hear him behind me. Not running. Just — there. Present. Constant.

I round the next corner and stop dead.

There, in the black glass of a shuttered shopfront, lit faintly by a streetlamp overhead — a girl. Pale. Black hair loose and wild. Eyes wide with terror.

Me. Unmistakably me.

My chest seizes. The air simply refuses to come. My vision narrows down to that one small, dark rectangle of glass and the face trapped inside it, and my knees buckle before I've even finished registering what's happening —

And then I'm caught. Pulled backward into a chest solid enough to hold my whole weight without so much as swaying, one arm wrapping firm around me, the other rising to press flat over my racing heart.

"Breathe," he says, low against my ear, steady as a metronome. "In. Slow. I've got you — I'm not letting go, so you don't have to hold yourself up. Just breathe."

I shake against him, gasping, clawing uselessly at his sleeve, and he simply holds on, murmuring the same low instructions again and again — in, out, I've got you, I'm here with you, I've got you — until the shaking finally slows, until my breath stops tearing at my throat and starts, however unsteadily, to behave.

I don't remember him carrying me. I don't remember much of anything after that, except the steady, unbearable comfort of being held by someone who doesn't let go, until exhaustion finally drags me under entirely, safe in the one place I never expected to feel safe at all.

I wake alone.

My own bed, my own room, three candles burning low on the nightstand, casting everything in warm, flickering gold. Something small and hard rests in my palm — the necklace, the black skull ringed in roses, cool against my skin. There is a black rose on top of it.

Beside it, a note on black paper, the silver ink unmistakable:

Meet me, Midnight. Come find me, little cracked doll. I'll be waiting.

I sit up slowly and stare at both — the note, the necklace — turning the whole impossible night over in my mind. Should I go? Every rational part of me screams no. But some smaller, more desperate part of me keeps circling back to the same aching question: is what he wants to make of me worse than what I already am? A girl who can't afford to be fixed by any of the proper doctors. A girl whose own father runs when she begs him to help. Could whatever this man intends really be worse than the mirror-shaped hole I've been living inside for seven years?

The clock on my nightstand reads half past eleven.

I cross to the window and draw the curtain back an inch. He's there, of course. Standing in the dark street below, utterly still, watching my window the way he's watched it every night since this all began.

I stand there a long moment — nearly two minutes, I think, though time feels strange tonight — just looking at his shape, unable to make out his face or his eyes in the dark, only the solid, patient outline of him. I tremble under that gaze even from here. Even without seeing it properly, I know exactly what it feels like to be looked at by him now.

I glance down at the necklace still curled in my palm. Would this be better? Would whatever he makes of me be better than the girl who can't look at her own reflection without falling apart?

My eyes land on the music box on the nightstand. I open it carefully, tuck the note inside alongside the second black rose he's left me, and close the lid with something that feels, absurdly, like a small ceremony.

I don't reach for a jacket. There's no time for it, and some reckless part of me has already decided the cold is the least of what tonight will cost me.

The shop is dark and silent as I make my way down through it, my hands unsteady on the old brass key as I lock the door behind me. I can feel him watching even before I turn — that same cold, deliberate weight settling over my shoulders — and my whole body shivers so hard I fumble the lock twice before it finally clicks home.

I hear him behind me. Close. Closer than the street should allow.

"You're properly terrified," he murmurs, right at my ear. "Good."