Like something just out of sight is watching to see how I break.
I don’t plan to break, and apparently, the silence in my apartment doesn’t either. It settles, thick, aware, and intentional.
Something has changed since I left, and not just the air or light. The very walls feel different, thinner, maybe. Closer. Every corner feels sharper, like it might cut if I get too close. The fridge hums with an anxious kind of rhythm. The overhead light in the kitchen flickers as I pass it, though no switch was flipped. The floor creaks beneath my heel, the same spot that always does, but now the sound is hollow. A warning instead of an annoyance.
I move through the room slowly. The air feels like it’s waiting for something. For me. I leave the door unlocked. Whatever this is, whatever has changed, I want it to come in.
I don’t run. I don’t even turn on the lights. I just wait.
And when it comes, it doesn’t come with a band. It comes like a tide. The temperature doesn’t drop in a flash, it’s slow and quiet, like water rising in a locked room. The heat from my body pulls away from my skin. My fingertips go numb as the warmth in my skin fades like it was never mine to begin with.
Then the hall light dies. Not with a pop or a buzz. It just exhales and goes dark.
And I feel it, a shift that isn’t a presence or a movement. It’s the kind of shift that unmoors gravity. The kind that presses down on the world from an angle that shouldn’t exist. Something has entered the space between things, between seconds, between breaths, between the reality of the room itself.
I turn toward the feeling.
And he’s there.
There was no door opened. No footsteps. No warning.
He is just present, standing at the center of my living room like he was already part of it. Like the world has been edited around him.
He’s tall. Composed. Unreasonably gorgeous in the way only something eternal can be, like he was sculpted by grief and refined by time. Black coat tailored within an inch of sin. Every line of him deliberate. Still, but not stiff. A man built to be worshipped, feared,wanted.
His skin is pale, but not bloodless, more like moonlight caught in flesh. Just… perfect. Smooth and striking and impossible to ignore.
And his eyes…his eyes are what mourning would look like if it seduced you instead of burying you. Soft gray. Piercing. Steady.
He says nothing. Doesn’t move. I’m forgetting how to breathe.
He watches me like he’s done it before. As if he’s been cataloging every version of me long before I ever bled into this moment.
His face is carved from something older than beauty, but I still register it, not out of instinct, but out of need. He’s devastating. Elegant and severe, the kind ofgorgeous that doesn’t beg for attention because it already owns it. A jaw built for silent judgements. A mouth that looks like it’s never whispered comfort, only truths. And eyes…
God, his eyes.
They carry the weight of endings and the quiet promise that you’re next.
He doesn’t blink; he doesn’t speak. Until he does.
“Lux.”
My name lands like it belongs in his mouth. It doesn’t sound like a greeting. It sounds like a claim. I don’t answer at first. My throat tightens, but I manage enough sound to push a whisper through it. “Who are you?”
His gaze never wavers. His mouth doesn’t twitch. “Death,” he says simply. “Vale.” It’s not a threat or a title. It’s a truth laid bare between us, stark and unadorned. Like he’s telling me the sky is blue, or the sea is deep.
And something inside me folds inward. Because the name doesn’t just land, it fits, like I’ve known it all along. Like some buried part of me has been saying it in dreams I’ve never remembered.
He steps forward again. Smooth. Measured. Like the laws of movement don’t apply to him, they ask for his permission. I don’t move because it doesn’t feel like I’m in danger; it feels like I’m under judgment.
His gaze moves over me, slow and clinical. Like he’s trying to locate the place where I stop being me and start being something else. “I’m not here to hurt you,” he says. The words land like a promise already fulfilled. And I believe him.
Death doesn’t hurt you; it’s just final. He brings an end.
“You’ve been watching me,” I say, trying to sound level.
“Yes.”
