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"When she went under, you climbed up and everyone pretended it was enough. That you were enough but you knew, didn't you?”

My vision blurred hot with fury. Rage so sharp it cut through the haze.

“I’m not her,” I forced out. My nails scraped the wood. “I never wanted to be her. I just wanted her back.”

Silence.

Then almost tenderly: “That is why you’ll break because you’ve built your whole life in the ruins of hers. You think you’ve been hunting the truth Camille but truth has been hunting you.”

The music box stopping gradually, its last note stretching long almost mournful.

The sudden quiet crushed me.

I blinked trying to pierce the dark. “What do you want from me?”

A pause. His breathing filled the silence.

“To finish what should’ve happened years ago. To give the ocean back what it owed.” He answered.

My veins turned to ice.

“You want me dead,” I whispered.

He took another step forward but still veiled in the shadow. The air between us thickened almost tangible.

“I don’t want,” he corrected softly. “I know.”

He bent closer to the line where shadow met light, his voice lowering until it brushed my ear like cold fingers..... “You should’ve drowned too.”

Something snapped inside me.

I surged forward, adrenaline clawing past the drug. My body shook, weak and unsteady but alive. My hand shot out knocking the swan-shaped music box off the floor. It shattered against the boards.

“You’re not finishing anything,” I spat, breath ragged. “Not me, not Ivy and not anyone else.”

The mirror across from me trembled with my words reflecting a stranger I barely recognized.... a woman half-ravaged and half-defiant.

The whisper came again but farther now, retreating with a glide of steps: “We shall see.....”

The door creaked open.

Light from the hall slivered across the floor, catching a glimpse of his back....dark jacket and shoulders too familiar then, he was gone.

The door clicked with lock sliding into place.

I was alone again with my heart battering my ribs while the music box in ruins beside me.

But something had changed as the lullaby has now been silent, in its silence, I could finally hear myself breathe.

~

When I woke up again, the first thing I felt was softness. Sheets, my sheets. The familiar dip of my own mattress beneath me, the faint scent of detergent clinging to the blanket.

For one blissful second, I thought I imagined it all... the studio and the music box as just another nightmare strung together from the scraps of my fear.

But when I tried to sit up, my head throbbed and my limbs were leaden. The kind of exhaustion that comes not from sleep but from being dragged and kept there.

My gaze swept the room. The window is intact while the curtains stir with the late-night breeze off the bay. The glow of the streetlamp bled through, faint and pale. Everything looked untouched, normal.

Almost.

But the shoes, they were still on my feet. Crooked on the bedspread like someone had dropped me here without care. I pushed myself upright.

When I bent forward and touched my shoe, my fingers came away damp.

Sea salt.

My shoes were wet and my sheets beneath them darkened with the spreading moisture.

This wasn’t a dream.

I pressed a hand against my mouth, stifling the sound clawing up my throat. No one would believe me but it was real. The studio, the music box and the mask men.

Worst of it all, the whisper that had cut through the lullaby like a knife. “You should’ve drowned too.”

The words crawled over my skin, they weren’t just threat but accusation and memory.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, shoes squelching against the floorboards. I tore them off and shoved them away like distance could sever me from what they meant but the salt clung to my fingers, tacky and sharp I could still smell the sea.

I staggered to the mirror over my dresser, half-expecting to see what I’d seen in the studio.... that broken girl and the ghost of myself but no....it was only me with hair matted with sweat and pale face, and wide eyes.

I leaned closer. “This isn’t happening.”

But it was.

A scrape of sound outside the window jolted me. Not loud, just the crunch of gravel shifting like someone had stepped wrong and caught themselves.

My breath hitched. Slowly and carefully, I turned my head toward the window but saw nothing, just the dark street, the faint sway of branches.

I reached for the curtain meaning to yank it shut but stopped when I saw it....faint just for a second, a figure standing across the street, half in shadow and half in the glow of the lamp still watching.

My blood iced.

“Nolan,” I whispered.

Even from here, I couldn’t see his face but I didn’t need to. My body knew immediately I saw him again......the tilt of his head and the way the dark held him as if it belonged to him.

I blinked while the streetlamp flickered. When the light steadied, he was gone.

The quiet pressed in, so deep I could hear my own pulse drumming.

I backed away from the window with one hand braced against the dresser my nails dug into the wood. I didn’t know what terrified me more.....that he was really there or that my mind had conjured him whole and all.

The lullaby echoed faint in my head, tinny and mechanical, like the music box had followed me here.

My hand twitched toward my nightstand drawer where I kept a flashlight and once my service weapons.

My instinct told me Nolan wasn’t done.

He's been in this room, carried me here and put me in my own bed like a child laid down to sleep but left me the shoes as proof.

“You should’ve drowned too.”

The words wouldn’t stop replaying.

I sank onto the edge of the bed with tight chest trying to hold myself together. Every memory of water surged up..... the bay, the nights I dreamt of being pulled under and Ivy’s necklace glinting on the waves. I spent my life now dragging myself out of that tide but Nolan wanted to remind me I’d never escaped.

I stared at the shoes across the floor, the damp outlines stained the boards. No matter how many times I told myself it's impossible, the salt still burned my skin sharp and undeniable.

I didn’t imagine this.

And if Nolan had carried me, drugged me and whispered those words to me, it meant he wanted me to remember.

Remember what? Ivy? The night she disappeared? Or something deeper, something I’d buried so far down the sea itself couldn’t reach it?