CHAPTER SEVEN — Marcus Admits He’s Worried
1917 Words
I didn’t hear from either of them for two days after that dinner. Two days of wind clawing at the windows, of low grey skies pressing down on the city, of rain that felt less like weather and more like a warning. I tried to tell myself they simply needed time — time to sleep, time to talk, time to step out of whatever shadow they’d been standing under. But the longer the silence stretched, the more I felt it settling into my bones.
When Marcus finally called, it was just after six in the evening. His voice sounded thin, as though carried through the line by someone else.
“Can you come over?” he asked.
“Is everything alright?”
A breath. Not sharp — more like a slow exhale he’d been holding for hours.
“No,” he said quietly. “Not really.”
There was something in the way he said it — not panic, but resignation. As though he’d moved past fear and arrived somewhere darker, somewhere steadier, somewhere uncomfortably close to certainty.
“I’ll be there soon,” I said.
The hallway outside their loft smelled of damp plaster and old carpet. A gust of cold air rushed down the stairwell, carrying with it the faint but distinct sound of glass chattering in its frame. When Marcus opened the door, he looked as though he hadn’t slept. His hair was uncombed, his eyes ringed with shadows, his shoulders slightly hunched — as if he’d finally realised that danger wasn’t something you examined from a safe distance.
It was something that could reach back.
“Come in,” he said, stepping aside.
The loft lights were on, but dimmed as if to keep from startling someone. The candleholders from our tense dinner still sat on the table, wicks stiffened with old wax. The air was stale, as if the windows had stayed shut for days.
Sophia wasn’t in sight.
Marcus rubbed the back of his neck. “She’s asleep,” he said. “Or… resting. I’m not sure.”
“How’s she been?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I could see it in the slant of his posture.
He walked toward the kitchen and sank onto a stool. “Not good.”
I sat across from him, waiting for him to gather the words he wasn’t sure how to say.
“She hasn’t eaten since that night,” he began. “Barely drinks. She keeps drifting around the loft, like she’s looking for something she lost.”
He pressed his hands together, as though bracing himself. “She woke up screaming yesterday.”
A pulse of cold went through me.
“Did she say why?”
“She didn’t say anything.” His jaw tightened. “She hasn’t spoken since the dream she told us about. Not one word.”
I swallowed. “Maybe it’s shock.”
“I thought so too. But—” He stopped, running a hand through his hair. “I found her in her study this morning. The window was open again, even though the storm was lashing against it. And she’d written… something.”
He pushed a piece of folded paper toward me across the counter. I hesitated before opening it — not out of fear of what it might contain, but fear of adding another piece to the puzzle I was starting to dread understanding.
It wasn’t a note so much as a fragment — pencil scribbles jagged and uneven, as though written in the dark, or while her hands were shaking.
I hear it again.
But it’s not outside.
It’s here.
It’s inside the room.
I felt my pulse thicken.
Marcus watched my expression. “She tore up the rest.”
“Was this part of another dream?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “She doesn’t know. Or she won’t say.”
He reached into a drawer and pulled out a small stack of crumpled scraps — the remnants of things Sophia had destroyed before he could read them. Bits of half‑words, ink smudges, crossed‑out lines that seemed more frantic than thoughtful.
“She’s been doing this for days. Writing things she won’t let me see. Tearing them up. Sometimes hiding them.” His voice cracked on the last phrase. “This isn’t her. You know that.”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what I knew anymore. Sophia had always carried her inner world with fierce privacy, but this was different. This felt less like withholding and more like being pulled somewhere she didn’t want to go.
“Have you talked to her?” I asked softly.
“I can’t get two seconds of clarity out of her,” he said. “She looks through me. Not past me — through me. Like she’s trying to remember something about me but can’t.”
“Did something happen between you?” I asked gently.
Another pause. Longer this time.
“There’s something else,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “Something I haven’t told you.”
I leaned forward, bracing.
“Yesterday morning, I found her in the hallway,” he continued. “Just standing there. Not asleep. Not awake. It looked like she was listening to something.”
“What was she listening to?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But she kept touching the side of her head. Like she could hear a sound the rest of us can’t.”
He shivered involuntarily.
“When I said her name, she didn’t respond. Not until the third time. Then she blinked, like she’d just remembered she had a body. She walked away. Didn’t look at me. Didn’t speak.”
Something inside the loft creaked then — a quiet, settling groan of wood expanding in the damp. Marcus’s shoulders tensed.
“And then,” he said, “I checked her phone.”
I stared at him. “You went through it?”
“I didn’t mean to snoop. It was on the counter. A text popped up.”
“What did it say?”
He closed his eyes for a moment, as though replaying it.
Are you alone?
Have you told him yet?
A cold prickle ran down my arms.
“Who was it from?” I asked.
Marcus shook his head. “No name. A hidden number.”
“And Sophia—?”
“She grabbed the phone out of my hand and deleted the message.” His voice lifted, brittle with emotion. “She wouldn’t tell me who sent it. She wouldn’t tell me what it meant. She just stared at me with this… emptiness.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I know,” he cut in. “I know she’s not cheating. I know that’s not what this is.”
The desperation in his tone was unmistakable.
“It felt like someone was… communicating with her. Not in a romantic way. In a threatening way.”
He swallowed hard. “I think someone is trying to scare her. Or manipulate her. Or maybe they already have.”
A flicker of lightning brightened the windows for a moment, followed by a rumble so low it felt like it came from somewhere beneath the building. Marcus flinched again — just slightly, but enough for me to see how tightly wound he was.
“Have you asked if the messages are related to your investigation?” I said.
“I tried,” he said. “She shut down.” He rubbed his temples. “Every time I bring up work — my work — she panics. Not outwardly. Just a subtle recoil, like I’ve stepped on some invisible fault line.”
“And you think that’s connected to your story?”
“Maybe. Or maybe everything is connected now. Maybe the timing isn’t coincidence.”
His voice dropped.
“My source has gone quiet.”
I stared at him. “Quiet how?”
“No messages. No calls. His account went offline.” Marcus’s fingers tapped restlessly against the counter. “And the last thing he told me was that he’d found something big — something that ‘ties everything together.’ His words, not mine.”
“That could mean anything.”
“It could,” Marcus agreed. “But I can’t shake the feeling that he was spooked. And whatever scared him… might have reached Sophia too.”
A hollow tension settled between us.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Marcus exhaled shakily. “Just… stay close. For her. I know she called you the other night.”
My skin prickled. “You know about that?”
“She told me,” he said. “Or rather, she typed it on her phone and showed me the screen.”
A beat of silence.
“She didn’t say why she called,” Marcus added. “But she trusted you enough to do it.”
I felt a complicated mix of guilt and something darker — something almost like fear.
“You think she’s in danger,” I said quietly. “And you think you might be too.”
His eyes lifted to mine. “Yes.”
I didn’t know what to say. Or what to believe. But I knew the storm outside wasn’t just weather anymore. It was atmosphere — a reflection of something that had already begun tearing through their lives long before the rain arrived.
Marcus stood and paced the length of the kitchen, agitation simmering off him.
“There’s another piece,” he said suddenly. “Something I need to show you.”
He vanished into the hallway and returned holding a notebook — thin, black, worn soft at the edges. Not Sophia’s usual brand. I recognised it immediately as one Marcus used for field notes.
He laid it flat on the counter and opened it to the last page he’d written. I assumed I’d see interviews, phone numbers, scribbled timelines.
Instead, the page was blank.
“What am I supposed to see?” I asked.
Marcus hesitated, then flipped back one more page.
This one wasn’t blank.
It held four words, written in a shaky, uneven hand.
SHE KNOWS ABOUT US
A chill swept through me so swiftly I almost recoiled.
“You didn’t write that,” I said.
“No,” Marcus whispered. “I didn’t.”
“Then who—?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I found it this morning. In my notebook. The one I keep at work.”
I stared at him, heart thudding.
“And Sophia?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She hasn’t been near my office. She doesn’t even know where I keep this thing.”
Another gust of wind rattled the windows, harder this time.
And then — somewhere deeper in the loft — something thumped softly. A muffled sound. Light, but deliberate.
Marcus and I both froze.
He turned toward the hallway, expression tightening. “Sophia?”
There was no answer.
Only the storm pressing at the walls.
Marcus stepped toward the dark corridor.
“Stay here,” he said quietly.
But I was already moving.
Because in that moment — in the stillness that followed the thump — I realised something with absolute, unshakable certainty:
Whatever was happening in that loft…
had already gone far past normal fear.
And none of us were ready for what was coming next.
- Writer
