The wet footprints were gone.
Damien stood in the center of his office, his back to me, the cloth in his hand already stained with the moisture he’d scrubbed from the hardwood. He wasn't frantic. He wasn't cursing. He moved with the dull, rhythmic efficiency of a man performing a chore he’d completed a thousand times before.
I stood in the doorway, my breath catching in my throat, watching the way he wiped the floor—the systematic, clinical way he erased the evidence of whatever had been standing there.
"How often?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
He didn’t look up. He didn't break his rhythm. "Often enough."
The simplicity of the answer terrified me more than the footprints ever had. There was no room for questions. There was no room for fear. For Damien, the manifestation
