Threads Unravel

Dominique led Priscilla into her room and locked the door behind them. She moved straight to her desk, motioning for Priscilla to take the chair beside her as she pulled up her encrypted server.

“Let’s trace the dropbox metadata,” Dominique muttered, fingers flying over the keyboard.

“You can do that?” Priscilla asked, raising a brow.

“I’ve had stalkers before. Creeps. Voyeurs. But this one’s… more calculated.” She clicked through a trail of anonymized proxies until one slip—one blip in the VPN chain—caught her attention.

A partial username.

Seraphim28

Dominique’s fingers froze.

That name—it didn’t belong to any of her clients. Not on Domica’s side. But it did belong to something older. A username from a now-defunct poetry forum. One she’d only used once, when she was thirteen. A post about duality, about masks, about pain.

She had shared it with one person back then.

A boy who called himself “Vox_inferi.”

Her childhood neighbor.

Dominique’s mouth went dry.

“Do you know them?” Priscilla asked softly.

“I thought I did.”

Dominique stared at the screen, unblinking.

Seraphim28.

The past bled through her carefully crafted firewalls like a whisper slipping through a cracked door. A username she had forgotten—until now.

“What does it mean?” Priscilla asked beside her, voice low.

Dominique didn’t answer right away.

Instead, her mind drifted.

To long summers.

Backyard fences.

A boy with too-blue eyes and a stutter that disappeared when he whispered poetry through the gaps in her window.

“What if pain is the only way I know I’m real?” he once wrote.

She’d thought he was just another lonely kid playing at depth.

Until he disappeared. Moved away. Erased.

Now?

Now she wasn’t so sure.

The room chilled.

Priscilla shifted uneasily. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Dominique muttered, “Maybe I have.”

Just then, the sound of gravel outside her window made her spine stiffen.

A familiar rhythm.

Rock.

Pause.

Rock.

Pause.

Tap.

She stood, drawing the curtain—and there he was.

Damien.

Hood up. Eyes burning beneath it.

He motioned for her to come down.

Priscilla peered over her shoulder. “You trust him?”

“No,” Dominique said. “But I trust what he knows.”

Dominique slipped out the back door in a hoodie, barefoot on the cool stone path, heart beating like a war drum. Damien waited by the garden wall, arms crossed, his motorcycle helmet dangling from one hand.

“Did you know someone used to watch me sleep?” she asked without preamble.

He raised a brow. “I was hoping we’d start with hello.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

She hesitated—then handed him her phone, thumb resting on the screen. “Recognize the username?”

His gaze flicked to it. Seraphim28.

He frowned. “That’s… old.”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Yeah. Once. On a burner post in a dark forum. One that linked to a hidden blog. Obsessed with domination theory, surveillance culture, behavioral rewiring.”

Dominique stepped back. “You never told me that.”

“Because I didn’t think it was tied to you. Until now.”

A silence stretched between them. Not hostile. Not yet.

“Did you bring anything?” she asked quietly.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded paper. She unfolded it slowly—and there it was. A printed screenshot of a coded chat log. Between Vox_inferi… and Seraphim28.

She nearly dropped it.

Damien caught her elbow.

“What does it mean?”

Dominique’s voice cracked. “It means the Fox might’ve known me before I became Domica.”

Dominique sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, Priscilla and Damien on opposite sides of the room like magnets forced together. The tension between the three of them crackled—but for once, none of it was about popularity, titles, or past betrayals.

It was about survival.

She unrolled the corkboard she’d kept hidden under her bed. Pins. Threads. Notes in crimson ink. It looked like a crime scene disguised as a conspiracy theory.

“What is this?” Priscilla whispered.

“My sanity,” Dominique said flatly. “And maybe our last hope.”

Damien tossed a USB stick onto the board. “I dumped what I could from the masquerade’s security system. Someone tampered with the WREC’s internal cameras.”

“They scrubbed everything?” Dominique asked.

“Almost. Except one blurry shot.” He clicked open his phone and turned it around.

A shadowy frame.

A tall figure in a staff shirt—WREC logo faintly visible. But it wasn’t the Fox. Not directly.

It was a connection.

“Someone on the inside is covering for him,” Damien confirmed.

Priscilla leaned closer, pale. “But why go through so much trouble? Why not just attack you directly?”

Dominique exhaled slowly.

“Because this isn’t about hurting me,” she said, voice trembling. “It’s about watching me. Breaking me. And then owning whatever’s left.”

After Priscilla left and Damien lingered awkwardly by the window—watchful, quiet, protective in his own jagged way—Dominique sat alone with her thoughts. The corkboard now glowed under the lamplight like a shrine to fear.

She pulled up her encrypted inbox.

Old messages, fan mail, encrypted subs, dom requests. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

But one stood out.

Unread.

No subject.

No sender.

It was dated nearly two years ago.

The same week she launched her Domica identity.

She hesitated.

Her thumb hovered.

Clicked.

I saw you through the curtain that night.

Red robe. Barefoot. Crying while you practiced saying "Mistress" into a mirror.

You thought no one saw. I did.

And I knew right then.

You were mine.

Fox

Dominique dropped the phone.

Her breath caught.

Her spine went rigid.

And for the first time in years, she realized something terrifying:

The Fox hadn’t followed her into Domica.

He had made her.