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The kidnap
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2025-12-06 19:14:28Lila
If there was one thing I’d learned over the last six weeks, it was that silence could be louder than screaming. It pressed against my ears when I woke up and followed me through the apartment. It curled beside me in bed at night, heavy and patient, waiting for me to break.
My phone lay faceup on the cluttered desk beside my bed, its dark screen reflecting the dull glow of my desk lamp. I’d stopped putting it on silent. I wanted to hear it if it rang. I needed to but It never did.
Just like every other night, I rolled onto my side, dragging the blanket tighter around me, though the room wasn’t cold. My chest ached with that familiar, hollow pressure an ache that had taken residence inside me the day he vanished, settling in like something permanent.
Nikolai, my boyfriend of some years now, he used to text me good morning even when we’d fallen asleep together the night before. The man who once joked that he’d haunt me if I ever forgot his voice. The man who had kissed my forehead and told me he loved me the night before he disappeared.
I could still feel it the warmth of his lips, the softness of the moment. At first, I’d told myself his phone was dead. Then that he’d lost it. Then maybe he needed space. By the end of the second week, hope had begun to rot into something sour, something that tasted like fear and by the fourth week, I stopped sleeping.
My apartment looked like a place someone had fled in a hurry. Half-finished canvases leaned against the walls, abandoned sketches scattered across the floor. Paint-stained hoodies lay draped over chairs like shed skins. Coffee cups crowded every surface, their contents long gone cold even air smelled of turpentine and stale coffee the scent of a life paused mid-motion.
I hadn’t stepped foot into my university studio since he stopped answering my calls. Every time I tried, my hands shook. The thought of standing in front of a blank canvas, expected to create, felt like mockery. Art had always been my escape and my voice but now even that felt useless.
I pushed myself out of bed and crossed the room, my bare feet sticking slightly to the paint-splattered floor. The largest canvas leaned against the wall, looming like an accusation. He's face stared back at me or what I’d managed to paint of it.
His eyes were only half-finished, one more detailed than the other, his expression caught somewhere between warmth and distance. It was the look he got when he was thinking about something he wasn’t ready to say and I hated it, my throat tightened, and with a sharp breath, I turned away.
A knock echoed through the apartment loud, insistent, breaking the fragile quiet I’d been drowning in. “Lila,” my friend in college called through the door. “I know you’re in there.”
I groaned and dropped onto the edge of the bed. “Go away,” I muttered, though I knew she wouldn’t but the door unlocked anyway.
She stepped inside, her nose wrinkling as her eyes swept over the mess. “Jesus,” she said. “You look like a Victorian widow.”
“Feels about right,” I replied flatly, she crossed the room in three long strides and grabbed my shoulders, forcing me to look at her. Her eyes softened when they met mine. “Okay,” she said. “That’s it. You’re coming out with me tonight.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not in the mood for clubbing”
“You haven’t been in the mood for weeks,” she snapped, then immediately sighed. Her grip loosened. “You’re disappearing in here, Lila.”
The word hit too close to the truth. “I don’t know how to be okay,” I admitted quietly and my voice cracked despite my efforts. “One day he was here. The next” I swallowed. “Nothing.”
She pulled me into a hug, tight and grounding. “I know and it’s unfair but sitting in this apartment, waiting for answers that may never come? It’s destroying you.”
She leaned back, eyes bright with stubborn determination. “So we’re going to the club.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “I don’t want to dance.”
“You don’t have to dance,” she said. “You don’t even have to smile. You just have to exist somewhere that isn’t this cave.”
I hesitated, my gaze flicking back to the canvas, to Nikolai unfinished eyes then I nodded.
The club assaulted my senses the moment we stepped inside. As always bass thundered through the floor, vibrating up my legs and into my chest. Neon lights sliced through the darkness, painting everything in violent shades of violet and blue. Bodies packed together in sweaty proximity, laughter colliding with music, the air thick with heat and perfume and alcohol.
I felt wildly out of place but Maya handed me a drink I hadn’t asked for. “Just hold it,” she shouted over the music. “You don’t even have to drink.”
I wrapped my fingers around the cool glass, grateful for something solid, and scanned the crowd.
Just as I was about settling down, I felt a prickle at the back of my neck like eyes sliding over my skin. I shifted immediately, glancing over my shoulder but I saw nothing.
Just strangers dancing and drinking but still, unease curled low in my stomach. “You okay?” Maya asked, leaning close, “Yeah,” I lied but the feeling didn’t fade.
It followed m through the press of bodies, across the edge of the dance floor. Every time I laughed too loudly or tried to lose myself in the music, it came back stronger, sharper, like a warning I didn’t understand.
I ducked into the bathroom and braced my hands against the sink, staring at my reflection. My eyes looked too big, too hollow. Get it together, I told myself and when I stepped back out, Maya was deep in conversation with someone. I waved, mouthing I’m stepping outside, and slipped through the side exit. The alley was mercifully quiet, the music reduced to a dull thrum behind brick walls cool night air wrapped around me like relief I exhaled and froze because footsteps echoed behind me slow and deliberate.
My pulse spiked and I turned, heart hammering. A man stood at the mouth of the alley, his face half-hidden in shadow, his gaze locked onto me with unsettling focus. There was something wrong about the stillness of him predatory and patient. “Sorry,” I said quickly, stepping back. “I was just”
But he moved fast and panic exploded through me. I spun to run, pain bloomed at my neck.
A sharp sting, my breath hitched as a hand clamped over my mouth, cutting off my scream. “No,” I gasped, legs buckling.
Warmth flooded my veins, heavy and unnatural, dragging me down. The alley tilted, lights smearing into darkness my last thought was Nikolai name burning, unanswered as the world dissolved, I fell into nothing and then silence.
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