Mag-log inAlanDarkness swallowed the hallway the second the lights exploded above us, and for one terrible moment the sound alone felt powerful enough to split my skull open from the inside because it was no longer just glass shattering around us anymore. The noise inside my head rose with it immediately, twisting together with the violent crack of the lights until I could no longer separate which sounds belonged to the building and which ones belonged to whatever had forced its way into me.Natasha grabbed onto me harder the instant everything went dark, her fingers digging painfully into my arms while broken pieces of glass scattered across the floor beneath us. I heard Matt curse nearby, but even his voice sounded far away already, muffled beneath the crushing pressure pressing against my thoughts hard enough that breathing itself suddenly became difficult.Then the whisper returned inside my head, we see you now.Pain tore violently through my skull the second the words formed completely,
NatashaAlan’s eyes changed right in front of me in a way that made fear spread through my chest so quickly that for a second I could barely breathe properly anymore.It wasn’t the color of them that changed and it wasn’t anything physical that I could have explained to somebody later if they asked me what happened in that hallway, but something behind his stare shifted in a way that felt deeply wrong, like part of him had suddenly stepped somewhere farther away while the rest of him stayed standing in front of me.My hands remained locked against his face because I was terrified that the second I let go of him, even for a moment, whatever was happening inside him would pull him somewhere I could no longer reach.“Alan,” I said firmly while forcing him to keep looking at me. “Stay with me.”His breathing became uneven almost immediately after that, growing shallower and rougher in a way that made panic slowly crawl up the back of my throat because I could actually hear how hard he was
AlanWhen I say it’s right here, I feel the words sit heavier than they should, like they don’t just leave my mouth and disappear into the space between us but instead stay close, hanging around me in a way that makes it hard to breathe normally.Natasha’s grip on my arm tightens, not a small adjustment this time but something firm and deliberate, like she is making a decision with her hands before she says anything out loud, and Matt goes completely still for a second before he shifts his weight and looks at me like he is trying to see something I can’t show him.“Define here,” he says, and his voice is steady, but there is something underneath it now that wasn’t there before, something stretched thin.I swallow because I don’t have a clean answer, not one that will make sense in a normal way, but I try anyway because not answering would be worse.“It’s not behind us anymore and it’s not in the walls the way it was before, it feels like it moved,” I say slowly, choosing each word lik
NatashaThere is a very specific kind of silence that feels like it is watching you, and I recognize it immediately because it does not come from the absence of sound but from the presence of something that has decided not to make any.That is the silence that settles around us the moment Alan stops answering me, it is not empty.It is waiting.“Alan?” I say again, a little sharper this time, because the first time I said his name it disappeared into that silence without touching anything and I do not like that, I do not like the idea that my voice cannot reach him when he is standing right in front of me.He is still, not frozen like someone startled, not tense like someone bracing for something, just still in a way that feels wrong because it looks like he is listening to something that neither Matt nor I can hear.Matt takes a step closer, careful but not hesitant, his eyes moving over Alan’s face like he is trying to catch any small change before it becomes something bigger.“Hey,
AlanThe sound didn’t echo the way it should have, and that was the first thing that settled wrong inside me before anything else had the chance to fully register in my mind.A stairwell like this should have carried sound easily, stretching it out and bouncing it back in uneven pieces that made it hard to tell exactly where it came from, but those three knocks didn’t do that at all, they stayed contained and flat and disturbingly precise, like they hadn’t traveled through the air in the normal way at all but had instead just… appeared exactly where we heard them.Behind us, inside the wall we had already checked.I didn’t turn around right away, not because I was trying to be careful or brave or even logical in any real sense, but because something in me stalled in a quiet, stubborn way that felt deeper than thought, like a part of my body had decided it didn’t want confirmation of what we had just heard.Natasha’s hand tightened around my arm again, and this time there was nothing s
NatashaThere is a kind of fear that doesn't announce itself.Not the loud kind, not the kind that shows up with a racing heart and shaking hands so at least you know what you're dealing with. This one is quieter than that. It moves in slowly and settles somewhere behind your sternum and just sits there, patient, waiting for you to stop moving long enough to feel the full weight of it. I know that fear. I have lived inside it before, in other places, with other people, and I had hoped, stupidly, that I was done with it and then Alan had stopped breathing and I had learned I was not done with it at all.We were moving now, which helped. Movement is good. Movement means there is somewhere to be, something to do with your hands and your legs and the part of your brain that would otherwise sit down on the floor and simply fall apart. Matt was ahead of us, checking corners, muttering something under his breath that I couldn't fully catch, some combination of directions and profanity that
NatashaI knew why Raymond called Alan. There was something or someone they needed to attend to and I was more than convinced that it was a rogue simply because of everything that was going on in that moment. Alan was vengeful when he wanted to be, at least I had seen that in him in the little time
AlanWalking into Zephyr’s pack, a sense of deja vu hit me all over again because this was the same way I had felt the last time I had been here. I had come here the other day to fight him because I thought he had forcefully taken Natasha from me but now, I could see very well that she had come her
Natasha“Where have you been? The Alpha has been looking everywhere for you.” I looked up from my phone, watching as Sophia hurried towards me, a frantic look on her face. Whatever it was, it had to be disturbing because Sophia was never easily rattled like this. My heartrate spiked because I didn
NatashaI stepped out of Alpha Zephyr’s chambers with my chest tight and my head full of noise. The hallway felt longer than before, and every step I took sounded too loud against the floor. His words kept repeating in my head.Someone inside helped them.He didn’t say my name when he said it, but







