I knock once. Soft. Controlled. Enough to be heard, not enough to be inviting.
The door opens a fraction. I see her first—Reyna Solis. Predictable. Composed. Her posture is textbook: spine straight, chin slightly lifted, eyes already assessing. She's exactly as the reports described. No surprises there. I mean I've seen her a few times till now.
Then I see the other one.
Amantha Harbringer.
No file. No trace. No digital shadow. That's either a failure of surveillance or a deliberate erasure. Either way, it's interesting.
She turns toward me, and I get my first real look. She's not startled. Not curious. Just... watching. Like a predator who hasn't decided if I'm prey or competition. Her eyes are sharp, but not wild. Calculated. She's dangerous, but not reckless. I mark that down.
She looks like she could stab me. Not out of rage. Out of strategy. And she'd do it with precision. I've seen that kind of face before—on people trained to kill without emotion. She wears it naturally.
Reyna's watching her too. There's tension between them, but not the kind that explodes. The kind that simmers. Useful.
I step inside. No smile. No greeting. Just observation.
Why is it that everyone I meet lately looks like they belong in a classified file labeled "unstable but effective"? Psychos with a taste for angst. It's exhausting.
Still, I prefer this to the alternative. At least they're predictable in their unpredictability.
I glance at Amantha again. She doesn't flinch.
Good.
Let's see what she does next. But she just sat there staring at me judgmentally.
She is like a ghost with cryptic answers and black colored veils that would slowly steal your sanity. She's like book on your desk that can't be forgotten no matter how hard you try and ends up giving you nightmares. She's like someone you can't get out of your mind, she is stuck forevermore in your subconsciousness.
She's like my late mother.
They say she used to arrive with the fog—silent, shapeless, and strange. No one saw her enter the town, but suddenly, she used to be everywhere. A figure cloaked in black veils, drifting through alleyways and moonlit corridors, her presence as chilling as the wind that followed her.
She never spoke plainly. Her words were riddles, her glances unreadable. People who met her said her eyes held centuries of sorrow, and her voice echoed like forgotten lullabies. She was like a ghost—cryptic, elusive, and quietly corrosive. The longer you listened, the more your thoughts unraveled.
One man found a book on his desk the morning after she visited. He didn't remember buying it, didn't know where it came from. But it was there—leather-bound, inked in a language he couldn't decipher. He tried to ignore it, hide it, even burn it. But it always returned. And with it came the nightmares: pages bleeding into dreams, whispers crawling into his ears.
Others began to speak of her too. Not with fear, but with obsession. She was in their minds, etched into their memories like scars. No matter how far they ran, she lingered—an echo in the subconscious, a shadow behind every thought.
She was not a woman. She was a presence. A story. A curse. Reyna was like her, Amantha- I don't know honestly. And once you knew her name, you could never forget it.
And to make it worse-she's my mother.
I could feel it again—like static crawling across my skin. That strange connection, elusive yet intoxicating. It wasn't just a passing thought anymore. It was a presence. Familiar. Whispering. Every time I tried to focus, my mind blurred, thoughts slipping like sand through trembling fingers. And yet, I didn't recoil. I leaned in. I wanted more.
Across the room, Amantha sat with that unreadable expression she wore like armor. Her eyes flicked toward Reyna, and though no words passed between them, something did. A gesture—barely a twitch of her hand, a glance too precise to be accidental. It was like watching a silent film with dialogue I wasn't meant to hear.
I rubbed my temples, trying to shake the haze. "Damn," I muttered under my breath, "I'll never understand women and their weird antics."
The air felt thick, charged. I cleared my throat, loud enough to break whatever spell they were under.
"Reyna, we need to talk—"
Before I could finish, Connor's head popped in from behind the doorframe, his timing impeccable as always. His eyes darted between us, sensing the tension but saying nothing. Just a raised brow and that half-smirk that said he knew something.
And just like that, the moment fractured.
I bit back a sigh as I decided to let Connor explain.