Page 21 of Beautiful Ruins
“Don’t insult me.Not so little.And I can’t help it if I like to know things.Why don’t you have a cook?”
“I do have a cook.”
Her eyes slide suspiciously to her discarded plate, before she gives me a look that’s questionable at best.
“If you intend to keep me prisoner,” she starts, “you should at least feed me well.”
The house had already changedaround her.
It wasn’t a switch being flipped or a spell being broken.It was calmer than that—insidious.And it came out of no-where.The kind of change you only noticed when you’ve already lost ground.
I didn’t realize it until later that night.After she abandoned the rest of the pasta, yawned into her arm like she’d just completed an endurance event, and rewarded me with a pair of unearned, thoroughly distracting moony eyes for dessert.
I’d been moving through the halls on instinct, the way I always did, avoiding rooms I hadn’t entered in years.Rooms I’d sealed off not with locks, but with will.With discipline.With the understanding that some doors stayed closed because opening them meant bleeding.
Except now the silence didn’t cut as sharply.
The walls didn’t echo the same way.The air didn’t feel as tight, as suffocating.There was sound where there hadn’t been before—not noise exactly, but presence.
Footsteps earlier in the evening.
Soft, unguarded laughter drifting down a corridor she had no business wandering.
The faint hum of music she’d put on while she danced, like the house might appreciate it.
Breathing.Life.
The kind that didn’t belong to ghosts or memories or men who had taught themselves how to exist without feeling.
She left traces of herself everywhere.A blanket folded wrong over the back of the couch.A book left face-down on the table, her place marked with a scrap of paper.A mug abandoned in the sink, a faint fingerprint left on the handle like a signature she hadn’t realized she’d signed.
She filled space without asking permission.
And worse—she filled it with warmth.
The house responded to her.I could feel it, like something old and starved stretching awake.Rooms that had stayed dark seemed to soften.Corners I’d learned to avoid no longer felt quite so hostile.Even the air smelled different—less like stone and restraint, more like food and soap and something alive.
I hated that I noticed.
I hated that I cared.
After she’d gone to bed, I stood alone in the kitchen, staring at the plate she hadn’t finished.Pasta gone cold.Fork resting crooked where she’d left it.The chair across from me was still warm when I touched it, heat lingering like an accusation.
For the first time in years, the house didn’t feel empty.
That realization hit hard and unwelcome—like stepping too close to an edge you hadn’t realized you were standing near.The kind of moment that made your stomach drop, your instincts scream.
I clenched my jaw and shoved the plate into the sink harder than necessary, porcelain clattering against steel.
Attachments were liabilities.
Distractions.
They burned.They exploded.They left nothing behind but destruction and ruin.
I knew this.I’d lived it.I’d paid for it in blood and fire and the kind of loss that never really loosened its grip.
Which meant whatever this was—whatevershewas—it needed to end.
