Chapter 3: Final Words
For a fleeting moment, the house held its breath. The chaos loosened its grip and folded into something almost like peace—a fragile, bruised stillness that wrapped around us like a worn blanket. In the doorway, light from the street pooled, painting the living room in sickly yellow. For one impossible second my parents looked like they might be ordinary people again: my mother's shoulders lowered, my father's hand settled on hers with that familiar, steady weight.
Then the world remembered what it was.
The masked man stepped back into the room, his silhouette a cutout of menace. He moved as if music guided him—silent, precise—as if every step had been practiced in some darker rehearsal. The mask hid everything except pale slits where his eyes should have been; those slits held a coldness that didn't belong to a person. They glinted, patient and unyielding, like knives waiting for instruction.
"Please… let us go," I whispered. My voice was small and thin, like something I was borrowing from a much braver child. It trembled in the space between the furniture and the man, and when it reached him it seemed to amuse him.
My mother folded around me like a shield. Her arms were so tight it hurt; her breath smelled of lemon and fear. "It's okay, baby," she murmured, but her voice was fraying. Her fingers dug into my shoulder until I thought she might break the bone. She spoke the truth she wanted to be true and not the truth she carried in her eyes. The true truth was harder—an animal crouched in her gaze: fear and hopelessness braided together.
I didn't believe her. How could I? The house still hummed.
It started that night and had a way of moving through the rooms—not a sound exactly, more a presence. The hum was thin and baleful, like the throat of something alive under the floorboards. It crept into my chest and wound around my ribs. The masked man cocked his head as if he heard it too; maybe he did. Maybe he arranged the world to fit around that note.
He let out a chuckle—metal scraping metal, the sound of rusted nails over a tin roof. The laugh was small and clean; it slid across the room and stuck to the wallpaper.
"Touching, David," he said. The words were casual, too casual for the thing he'd done. "I gave you a chance to hand it over. You refused."
My father's eyes—usually soft and tired from work—snapped to something I recognized and feared at once: recognition and fury flaring into one. "It's you," he spat, voice raw.
"Who else?" the man sneered. There was a hunger in him now. "You're done, David. Your daughter's next. And your wife?" His voice drooped into a new, rehearsed horror. "She'll watch it all—before she's mine."
The grin beneath that mask folded the shadows inward, making the room colder. My mother dropped to her knees like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She sobbed until something in her broke cleanly, the sound swallowing smaller sounds.
I watched him as if I could see what he was thinking. He was a monster, yes, but he wore a human's cadence; his cruelty had rhythm. My fear unraveled into something darker and older—hatred threaded with a cold, surprising clarity. A fire lit in my chest that I didn't have words for. I was ten. There shouldn't have been room for that kind of burning in me.
"Any final words?" he asked, raising the gun with a mock-polite tilt, as if he were offering us a courtesy.
My father turned to my mother first. Tears cut tidy lines through his blood-smeared face. The man behind the mask could have offered him mercy; he didn't. Instead he leaned into the moment, into the ceremony of it.
"I love you, Mia. I'm sorry I failed you… but I love you both." His voice was thin but steady. Then he looked at me—no bravado there, only the kind of fierceness that settled into bone. "Be strong, my female king. Do what's right. Daddy loves you."
Those words were a blade and a balm at the same time. I nodded because nodding was something I could control; because the sound of his voice lodged in me like a stone and I knew I had to carry it.
The hum swelled. It became a tide, swallowing the edges of my breath and thought. Time compressed; my vision tunneled into the barrel of the gun and the small, relentless glint in the masked man's eye-slits. Sound narrowed to the beat of my heart and the thin, mechanical note that lay above it like a threat.
Then the gunshot came—a clean, brutal punctuation. The boomed air knocked the world off its axis. Pain came as shock rather than sense; the room spun a little and everything went intolerably, betrayinly quiet.
Except for the hum.
That cursed note reasserted itself, louder now, threaded into the silence like a curse that wouldn't be undone. It vibrated through my bones and settled under my skin. I remember the way the light pooled on the floor, how it shattered into a hundred tiny pieces that no one could pick up again, and how my father slumped as if exhausted by the act of living itself.
My mother's sobs filled the space after the gun. They were endless, ragged, animal sounds. She held me more like a survivor than a parent, clutching me as if her grip could stitch the world back together. But the world had been torn.
I sat very still. The noise that had always threatened to break me had moved from outside to inside. The hum wasn't gone; it had become part of me. And in that silence—the silence made by a gun and sealed with breath—something in me finished its change.
I whispered his final words into the dim, into the wound of the room, and let them set the shape of everything that would come after.