The knock on her apartment door was sharp and commanding, the kind that carried authority rather than uncertainty. Divine froze mid step, clutching the manuscript Xavier had sent her only a day before. The words on the pages had been swirling in her mind like smoke, but now another presence filled the room even before she opened the door.
“Divine, open up. It is me.”
Her brother’s voice cut through the silence. Sid.
She unlocked the door, hesitant, and found him standing in the hallway with the same familiar intensity in his eyes. Sid was taller than her, his broad shoulders filling the doorway as though he were a wall sent to guard her from the world. His hair was slightly disheveled, but his posture remained rigid, military in its precision.
“You did not tell me Maverick was back,” Sid said without greeting. His eyes swept over her living room as if searching for hidden threats.
Divine’s throat tightened. “You already know?”
“I know enough,” Sid replied, stepping inside without waiting for permission. “And I know you have been reading too much of Xavier Isidro’s madness. Do not think I cannot tell. I hear his voice in the way you speak now.”
Divine’s chest clenched. Xavier’s name from Sid’s lips felt strange, almost scripted. She closed the door behind him, but unease prickled her skin. “What are you saying?”
“I am saying,” Sid continued, “that I have read his work. I know the patterns. I know the way his villains move. And I hear them in you. When you talk, when you walk, even when you breathe, it is like you are reciting his pages.”
Her heart dropped. The words sounded almost identical to what Maverick had said at the café. Different voices, same warning. She wondered if they were all reading from the same script.
“Sid,” she whispered, “do not do this. I do not need you to police my thoughts.”
Sid’s jaw tightened. “I am not policing. I am protecting. You may not see it, but you are being consumed. First by Maverick. Now by this Xavier. Both of them are dangerous men who see you not as a person but as a story to be written and rewritten. And I will not let you fall into it again.”
Divine turned away, unable to hold his gaze. His words struck truth, but they were also chains. She remembered the suffocating way he had hovered after Maverick had left her bruised and broken years ago. Sid had meant well, but his protectiveness had smothered her, replacing one prison with another.
“You do not get to decide what I read, who I meet, or what I feel,” she said quietly. “You are not my warden.”
Silence stretched between them. When she finally glanced at him, his eyes burned with a mixture of anger and grief. He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “You think I cannot hear it? Divine, you are not even speaking like yourself anymore. You sound like a character someone else created. And I swear to you, some of the things you said just now… I have read them before. In his novels.”
Her breath caught. The world tilted for a moment. “What?”
“Yes,” Sid said firmly. “You quoted him. Verbatim. Words you never could have known, unless he fed them to you, or unless…” He trailed off, his gaze narrowing. “Unless he has been writing you all along.”
The manuscript still rested in her trembling hands. She pressed it to her chest, as though hiding it from him would undo the truth. “You are scaring me.”
Sid shook his head. “No, Divine. It is he who is scaring you. And I will not let you surrender to it. You survived once. Do not let yourself be devoured now.”
That night, Divine could not sleep. Sid had left reluctantly, after checking every lock on her doors and windows. She had promised to call him if Maverick appeared again, though she had no intention of doing so. She needed space from his suffocating protection.
But his words lingered, echoing inside her mind. Had she really spoken Xavier’s lines without knowing? She tried to recall her sentences from earlier, but they slipped from her like water through her fingers. What she remembered instead was the feeling of being watched, as though every syllable had already been written before it left her lips.
When she finally drifted into restless sleep, the dream came.
She stood in Xavier’s study again, surrounded by towers of manuscripts that seemed to breathe with their own shadows. The pages whispered as though alive, their voices overlapping in a chorus that carried her name. Xavier emerged from the darkness, his hand holding a pen that dripped with black ink.
“You see, Divine,” he said softly, “I do not invent. I recall. Every line is only a memory of you. Every villain is the echo of your past. And every word you speak has always belonged to me.”
She tried to move, to protest, but her body felt bound. From the shadows another figure stepped forward. Sid. His face was pale, but his eyes were wild, desperate. He repeated Xavier’s words, his voice like a mirror.
“Every line is a memory of you. Every villain is the echo of your past. Every word you speak has always belonged to me.”
The dream shattered, and Divine woke with a cry, her sheets tangled around her limbs. Sweat drenched her skin. For a long moment she stared at the ceiling, unable to separate dream from reality.
The next day Sid returned again. He carried one of Xavier’s books in his hand, the cover worn from use. He placed it on her kitchen table with deliberate weight.
“Read this passage,” he demanded, flipping the pages to a marked section.
Divine hesitated, then leaned forward. Her eyes scanned the words, and her blood froze. It was almost identical to what she had spoken in her apartment the night before, when she thought she had been resisting Sid’s control. Word for word, her defiance had already existed in Xavier’s pages years earlier.
“I told you,” Sid said grimly. “You are being written.”
Divine pushed the book away, shaking her head. “That is impossible. He cannot know. He has never met me before this year.”
“Then how do you explain it?” Sid demanded. “How do you explain that your life, your pain, even your words are already printed for strangers to read?”
She could not. The silence between them grew heavy.
Sid leaned closer. “I do not care how brilliant or charming he seems. This is not art. This is obsession. And I swear to you, I will not allow him to take you away from yourself. Even if I have to fight him. Even if I have to fight you.”
His words struck her with the weight of chains. She saw again how his love had always blurred with control. He wanted to protect her, but his protection meant ownership, just as Maverick’s passion had meant possession, and Xavier’s obsession meant creation.
Three men, three prisons.
She whispered, almost to herself, “What if I am already gone? What if the girl you are trying to protect was never real at all?”
Sid’s face hardened, but in his eyes she caught a flicker of fear. He did not answer. He simply picked up the book and left, his silence speaking louder than words.
That evening another letter slid under her door. She hesitated before opening it, but curiosity consumed her. The letter was short.
Your brother is right. But he is also wrong. He fears I am writing you, when in truth I am only transcribing what has already been carved into your soul. He wants to protect you, but he cannot see that you have always been a story long before I arrived.
The signature was absent. Only the black ink, curling at the edges of the page, as though the words themselves bled.
Divine folded the letter with shaking hands. The walls of her apartment seemed closer than ever, the air pressing down on her. She wanted to scream, to tear free, to burn every page. Yet part of her clung to the words, as though they carried something she could not release.
She wondered then if Sid’s return had been a rescue or another chapter written by the same hand. And for the first time, she feared that she would never again know the difference.
ns216.73.216.13da2
and then Add to home screen.