Divine woke with the heavy weight of words lingering on her skin. They were not her own words. They were his. The letters had begun arriving two weeks after that night in Xavier’s study, and though she told herself she would not read them, every evening she found her hands trembling as she unfolded the parchment. His handwriting carried the same elegance and restraint as his novels, every line precise, yet beneath it lived something dangerous, like fire hiding under ice.
The first letter had unsettled her because it described exactly how she had sat that morning by her bedroom window, sipping black coffee with her knees drawn close to her chest. He wrote of how the sunlight fell across her cheek, how her lips moved slightly as if she were speaking to herself, and how she looked like a figure who had escaped from a painting only to find herself trapped in the wrong century.
She remembered tearing the paper into pieces, but she had not been able to burn it. Instead, she had placed it in a box she locked inside her cabinet, as if keeping it would help her understand how he had known what he could not have possibly seen.
Each letter after that grew bolder. Xavier described her dreams with a clarity that made her chest tighten. He spoke of the way her brother Sid hovered near her with suspicion, of the way Stacy whispered warnings with impatient affection, and of the way she herself lingered between resistance and surrender. He wrote of the shadow of Maverick Landicho as if the man still stood at her door, waiting to be let in.
Divine tried to break away. She had written Xavier once, a single message folded and left with Marisse during a book event she dared not attend. Her words had been simple: Stop. Do not write me again. But he had answered, and his response was more haunting than silence.
He had written, You do not understand. I am not writing to you. I am writing you.
The distinction pierced her like a blade.
Maverick returned on a humid Friday afternoon, his presence announced not by words but by the silence that fell over the small café where Divine sat with Stacy. She had been stirring her iced tea, trying to laugh at one of Stacy’s sarcastic remarks about men who thought cologne could replace personality, when she felt it. The air grew thick, and her spine tightened as if a ghost’s hand had pressed against it.
When she looked up, he was there. His hair was shorter, his clothes more polished than she remembered, but his eyes were the same. That familiar burn that once made her weak and terrified in equal measure still lived there. Maverick walked toward her table with the casual arrogance of someone who believed the world owed him an audience.
“Divine,” he said, as if years had not passed, as if bruises had not bloomed under his hands once upon a time.
Stacy stiffened. Her nails tapped against the table as though itching to scratch his face. “What the hell are you doing here, Maverick?”
He ignored Stacy completely, his gaze fixed on Divine. She tried to keep her voice steady. “You should leave.”
“I only want to talk,” he replied. “You look… different. Stronger. But still mine.”
The word mine struck her like a lash. Memories she had buried came rushing back, memories of nights when his voice wrapped around her throat like a chain, when her body had been treated as both prize and battlefield. She pushed her chair back, but before she could stand, Stacy placed a hand on her arm.
“Do not,” Stacy whispered. “That is what he wants.”
Maverick smirked, leaning closer. “You think you are free, Divine. But men like me do not let go. And men like Xavier? He will not save you either. He is only another mirror of me.”
Her chest froze. Maverick knew Xavier’s name.
“How do you know him?” Divine demanded.
Maverick’s grin widened. “Do you really believe secrets are safe in this city? Do you really think he found you by chance? You draw us in, Divine. You have always drawn us in.”
Stacy stood now, fire in her eyes. “Leave, or I will call Sid. You remember Sid, do you not? He has been waiting for an excuse.”
The mention of her brother’s name shifted Maverick’s smile, but he did not falter. He straightened, smoothed his shirt, and whispered, “You cannot run from what you are. You carry us with you.” Then he walked out, leaving behind the stench of memories.
Divine trembled, gripping Stacy’s hand tightly. Stacy squeezed back, whispering, “Do not let him crawl back into your head. You survived him once. Do not hand him the victory of haunting you again.”
But as they left the café, Divine could not shake the echo of his words. Xavier and Maverick. Both bound to her in ways that seemed less like chance and more like curse.
That night, Divine found another letter waiting for her at her apartment door. She picked it up with shaking hands, tempted to rip it apart before reading. But the seal on the envelope was marked with an unfamiliar symbol, a circle enclosing a dark figure that looked eerily like her silhouette. She carried it inside, locked her door, and sat at her desk.
The letter was short this time.
You are afraid of the wrong man.
Her breath caught. She wanted to believe he meant Maverick, but the way the words curved across the page, the way each letter was drawn with deliberate care, made her wonder if the warning was more twisted.
For hours she sat staring at the letter, the silence of her apartment wrapping around her like a second skin. She thought of Xavier’s eyes in that dimly lit study, eyes that seemed to see too much. She thought of Maverick’s smirk and his certainty that she would never be free. She thought of her brother Sid, who hovered too close, suffocating her with his protection, yet never truly asking what she wanted.
The lines between her thoughts blurred. The nightmares that visited her each night crept into her waking hours. She could no longer tell if Xavier was writing her dreams or if her dreams were feeding his books.
Two days later, Maverick appeared again. This time it was outside her apartment building. Sid had just left after insisting on fixing the lock to her front door, muttering about how the city was crawling with men who could not be trusted. Divine had promised him she would be fine, but as soon as Sid’s car drove away, she felt that same suffocating weight pressing down on her.
She opened her window and saw Maverick leaning against the lamppost, a cigarette glowing between his fingers. He looked up as if he had been waiting for her gaze, then raised the cigarette in greeting before letting it fall.
Her phone vibrated. A message appeared. It was from an unknown number.
I told you. You cannot keep us out.
Divine slammed the window shut, her heart racing. She wanted to scream, to run, to fight. Instead she reached for her desk drawer, pulled out Xavier’s latest letter, and read it again. You are afraid of the wrong man.
She could not tell if Xavier was warning her, claiming her, or both.
When Stacy visited the next evening, Divine confessed in a low voice, “I feel like I am being pulled in two directions. Maverick wants to drag me back into the past. Xavier wants to shape me into something I do not understand. And in between them, I feel like I am losing myself.”
Stacy studied her, her expression soft but firm. “You are not losing yourself. You are letting them write over you. Maverick wrote his cruelty on your body once, and now Xavier writes his obsession on your mind. Both of them treat you like a story they own. But you are not theirs. You are your own.”
Divine wanted to believe her. She wanted to trust that her life was more than a series of chapters authored by men who claimed to know her better than she knew herself. Yet every night, as she drifted into sleep, she heard Xavier’s voice narrating her steps, her breaths, her very heartbeat.
And sometimes, in the quietest moments, she realized a terrible truth. A part of her longed for it.
The next letter came not with words but with a manuscript. Xavier’s new draft, untitled, unfinished, but unmistakably about her. The opening line chilled her:
She thought she was escaping, but she was only walking deeper into the embrace of the one who had always been waiting.
Divine dropped the pages on the floor, clutching her temples. The words blurred, yet they burned into her memory. She felt trapped between two obsessions, one violent and one poetic, both prisons disguised as destinies.
Her reflection in the mirror across the room looked back at her with hollow eyes. She whispered to it, “Who is writing me now? Him… or me?”
The silence answered with nothing but the echo of her own voice, as if even her shadow no longer belonged to her.
ns216.73.216.13da2
and then Add to home screen.