Click.
This time, I am fully awake and waiting for it. A thin, searingly bright strip of LED light appears first along the bottom crack of the door, then slowly, agonizingly, it begins to rise. Lucía doesn’t have to warn me—my muscles lock, freezing me in place.
Esteban lies just beyond her, his back turned away from both of us. His breathing sounds steady. But now that my senses are completely dialed in, it feels far too steady. It lacks the occasional snorts or shifts of true sleep. It sounds rehearsed.
The creeping light pauses right near the wooden headboard.
Then comes the soft, sickening knock.
Tac.
Lucía shifts her body upward slightly, placing her head directly into the beam’s path, eclipsing it. After two agonizing beats of silence, the light abruptly vanishes.
A loose floorboard in the hallway lets out a faint, complaining creak. Then comes the unmistakable sound of a physical withdrawal—footsteps that are slow, heavily controlled, and dripping with intentionality.
I wait, barely breathing.
Five minutes later, Lucía sits up in the dark. “Now,” she whispers, her breath trembling.
I cast a hard glance over her shoulder at Esteban’s unmoving form.
Lucía follows my gaze. “He won’t move for at least ten minutes,” she states.
The sheer, terrifying certainty in her tone makes my stomach twist into violent knots. Because she knows his routine. Because this is a routine. The monster was not in her head. It had always been him.
I slide out of the bed without a single word. The decorative ceramic tiles feel like ice against my bare soles. Lucía tightly gathers her woolen blanket around her shaking shoulders, and the two of us step out into the shadowed hallway, creeping through our own home like fugitives behind enemy lines.
