Page 2 of Fractured Devotion
At the bottom, the world is painted in red. Blood stains the floor in jagged pools and smeared trails, as though something was dragged, or someone tried to crawl away. The silence here feels heavier, like it’s pressing against my skin.
Before I even register it, my foot slips in the blood-slick trail, and I lose my balance.
My body twists, gravity pulling me down faster than thought, and I slam onto the floor. My breath is knocked from my chest, and my knees smear through the blood with a sickening squelch.
My hands flail and land in shards of glass—what’s left of a picture frame. Pain shoots up my arm, but I barely notice. Mom’s face looks up at me from beneath the wreckage, her smile fractured through a spiderweb of cracks.
At the end of the hallway, I see a pair of feet. Bare. Pale. With one turned slightly inward, like she always did when nervous.
I don’t scream.
The world folds in on itself like a paper house set on fire.
My vision blurs at the edges, narrowing to a tunnel of flickering light. My body gives out, and the last thing I feel is the sting of glass in my palm before everything slips away.
And then there is only darkness.
This is the moment the fracture takes root. When my mind splinters beneath the weight of everything I wasn’t meant to see.
When I stop being a child and start becoming something else, something cracked but still breathing. This night carves itself into my bones like scripture.
The man in the mask. The one who whispered my name like it belonged to him. I don’t know who he is. And I won’t for years. But his presence settles over me like a second skin, one I’ll never fully shed.
This memory isn’t just a flashback. It’s a wound that never scabbed over. I relive it often, sometimes in dreams, and sometimes when the stillness creeps in and I feel the echo of that same suffocating silence.
I tell myself the man in the mask is gone, a ghost buried in memory. But the way he looked at me—unmoving, unblinking—has stitched itself into the fabric of my fears. I don’t know who he was, what he wanted, or why he whispered my name like a lullaby. All I know is that night marked me. That look marked me. And sometimes, I still feel it, like it’s watching.
This was the first time I saw a monster.
And the last time I believed I could ever be safe.
It’s been twenty-three years since that night. I don’t remember the days that followed, only the way the paramedics’ gloves felt cold against my skin, and how my aunt’s voice cracked when she called my name from across a sterile hallway.
The house was condemned, and the files were sealed. No one ever found the man in the mask.
Now, I wake up every morning with the memory tucked behind my eyes like a splinter. I run a clinic, I make decisions, and I look composed. But the past is never really gone. It’s just quieter sometimes. Until it’s not.
Earlier today, I stood in front of the mirror and saw the crack in my smile. Not from age, and not from exhaustion. From him. From what he left behind. And I know, deep down, this fracture in me never healed. It just learned how to wear skin.
Chapter 1 – Celeste - Clinical Precision
The sky outside is the color of a faded bruise, all muted gray with veins of dull blue. It hasn’t rained yet, but the air tastes like metal. At Miramont Neuro Clinic, mornings begin in silence—no greeting chatter and no squeaky shoes, just the low hum of machines that pretend to understand the human mind better than we do.
I sit in my private Cognitive Conditioning Lab, surrounded by soft glows from biofeedback monitors. The screens pulse with delta wave patterns and color-coded stress indicators. Subject 43’s chart is at the center. The lines are too erratic, too sharp for comfort. There was a seizure last night.
My fingers tighten around the stylus.
“REM-phase instability,” I say aloud, more to myself than anyone else. Transitional volatility, not system error. Not my fault.
The door hisses open, and Mara steps in, holding a tablet to her chest like a shield. She’s petite, sharply dressed in slate-gray scrubs that match her precision-cut bob. Her eyes are the color of dried chamomile, always slightly tired but never missing a detail.
She’s my assistant, clinically brilliant and pathologically loyal, though she still flinches when I speak too sharply. “He convulsed at 03:22. Emergency override kicked in. He’s sedated now.”
“Vitals?” I ask.
“Stabilized. No regression. Memory integrity intact.”
I nod once. Cold, professional. “Document it under transitional dissonance. Strip the timestamp and attach it to the generic flag.”
