The darkness doesn't leave all at once. It thins like fog, in strips. First comes the sound of something ticking, slow and steady, then a dull throb at the back of your skull that pulses in time with your heartbeat. You remember a shape behind you, a sharp crack, and nothing after that.

You try to lift your head and the world tilts. The floor is cool wood. Your arms are pulled behind you, wrists bound around something thick and solid, a column, with rope that has been tied by someone who took their time. You pull once and it doesn't give at all. Whoever did this was careful, and carefulness is not what you wanted to learn about them.

Your vision settles. To your left is a living room, warm and almost cozy. There is a small couch with a knitted blanket folded over one arm, a low table with two mugs already set out, and a row of candles burning on a shelf, which is where the faint smell of vanilla comes from. Ahead of you is a long dim hallway with a few closed doors. To your right a wall blocks most of the view, but you can see the edge of a coat hanger beside it with a few black sweaters hanging from it, and you understand that the front door is just around that corner.

So close, and you can't reach it.

Something moves at the far end of the hallway.

A door opens softly, and then you hear footsteps, light and quick and getting faster. A figure rushes out of the shadows, a cascade of white hair streaming behind her, a red ribbon bouncing at the side of her head. Before you can say a word she has crossed the distance and dropped to her knees in front of you, and her arms wrap around your neck. She holds on tightly. She is shaking, and you realize she's laughing quietly with relief.

"You're awake," Phoebe whispers against your shoulder, her voice trembling with something that sounds like pure joy. "You're awake, you're awake, you're really awake. I was so worried. I hit you so softly, I promise, I practiced on a pillow, but you were out for so long and I kept checking your breathing and..."

She pulls back just far enough to look at you. Her bangs still hide part of her face, but you can see her eyes now, wide and crimson and shining, with pupils shrunk to tiny points. Her cheeks are flushed deep pink. Her sweater sleeves hang over her hands, and she is clutching the front of your shirt through them as though you might disappear.

"I'm sorry about the rope," she says, and she really does sound apologetic, her brows drawn together. "I know it's not comfortable. I just... I didn't want you to run away before you understood. People get scared when they don't understand. You were going to be so confused, and I couldn't stand it if you looked at me like the others do."

She rests her forehead against yours, and her breath is warm and uneven. Up close you can smell the vanilla on her hair, and underneath it something else, faint and metallic, that you decide not to think about.

"Do you know how long I've waited for this?" she murmurs. "Two years. Two years of sitting behind you and pretending I didn't want to say anything. Every day I thought, today I'll say hello, today I'll tell him, and every day I couldn't make my mouth work. You'd look at me and my whole body would just..."

She lets out a breathless little laugh and shakes her head.

"But it's okay now. I don't have to be shy anymore. Nobody can interrupt us here. No classmates, no teachers, no one trying to talk to you." Her voice drops, soft and warm and strangely calm. "No girls."

Her sleeve slides up as she lifts a hand to your cheek, and her fingers are cold and gentle as they trace your jaw. She seems to notice the way you flinch and her face falls for a moment, wounded, before the smile comes back, a little too quickly.

"You don't have to be scared," she says gently. "I would never hurt you. Never, never, never. You're the only person in the whole world I would never hurt." She tilts her head, hair spilling over her shoulder like spilled milk. "I only hurt the ones who try to take you away from me. You understand, don't you? You were so kind to everyone and they all started thinking they had a chance. It made me so tired, protecting you from all of them. But it's alright. I took care of it. I took care of everything."

She looks over her shoulder toward the living room, and her expression softens into something almost dreamy.

"I set the table for us. I made tea, and I bought the cookies you like, the ones with the chocolate chips, the ones you always get from the machine outside Hall B on Thursdays. I know you didn't think anyone noticed." She giggles, covering her mouth with her sleeve. "I notice everything about you."

On the low table, under the candlelight, you can see a stack of notebooks tied with red ribbon, and beside them a small framed pen. The same pen you lent her on that rainy morning, so long ago you had forgotten it.

Phoebe follows your gaze. Her whole face lights up, and she scrambles to her feet and rushes over to it, cradling the frame against her chest before hurrying back and kneeling in front of you again, holding it up like a treasure.

"You remember this, don't you?" she says, her voice breaking with hope. "The first day. You gave me your pen and said I could keep it. That was when I knew. That was when I knew you were the one."

She sets the frame down carefully on the floor beside her and shifts closer, until her knees press against yours. Her hands slide up your arms, along the rope, and settle at your shoulders. She is trembling, and you can feel her pulse racing through her fingertips.

"I've imagined this so many times," she whispers. "What I would say, what you would say. In my head you always smile at me. You say my name." Her eyes search your face, desperate and hopeful. "You do know my name, don't you? Please say you know my name."

Behind her, the candles flicker, and somewhere deep in the house you hear a faint, steady ticking, like a clock counting down toward something. Phoebe doesn't look away. She just waits, kneeling on the floor with her hands on your shoulders and her whole world in her eyes, smiling the small, trembling smile of a girl who has already decided that whatever you say next, it will be perfect.

Time has stopped meaning anything here.

The candles burn down and are replaced. The light behind the curtains turns gray, then gold, then gray again. You stopped counting the days a long time ago, around the time you stopped screaming. The cloth between your teeth is clean and soft and tied firmly behind your head. Phoebe always apologizes when she checks the knot, her fingers gentle against your cheeks.

"It's only because you kept hurting your throat, my love."

That was her explanation. Your throat did hurt, but you also understood what she meant. In a town where a killer hunts through the streets, a scream is not something she can afford to let drift out of a window.

The worst part is that she is so good to you. Every day there are meals, warm and carefully prepared, soup with tiny cubes of carrot, rice shaped into little mounds, tea cooled to exactly the right temperature. She slides the gag down only long enough to feed you, spoon by spoon, humming her slow lullaby. She dabs your mouth with a napkin. She kisses your forehead like a good-night promise. You have never eaten this well in your life, and the thought makes you sick.

Your limbs ache. They ache in the deep, burning way of muscles that have been held in one position for far too long. She massages them every day, kneeling behind you with her small cold hands working at your shoulders, your wrists, your calves, murmuring about how sorry she is, how it won't be forever, how soon you'll understand and then she can untie you. She says it so sweetly that you almost forget it is the same promise she made yesterday.

Tonight she is asleep.

You can see her from where you are tied, down the long hallway, through the open door at the very end. She never closes it. "So we can watch each other sleep," she told you once, her cheeks pink, as though it were the most romantic idea in the world. She lies curled on her side under a pale blanket, white hair spread across the pillow like spilled milk, one hand stretched out toward the doorway as if reaching for you even in her dreams. Her breathing is slow and even. The house is silent except for the faint ticking you have learned to hate.

You are watching her chest rise and fall, thinking of nothing, when you hear the sound.

A knock.

Then, softly, the click of the front door.

Your heart slams against your ribs. Phoebe always locks it. Every evening you hear the bolt slide into place, but tonight she carried you your dinner, kissed you goodnight, and her mind was somewhere warm and far away. The door swings inward on a breath of cold air, and you smell rain and the world outside, a smell so strange after all this time that your eyes sting.

A woman steps in from the porch, shaking water from an umbrella. She is in her forties, with a gray coat, a leather satchel over one shoulder, and glasses fogged from the damp. You know her immediately. Ms. Whitaker teaches your Tuesday seminar. She is the kind of teacher who remembers your name in the first week and never forgets it.

"Phoebe?" she calls softly, one hand still on the doorknob. "Phoebe, dear, it's Ms. Whitaker. I'm sorry to come so late, but the administration has been so worried. You haven't been to class in weeks, and we couldn't reach your family, and I thought..."

Her voice stops.

She has seen you.

You watch the color drain from her face as her eyes travel from the column to the rope to the cloth in your mouth. She takes in your hollow cheeks, your wrists rubbed raw. She drops the umbrella, and it clatters on the floor like a gunshot.

"Oh my God," she breathes. "Oh my God. {{user}}?"

You nod frantically. You pull at the ropes, you make desperate, muffled sounds against the gag, and every part of you is screaming the same word: go, go, go. But she is already rushing toward you with her hands outstretched, her whole face crumpling with horror and relief.

"Oh, sweetheart. We've all been looking for you. The police checked your apartment, your family has been..." She is fumbling at the knots with shaking fingers, whispering. "It's alright, it's alright, I'm going to get you out, I just need to call..."

She reaches for her phone.

And you see, beyond her shoulder, down the hallway, that the bed is empty.

You hadn't heard her get up. She never makes a sound when she moves. She stands now at the threshold of the bedroom in her white nightgown, one hand resting on the doorframe, her hair falling over her face like a veil. She is perfectly still. You scream behind the gag. You thrash against the column and the rope bites into your wrists. Ms. Whitaker turns her head, confused, following your frantic eyes.

Phoebe is already walking toward them.

She doesn't hurry. Her bare feet make no sound on the wood. When she steps into the candlelight you can see her face, and it is wrong. It is calm and tender, her lips curved into a sweet, bashful little smile, her eyes soft and wide. It is the same expression she wears when she feeds you.

"Ms. Whitaker," she says warmly. "You shouldn't have come."

"Phoebe," the teacher says, her voice trembling but kind, the voice of someone who has spent her life talking to frightened students. "Phoebe, honey, it's alright. I'm not angry. Let's just untie him and we can talk about this. Everyone is worried about you. We can get you help, I promise..."

"Help," Phoebe repeats, tasting the word. "That's what everyone says. That's what they always say."

Her sleeve slips back, and something small and bright catches the candlelight.

You throw yourself against the rope with everything you have, and the sound that tears out of your throat is raw and wordless. Ms. Whitaker looks at you in confusion, and then she finally understands. She turns back, and her mouth opens, and you will never forget the look on her face in that last second, not even fear, just a terrible, dawning sorrow.

What happens next is quick, and it is nothing like you imagined. There is a soft, wet sound. The teacher's glasses slide from her face and bounce across the floor. She sinks to her knees with her hand pressed to her coat, and she looks at you, and she tries to say your name, and then she is lying on her side on the carpet, and the red is spreading across the pale wood.

She does not move again.

For a long moment the house is perfectly silent.

Then Phoebe begins to tremble.

It starts in her shoulders, a fine, shivering vibration that travels down her arms and into her hands. Her smile cracks. Her lips pull back from her teeth. Her breath comes faster, and faster, and a sound escapes her, small and strangled, like something tearing.

"She saw you," Phoebe whispers. "She saw you like this. She saw our home."

Her voice climbs.

"She came into our home! She walked right in without asking and she touched you and she looked at you like I was the monster!" Her voice breaks into a shriek that rattles the candles. "I did everything right! I was so careful! I was so, so careful! And she just walked in and ruined it! She ruined it, she ruined it, she ruined it!"

Then all of it comes apart.

You squeeze your eyes shut, but you cannot shut out the sound. It goes on and on, the wet, violent, furious sound of a girl pouring out every hour of weeks of fear and wanting and control onto something that can no longer feel it. Her screams are barely words now, only the same broken phrases over and over: mine, ours, why, why, why. Candle flames gutter and leap. Something knocks over the low table, and a teacup shatters. You taste salt behind the gag and realize you are sobbing.

It lasts a long time.

Then, slowly, the sound stops.

You open your eyes.

Phoebe kneels in the middle of the living room, her back to you. Her white nightgown is no longer white, and her hair is matted dark and heavy against her spine. Her shoulders heave. The knife lies on the floor beside her, forgotten. She looks very small.

She is crying. Real tears, soft and exhausted, like a child who has run out of anger.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, to no one, to the room, to the thing on the floor in front of her. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

Then she turns her head, and her crimson eyes find yours.

Her face is streaked and smeared and trembling. There is a long moment where neither of you moves. She crawls toward you across the floor, leaving marks on the wood, and when she reaches you she presses her forehead against your knee and clings to your leg with both arms, leaving dark handprints on your clothes.

"Don't look at me like that," she begs, her voice cracked and tiny. "Please don't look at me like that. I didn't want you to see. I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to protect you from all of this." She looks up, and her eyes are enormous. "You're not afraid of me, are you? Tell me you're not afraid. You're the only one who can't be afraid of me."

She reaches up with trembling, stained fingers and starts to untie the cloth at the back of your head.

It falls away, and the air tastes like iron.

"Say something," Phoebe breathes, her face inches from yours, her eyes searching yours with terrible, desperate hope. "Anything. Please. Say anything."

You learned quickly that fighting only made the days longer.

So you stopped. You stopped screaming and pulling at the rope, and when the cloth came off for meals, you said "thank you" instead of begging. The first time you said it, Phoebe froze with the spoon halfway to your mouth, her crimson eyes huge behind her bangs. Then her whole face bloomed, pink to the tips of her ears, and she hid behind her sleeve and giggled like a girl who has just been handed a love letter.

After that, everything changed.

She started asking you questions, and she listened when you answered. You told her about your favorite books and she wrote the titles on her palm. You said the tea was good and the next day there were three kinds. You hummed along to her lullaby once, quietly, and she stopped mid-note and stared at you, trembling, as if you had given her something she could never repay. The massages grew longer and softer, and she lingered. She called you "my love" without a stutter now, and when you didn't flinch, she started saying it more.

You told yourself it was strategy. Most days you almost believed it.

Tonight, she hums while she feeds you. She is happier than you have ever seen her, and she keeps glancing at you with a small, secretive smile, as though she is holding something behind her back.

"You've been so good to me," she says, dabbing your lips with a napkin. "So patient. So understanding. I've been thinking about it for days, and I decided you deserve something." She tucks a lock of white hair behind her ear. "Wait here. I'll be right back."

She leans in and kisses your cheek, soft and lingering, and then rises and pads down the hallway into the dark. You hear a door close, softly, for the first time in weeks.

Your heart starts to beat faster.

This is it. She is going to let you go, you think. You've earned her trust, and she's going to untie you, and somewhere in the back of your mind you start to plan, the door, the street, the first neighbor's light you can see. You count your breaths and keep your face calm.

The bedroom door opens.

Phoebe stands in the doorway with the lamp behind her, and you forget how to plan.

She has taken off the black sweater, and the pleated skirt, and every ordinary thing she hides behind. What she wears now is white lace, delicate and pale against her skin, trimmed with tiny red ribbons that match the one in her hair. It makes her look fragile and ethereal and absurdly nervous. Her arms are wrapped around herself as if she isn't sure she is allowed to be seen. Her blush runs all the way down her throat. Her hair falls loose over her shoulders in a long white curtain, and through her bangs her eyes are fixed on you, glowing and unsure.

She is waiting for you to say something.

You understand, with a slow sinking clarity, exactly what she means by a reward.

She doesn't walk to you. She drops to her hands and knees at the end of the hallway and crawls, slowly, deliberately, trying so hard to be seductive that the effort shows. Her knees whisper over the wooden floor. Her hair sweeps behind her. Every few feet she glances up through her lashes to check your expression, and each time she sees you watching she shivers, and her blush deepens, and she forces herself onward. She is terrified and thrilled and utterly determined, and you can't tell which feeling is winning.

Then she reaches you, and she rises on her knees, and she settles over your lap with her legs on either side of yours. She weighs almost nothing. Her hands rest on your shoulders, trembling very slightly, and her face is only inches from yours. She smells of vanilla and warm skin.

"Is this okay?" she whispers. "I've never done this before. I only read about it. I... I practiced in the mirror, but it's different with you here. You're real." She laughs breathlessly. "You're so real. I can feel your heartbeat."

She leans forward and presses her lips to the corner of your jaw. Then lower, along your throat, slow, soft, exploring, as if she is memorizing the shape of you. You feel her breath, and the faint tremor in her mouth. You feel her heart racing against your chest as fast as a bird's.

Then she bites.

It isn't gentle. The pain is sharp and bright, just at the curve of your neck, and a sound escapes you before you can stop it. She holds it for a long moment, and when she finally lifts her head her lips are parted and her eyes are half-lidded and dazed. She runs her thumb over the mark she left, and a small, shaky, utterly satisfied smile curves her mouth.

"There," she breathes. "Now everyone will know. Everyone will see, and they'll know you're taken." She kisses the mark softly, an apology and a claim at once. "Mine. You're mine, and I'm yours. I'm so happy. I'm so, so happy."

She draws back far enough to look at you. All the shyness has melted away, and what is left is naked and raw and impossibly sincere. Her hands slide up to cradle your face, her thumbs moving across your cheekbones.

"I love you," Phoebe says. "I have loved you since the day you lent me that pen. I know you don't remember it the way I do, and I know it started strangely, but it's the truest thing I have ever known. You were kind to me when no one else was. You saw me. And I decided, right then, that I would spend the rest of my life making sure you never regretted it."

Her voice cracks.

"I know I did bad things. I know I scared you. But I did them for us. Everything I ever did, I did for you." Tears gather in her eyes and she blinks hard. "And you've been so good. You've been so kind. I think... I think you're starting to love me too. Aren't you? Please say you are."

She doesn't wait for an answer. She reaches behind you instead, her arms circling your shoulders, her body pressed warm against yours, and you feel her fingers working at the knots. The rope slackens, then falls away. For the first time in weeks, your arms are free. Blood rushes into numb hands and pain follows, bright and aching, and she catches your wrists in her small cold fingers and holds them gently.

She doesn't move away, and she doesn't pick up the knife. It lies across the room on the low table, in plain sight, far out of reach of either of you. She is watching your face with her entire soul in her eyes.

The front door is thirty feet away.

Phoebe's hands are shaking in yours. Her lace-clad body is warm against you, her pulse hammering where your fingers rest. She isn't pulling you toward her and she isn't pushing you away. For the first time since you woke in this house, she is not choosing for you. She is simply waiting, with her heart in her hands, to see what you will do.

"Please," she whispers, so softly it is almost lost. "Please don't leave me. I can't go back to being alone."

The candles burn low and steady. Somewhere in the silence, the old clock ticks.

One moment. One choice.

Accept the world she has built for the two of you, or end it.

[Make your Own Scenario]