I Am Not The Only Monster In This Story

After days of unbroken rain, the silence felt uneasy, less like calm and more like a truce. Water still clung to the windows in scattered beads, distorting the pale afternoon light into blurred smears of green and grey.

Inside, the air was tense. Maisie sat at her vanity, staring at a dossier from her last university project. The polished wood reflected her pale, anxious face as she traced the edges of the paper on Alucard's labor policies.

She had once debated topics like this in class. Now, she lived them. The words blurred as her thoughts drifted to Igor, to her mother, to the quiet wrongness woven through her family. This wasn't just about her degree anymore. It was about facing a truth she could no longer ignore.

She had written essays condemning the quiet cruelty of Alucard servitude, framing it as modern slavery dressed in civility, but no amount of eloquent outrage could undo the fact that, in the end, she had still worn the badge of the White Angels.

Inside the room, the air was thick with tension, not peaceful but taut, like the pause before a storm or a verdict. Maisie sat rigid at her vanity, the polished mahogany reflecting the muted afternoon light and her pale, drawn face with unflinching clarity. The once-comforting surface now felt cold, amplifying every flicker of anxiety in her tight jaw and trembling lip.

Maisie's usually restless fingers drifted across the edge of her desk, skimming past scattered notes, glossed-over articles, and the blinking tablet that still displayed her coursework. The university crest pulsed faintly in the corner of the screen, a stylized evergreen wrapped in a digital laurel, the pride of Cascadia State, the region's elite institution.

She'd worked hard to be here, buried herself in political arts and ethics, argued for justice and reform in seminar rooms with climate control and bulletproof glass. But none of that could erase what she'd done. She'd aligned herself with the White Angels, however briefly. She'd chosen safety, influence, and prestige over truth. Over people. And all the eloquent essays in the world couldn't make that choice disappear.

Now, seated alone in her dorm at Cascadia State, Maisie stared not at a letter, but at the blinking cursor of a half-written essay on moral policy. The pressure in her chest tightened like a vice. This wasn't about schoolwork, not really. It was everything beneath it. The weight of expectation. The odd silence in the house.

Maisie had heard her mother was away on a retreat, but the nagging anxiety wouldn't fade. Her mom always said goodbye before, maybe this time was different because she'd crossed a line.

The slow, creeping realization that her carefully curated future might be built on the bones of something monstrous. Her fingers hovered above the tablet, trembling slightly, then settled, drawing slow, aimless lines across the screen's edge as if tracing the edges of a life that no longer made sense.

Once, this university had been her dream: a dazzling world of progress, intellectual rigor, and change. Now, the lectures on justice and ethics rang hollow against what she'd seen. What she'd been part of.

And though she could recite theories of liberation and civil reform from memory, she couldn't escape the truth: actions spoke louder than words, and her ex-alliance with the White Angels was a choice that words couldn't undo.

She stood before the antique cheval mirror, its ornate frame catching the soft afternoon light. Her gaze was fixed on her reflection. There it was, the face she presented to the world. Impeccable.

Every feature seemed exactly as it should be, the expression carefully neutral, perhaps even subtly pleasant, perfect, practiced. A mask honed over the years until it felt less like something worn and more like a permanent fixture.

But lately, the stillness in the glass felt… brittle. There were moments, like unexpected cracks appearing in a flawless surface, flashes when the woman staring back felt profoundly alien. A sudden jolt of unease, a visceral sense that something was fundamentally, terrifyingly wrong beneath the composed exterior. It often coincided with the act of reaching back into her past.

Maisie tried to recall the day of the rally, piecing together moments, conversations, faces, but found only a growing void. It wasn't simple forgetfulness; it felt like her memories had been wiped clean, erased with chilling precision.

That smooth, cold emptiness was impenetrable, like staring into polished glass reflecting nothing. Each time the blankness swallowed her thoughts, the perfect face in the mirror flickered, and for a fleeting second, the raw fear beneath it shone through.

A knock startled her, tearing through the quiet afternoon like a sudden tear in silence. It wasn't a loud, insistent demand, but soft, barely audible, a tentative tap-tap that prickled the hairs on her arms.

Who would knock like that? A shiver, not entirely from cold, traced its way down her spine. Hesitantly, curiosity warring with a sudden prickle of unease, she approached the door.

She held her breath, listening, then the lock clicked open. She pushed the heavy door inward and peered out. No one was there, just the dim hallway lit by a lone bulb near the stairs. Outside, a faint breeze carried the distant, cheerful song of birds, a stark contrast to the silent mystery before her.

With a sigh that felt too loud in the stifling afternoon air, she stepped outside, pulling a flowing, patterned shawl around herself with a distracted gesture.

The transition from the stuffy indoors to the crisp air was abrupt but welcome. She needed to escape the oppressive atmosphere within to find the space to simply breathe and think without interruption.

Wandering slowly, almost deliberately, down the familiar stone path lined with drooping hostas and late-blooming hydrangeas, she let her gaze drift over the moon-dappled leaves. But her mind refused to settle.

Clarity remained just out of reach, shadowed by two faces: Igor's and Dash's. Igor's recent glances unsettled her, haunted and hesitant, seemingly painful. Whenever he helped her with daily tasks, she was always close by, sensing the weight he carried beneath his calm exterior.

It was as if he wrestled with a secret he wanted to share but pulled back each time, leaving behind a quiet unease, and, beneath it all, a subtle reminder that he knew she cared.

Dash, usually so straightforward, had been oddly fidgety for days, restless, avoiding conversations, his usual cheerful demeanor replaced by a nervous edge. Maisie couldn't quite understand.

Even the garden's calm couldn't distract her from the sinking suspicion that something was seriously wrong, and that these two men, for reasons she couldn't guess, were caught up in it. Yet despite his nerves, Dash still made time for her, a small anchor amid the chaos.

At the edge of the garden, where the manicured lawn softly blurred into a wilder, shadier growth, she paused. Before her stood the old marble fountain, a silent, weathered monument to a gentler time. Its once-smooth stone basin was now deeply veined with emerald moss, clinging stubbornly between the cracks of intricate carvings worn smooth by time and weather. The air here felt cooler, carrying the faint, damp scent of wet stone and decaying leaves.

She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the quiet seep into her. This fountain marked the gateway to a cherished past. This was where she used to come with Dash, their secret sanctuary, to read for hours beneath the lush, flowering embrace of the hydrangea arch nearby.

The world felt vast and full of quiet possibility then, a feeling that had receded entirely long before the estate library began sending double tutors to her door, demanding hours of Latin and sums that blurred into tedious monotony, and her father's once-lenient guidance had solidified into an unyielding code of conduct, leaving little room for idle hours, whispered secrets, or the comforting weight of a furry head resting companionably on her lap.

Now, the fountain stood not as a meeting place for adventure, but as a still point in a life that had become far too constrained.

A breeze swirled the leaves, sending a dry, rustling whisper through the afternoon air. Maisie paused on the gravel path, a subtle shiver tracing its way down her spine despite the mild temperature.

She looked back toward the mansion, its grand, imposing silhouette dark against the fading light. Windows peered out like unblinking eyes, reflecting nothing but the grey sky. A single thought bloomed in her chest, unwelcome and half-formed:

What if none of this is what it seems?

It was a treacherous question, a serpent in her mind, threatening to uncoil and poison everything she had come to understand. She wanted to dismiss it, to laugh at the absurdity of it. What else could it be? '

This was the quiet life she had envisioned, a refuge from the storm. But the unease lingered, a cold knot tightening beneath her ribs.

It wasn't just one thing, but a thousand tiny discrepancies she had tried to ignore, the way the staff's smiles didn't quite reach their eyes, the uneasy silence that often hung over the vast rooms, the intensity of the scrutiny she sometimes felt when she passed from one wing to another.

The house itself seemed to hold its breath, waiting. The thought, once planted, began to send out tendrils, wrapping around her confidence, making her suddenly doubt the very ground she stood on.