chapter 5 Mina and Mark

Chapter 5What Waits

Mina didn’t move.

She lay still, counting her breaths, keeping them shallow enough not to give herself away. The smell lingered in the room, clean and deliberate. Not the ghost of something old, but the presence of something recent. Aftershave. Familiar. Wrong.She slid her hand beneath the duvet and wrapped her fingers around her phone.No torch. No noise. No sudden bravery.The house made its ordinary sounds. Pipes ticking. Wood shifting as the night cooled. Wind worrying at the hedges outside. Nothing else. No footsteps. No breathing but her own.She sat up slowly and placed her feet on the floor. The cold didn’t shock her the way she expected. That absence of fear unsettled her more than panic would have.The bedroom door opened a fraction. The hallway lay stretched and narrow, unchanged since childhood. Framed photographs. Muted carpet. Shadows that knew the shape of her.The smell was stronger downstairs.Mina followed it.At the back of the house, she stopped.The door was open.Not caught on the latch. Not drifting. Open wide enough to let the night lean in.Her breath snagged.She crossed the kitchen and closed it, the wood cold beneath her palm. She turned the lock. The click sounded too loud in the quiet room.On the counter sat an empty whisky glass.One of her mother’s. Heavy. Expensive. A faint amber ring clung to the base, as if it had been set down with care.Someone had taken their time.Her heart began to hammer now, the calm she’d borrowed finally spent. She flicked the light switch.The kitchen filled with yellow light.For a split second, her reflection stared back at her in the glass of the door.Only it wasn’t her.Mark’s face hovered there instead. Pale. Watchful. Too close.Mina gasped and the image shattered, leaving only her own wide eyes staring back at her, the night pressed flat beyond the glass.Get a grip.She locked the door again, harder this time, then moved through the house, checking every room. Living room. Dining room. Bathroom. Corners. Shadows.Nothing.Too nothing.Back upstairs, she shut herself into her bedroom and locked the door. She dragged a chair beneath the handle, the scrape loud and grounding.Only then did she sit on the edge of the bed and force her breathing to slow.The house settled around her, indifferent.Mark’s face wouldn’t leave her.Not the injured man from the night before, bloodied and silent, but the version she remembered too well. The one that appeared when his mind began to slip its tether. When pain and exhaustion sharpened his focus into something dangerous.She’d seen it before. The way he could fix on an idea until it consumed him. How coincidence became intent. How silence turned into accusation.Sleep deprivation did that to him. So did injury. So did fear.And once Mark believed a story, he lived inside it.Mina rubbed her arms, suddenly cold.If he thought she’d abandoned him. If he believed she was part of whatever was closing in around him, then distance wouldn’t matter. Geography never had with Mark.Her phone lay switched off beside her, a small act of defiance.She imagined him somewhere in the dark. Wound throbbing. Thoughts spiralling. Convinced she was the last place that made sense.That frightened her more than the open door.Mark didn’t need to be in the house to be present. When his mind fractured, it reached outward, searching for somewhere to land.Often on the person closest.Mina lay back fully clothed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the quiet, knowing the real danger wasn’t whether Mark had been there.It was whether, in his head, he already was.