Page 9 of Steel and Ice

BLAIR

I woke with a jolt that felt less like waking and more like being pulled from sleep by invisible hands. The type of start that doesn’t have a cause, doesn’t offer a reason. No nightmare I could remember or analyze. No sound I could name.

Just obtrusive, merciless certainty that something wasn’t right. Inside or out.

I looked at the purple crescents along my wrists, a map of where Travis had grabbed me. The metal shopping carts still rang in my ears.

But noises downstairs distracted me from the pain.

This godforsaken house made noise the way all old homes do. Particularly at night when the rest of the city’s commotion settled. As much as anything settles in Chicago.

The home never let me forget it wasn’t mine by decision. Most people dream of inheriting a home, but this one had been a liability. I couldn’t afford to renovate, and the few interested buyers wouldn’t offer more than pennies on the dollar.

Wood shifted under its own weight, pipes knocked. The faint whistle of wind at the windows, Chicago’s signature sound. I was used to it.

Well, at least that’s what I told myself; the creaks and bangs were echoes of old bones as they settled.

But tonight, the sound was different.

Sleep had evaded me for hours, and I was furious to be awakened by a sound, whether real or imagined. The room pressed in around me and shadows stretched long across cracked plaster walls. The ancient house groaned as if it remembered something it couldn’t quite let go of; at least not yet.

Not tonight.

I lay there in bed, flat on my back, sheets tangled around my legs, waiting for my pulse to steady, if only for a moment.

It didn’t.

Sheets dragged across my legs as I slid to the edge of my queen bed. My bare feet touched the floorboards, cold as stone. They creaked beneath my feet, sharp and splintered, breaking through the hush that filled the room.

I pushed up and moved slowly as my legs steadied.

On the nightstand I found my phone and opened it to the screen I’d last viewed; a draft of the recusal letter I’d typed to acknowledge to my superior I’d need to refer Colt out to someone else.

Subject line: Recusal/Referral—C. Mitchell

In the window behind my email app was an open Google search for “dual relationship ethics Chicago.”

The potential consequences of my actions stared blankly—coldly—back at me.

The radiator hissed through its ribs near my bed. I glanced away from the phone as the house held its silence, lightless and still.

I stepped out into the hallway that splayed out before me. Long, narrow, the wallpaper peeling where water stains had bruised it years ago. My shadow bent and slid against the wall as I put one foot after another. I paused and listened for something.

But there was nothing.

A thick kind of nothing. The kind that swallowed sound and left only heavy pounding in my ears.

Cold radiator dust wafted through air, and the scent filled my nostrils. My thoughts flashed to the back door latch, the one that never sat perfectly flush. Tonight, I regretted not trying harder to fix it.

I couldn’t just stand there, a waiting target. So, I started down the stairs.

The old banister chilled my palm, polished smooth by decades of hands before mine, way back to my great grandfather on my mother’s side.

Each forward movement was met with a hollow crack that echoed into the black below.

Halfway down, I stopped; there it was—a sound.

Not the pipes. Definitely not the wind. A dragging step across the floorboards. Too deliberate to be accidental.

Too careful to not be human.

My throat closed reflexively. The old house shifted, leaning in closer, waiting to see what I’d do next. I forced myself to move, determined not to allow fear to dictate my actions.

Slowly, I descended and avoided each soft spot on the stairs. The house itself sometimes seemed to decay around me in real time. The living room gradually unfolded as my eyes partially adjusted to darkness.

Everything was cast in varied shades of black. The sagging couch, crooked shelves built by my grandfather, stacked with books which resembled rows of teeth.

Tall windows sealed against the night’s cold, but a shiver ran down my spine, nonetheless. Curtains stirred, too faint to be anything real. Too much like breath.

The sound was suddenly gone.

The worst part was how this would sound on the evening news. “Local therapist makes drafty Victorian for haunted mansion, more at eleven.”

I crossed into the kitchen with its lone overhead bulb flickering, occasionally holding steady. Its weak yellow glow spilled across linoleum that chilled my bare feet. Warm socks would’ve been a good idea, but they were in a noisy drawer which would’ve called attention to me.

A knife block sat by the sink, handles jutted out. Silent invitations to take one.

My hand hovered—then closed. I drew it; the blade flashed and reflected light. Silver trembled in my grip, even as I reprimanded it for doing so.

I wanted to be steady, calm. To practice what I preached.

I told myself the knife was for reassurance, proof I hadn’t imagined this weight pressing on me, holding me down. But when I turned back toward the door, I could have sworn the curtain shifted again.

A ripple, faint enough to mock me.

I was losing my damned mind.

I stepped closer toward the door, knife in hand, shaking anyway as my body ignored the memo that I was supposed to be the calm professional in the room.

Glass panes in the back door mirrored back to me a fractured reflection, bare chest, hollow eyes.

A blade that looked steadier than the hand grasping it for dear life.

Then I saw it. The door itself, unlatched.

Not even flush; slightly ajar.

A warped edge that yawned open as though the night itself had pried it loose. A vivid nightmare turned reality before it twisted back to nightmare again.

A mistake. Had to be.

Except… I didn’t ever make mistakes this careless.

Not me.

The radiator ticked in the living room next to me and stole my attention from the open door. This couldn’t have happened. I didn’t ever leave doors open. I checked locks twice. Sometimes more. Because the thought of forgetting gnawed at me if I didn’t.

My feet wouldn’t budge. The linoleum pressed its frozen chill straight to my bones and anchored me in place as I willed my limbs to move. But I could only fixate on the little sliver of darkness beyond the doorframe, blacker than anything I wished to name.

Something stood out there—a shoulder, a head.

Headlights swept past the front windows and cast a long, shadowy arm from the banister across the floor. The arm slid away.

The curtain edge lifted, settled, and lifted again as a branch brushed window glass. The mail slot clicked once. Probably wind.

The hinge ticked.

The longer I watched, the more the dark rearranged itself; a coat on a hook became a man near the door before it turned back into a coat. I couldn’t tell if there was anything beyond the open door.

Only stillness so deep it devoured sound entirely. Which was somehow worse because silence like this didn’t mean safety.

It meant waiting.

I lifted my arm and moved the knife higher, a futile gesture against whatever was—or wasn’t—out there. Fear screamed inside me as my heartbeat slammed so hard I thought it might punch through my ribs.

I had a sense that the unnamed dark beyond the door was less about the house and more about me. Or maybe what I should really be afraid of wasn’t out there at all.

I closed the door and latched it before I climbed the stairs, knife in hand, to return to bed. I reached over to the nightstand and picked up my phone then opened the recusal email I’d drafted.

I scrolled down to the empty body field and typed a single damning line: I have developed a conflict and must refer out.

My finger hovered above the send button, begging me to decide. But that was the issue. There was no decision to make here. Only what was right.

And what was wrong .

The cursor blinked in a white, insistent glow. A subject line was already there, as was my supervisor’s name. The word recusal stared at me, a door I was professionally supposed to walk through voluntarily.

A draft of wind crawled up from the stairwell, cold and thin. A reminder: the open door this house didn’t want me to forget.

I told myself I’d refer Colt out in the morning when daylight might help me think more clearly. When my hands wouldn’t shake from replaying the parking lot incident in my head.

My thumb lowered.

Not onto send. Onto cancel.

A prompt slid up: Discard draft?

Yes.

The word snapped like a lock on a door that no longer wondered if I’d walk through.

The screen went blank; the room fell silent. I closed my phone and slid it under my overstuffed pillow, hoping to hide my choice. The latch downstairs clicked again.

No, probably not the latch. Just the old metal talking to itself.

I told myself I’d finish the email tomorrow, properly. With official citations and a referral list. And, most importantly, with proof I still knew how to do the right thing.

I lay back and stared at the ceiling until my eyes burned.

The cursor was gone.

The door I should have walked through, gone with it.