The pounding at the door came so suddenly and violently that Heidi nearly screamed.
One moment she stood frozen in the center of her ruined apartment wrapped in nothing but a towel, staring at the blood and feathers scattered across the floor like the aftermath of some grotesque ritual, and the next—a deafening bang rattled the front door hard enough to shake the frames on the wall.
At the exact same moment, her phone began vibrating wildly across the kitchen counter.
The sound of both together shattered whatever fragile grip she still had on reality.
Her pulse lurched painfully in her throat as she stumbled toward the door, bare feet slipping slightly against the tile. For one horrible second she imagined green eyes waiting on the other side. Saltwater skin. That impossible smile.
But when she yanked the door open, it was Jacques.
And the relief that flooded through her nearly made her collapse.
He stood there breathing hard, clearly having run up the stairs, dark curls disheveled from the wind outside. The moment his eyes swept past her shoulder into the apartment, all color drained from his face.
“Mon Dieu…”
His voice came out almost reverent with shock.
The broken glass.
The blood smeared across the white tile.
The drifting feathers.
The dying seagull sprawled near the patio doors.
And Heidi herself—pale, trembling, wrapped tightly in a towel like she was trying to hold herself together physically.
Jacques stepped inside immediately.
“Chérie,” he said softly, horrified. “What happened here?”
Heidi opened her mouth, but nothing coherent arrived.
“I—I don’t know.”
The words sounded pathetic.
Childish.
Her mind still refused to process what she’d walked into after stepping out of the shower.
Jacques’ eyes searched her face rapidly, scanning for injuries, panic sharpening every movement. His hands hovered near her shoulders like he wanted to touch her but was afraid she might break apart beneath his fingers.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
The phone continued vibrating behind them.
Heidi jumped at the sound like a startled animal before hurrying toward the counter and fumbling it into her hand.
Lila.
Of course it was Lila.
Heidi answered immediately.
“Lila—”
The second she heard her own voice, she realized how shaken she sounded.
“What happened?” Lila demanded instantly. “Jacques called me.”
“A bird flew through the window,” Heidi blurted breathlessly. “Or—I think it did? Jesus Christ, I don’t know, there’s blood everywhere and feathers and the whole apartment looks like a murder scene—”
“Hey. Hey.” Lila’s voice softened immediately. “Breathe.”
Heidi pressed trembling fingers against her forehead.
“I’m trying.”
“I’m coming over.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m already grabbing my keys.”
The line disconnected.
Heidi stared blankly at the phone for a moment before lowering it slowly.
The apartment suddenly felt impossibly quiet again.
Only the ocean outside.
The distant cry of gulls.
The faint wet rattle of the dying bird still twitching near the patio.
Jacques moved first.
Carefully, he stepped toward the seagull and crouched beside it.
His expression darkened instantly when he saw the wound.
The bite.
Heidi watched the realization move across his face slowly.
Not coincidence.
Recognition.
Something old flickered behind his eyes for only a second before he masked it.
“What?” Heidi whispered immediately.
Jacques looked back toward her.
“Nothing.”
“Jacques.”
But before she could press him further, he stood and crossed the apartment toward her instead, his expression gentling as he took in the fact that she was still standing there barefoot and half naked in shock.
“Mon amour,” he said quietly, “perhaps first we get you dressed, yes?”
The tenderness in his voice nearly undid her.
Heidi suddenly became aware of how exposed she felt standing there wrapped in a damp towel while her apartment looked like a crime scene around her.
How vulnerable.
How exhausted.
Jacques reached out carefully and brushed damp hair back from her face with surprising gentleness.
“We clean after,” he murmured softly. “Together.”
That word settled warmly into her chest.
Together.
It had been a very long time since Heidi Bennett faced disaster with other people instead of alone.
She nodded weakly.
Jacques gave her a small encouraging smile.
“Allez, chérie.”
He turned his back politely while she hurried toward the bedroom, though she still caught the faint amused curve of his mouth when she nearly tripped over an overturned chair in the process.
“Elegant,” he observed mildly.
“Shut up.”
“Ah, there she is.”
Somehow that tiny moment of normal sarcasm helped.
Heidi quickly pulled a sundress over her head before tying her damp hair back with trembling fingers. By the time she emerged again, Jacques had already begun cleaning.
And God—
There was something strangely intimate about watching a man quietly help clean blood from your apartment.
Not glamorous intimacy.
Real intimacy.
The ugly kind.
He’d gathered a broom and dustpan already, moving carefully through shattered glass while moonlight and lamplight reflected off the floor around him. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows now, exposing strong forearms dusted with fine dark hair while he swept each shard into neat piles with methodical focus.
No panic.
No dramatics.
Just steadiness.
Heidi suddenly realized how badly she needed that.
Together they began restoring the apartment piece by piece.
Heidi retrieved extra cleaning supplies from the laundromat downstairs while Jacques filled buckets at the sink. Broken glass clinked heavily into an old canvas bin while bloody feathers drifted stubbornly beneath furniture and against baseboards.
The whole apartment smelled faintly metallic now beneath the detergent and salt air.
Blood.
Everywhere she looked there was blood.
Small crimson smears streaked across framed photographs. Tiny droplets spotted the curtains. Even the couch cushions carried rust-colored marks where the seagull must have crashed through in blind terror.
Or while trying to escape something.
The thought slithered quietly through Heidi’s mind unwanted.
She tried not to think about it.
Tried not to think about the identical wound buried beneath the feathers.
Jacques remained mostly silent while they worked, but his presence anchored the room. Every now and then Heidi would glance toward him and catch him watching her carefully, concern lingering heavily beneath his otherwise calm expression.
At one point she crouched beside an overturned picture frame and froze.
It was an old photograph from early on after she’d arrived on the island. A bonfire party down by the cliffs. Lila half drunk and laughing beside her. Jacques holding a bottle of rum in one hand while pretending to look offended at the camera.
The glass covering the photo had cracked directly through Heidi’s face.
She stared at it too long.
“You okay?” Jacques asked quietly.
Heidi swallowed.
“Yeah.”
A lie.
He gently took the frame from her hands and set it aside without comment.
Not fixing it.
Not throwing it away either.
Just… setting it aside for later.
Lila arrived twenty minutes later carrying enough nervous energy to fill the entire apartment.
The second she stepped through the door and saw the state of the place, her face drained of color.
“Holy shit.”
Her eyes immediately found Heidi.
Then the towel discarded near the bathroom.
The blood.
The feathers.
Jacques.
Then finally the seagull.
“Oh my God.”
Heidi hadn’t realized how badly she needed Lila there until that moment.
The second their eyes met, something inside her loosened painfully.
Lila crossed the apartment immediately and wrapped her arms around Heidi without hesitation.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
The honesty in the answer frightened them both.
Lila held her tighter.
And for a while after that, the three of them cleaned together in strange domestic silence while the ocean crashed endlessly outside the windows.
There was something surreal about it all.
Jacques scrubbing blood from tile floors.
Lila wiping feathers from walls.
Heidi rinsing crimson-stained cloths beneath hot water while her apartment slowly returned to normal around them.
Or at least the appearance of normal.
But the whole time, Heidi felt it lingering beneath the surface.
The sense that something had entered her life and would not easily leave.
By the time the apartment finally looked somewhat recognizable again, exhaustion hung heavily over all three of them.
The ruined curtains sat bundled inside the canvas bin beside the couch like evidence waiting to be buried.
Lila sat beside Heidi finally, brushing tired fingers through her hair.
“We can still do date night,” she offered softly. “Get drinks. Pretend your apartment wasn’t attacked by Satan’s pigeon.”
A weak laugh escaped Heidi despite herself.
But her body felt hollow now.
Heavy.
All she wanted was quiet.
“I can’t tonight,” she admitted softly. “I need to wash these before the stains set.”
Lila frowned immediately.
“Heidi…”
“If I let blood dry into linen curtains I’ll literally never emotionally recover.”
“Priorities,” Jacques murmured dryly.
“Exactly.”
But beneath the joke, all three of them understood the truth.
Heidi needed routine right now.
Needed something normal to hold onto.
Even if that normal thing was scrubbing bird blood from curtains at midnight.
Lila hesitated visibly before nodding slowly.
“I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“I’ll be okay.”
Another lie.
This one quieter.
Jacques crouched in front of her before leaving, taking one of her hands carefully between both of his.
“You call me if anything happens,” he said softly.
“Anything.”
Heidi nodded.
Then he kissed her forehead.
Lila kissed her cheek.
And suddenly Heidi almost asked them both to stay.
The loneliness hit hard the second the thought appeared.
But she swallowed it down.
Because she was thirty-six years old and bruised and exhausted and rapidly losing her fucking mind over some sea-creature man who apparently murdered birds now.
“Go,” she said weakly. “Before I become more dramatic.”
“Impossible,” Lila muttered affectionately.
Then they were gone.
Their footsteps faded slowly down the staircase until only the ocean remained.
And silence.
God.
The silence afterward felt enormous.
Heidi stood alone in the center of the apartment for a long moment staring at the bundled curtains before finally forcing herself to move.
The laundromat downstairs waited in darkness when she unlocked it after hours.
Without customers, without music, without daytime chatter filling the room, the place felt entirely different. The fluorescent lights buzzed softly overhead while shadows stretched long between rows of silent machines.
Usually the laundromat soothed her.
Tonight it felt uncanny.
Like walking through the memory of something instead of the thing itself.
Heidi loaded the bloody curtains carefully into the industrial washer before dumping in detergent almost aggressively.
The machine door slammed shut with heavy finality.
Then came the water.
Swish.
Swish.
Clouds of diluted blood spiraled slowly behind the glass while the machine churned.
Heidi leaned against it heavily, staring into the dark red water turning slowly pink.
Swish.
Blood.
Swish.
Funny, she thought numbly, this is the same machine that man nearly fucked my soul out of my body on.
Now she was washing death out of curtains inside it.
Life came at you fast.
“If only trauma came out on hot cycle,” she muttered bitterly.
The machine hummed steadily beneath her hands.
And then—
The bells above the laundromat door jingled.
Softly.
Heidi froze instantly.
Every muscle in her body locked.
No.
No no no.
She had locked the door herself.
Double checked it.
The laundromat remained completely still around her except for the washer turning endlessly beside her.
Swish.
Blood.
Swish.
Slowly, Heidi turned toward the entrance.
The door remained shut.
Locked.
Empty.
But the bells still swayed faintly overhead.
A cold sensation spider-walked slowly up her spine.
“Hello?”
Her voice came out too small.
Too human.
Silence answered.
Then—
A floorboard creaked somewhere deeper in the laundromat.
Heidi’s stomach dropped so violently she thought she might vomit.
Every instinct screamed at her to run.
Not walk.
Run.
But fear rooted her in place beside the washing machine while her eyes darted desperately through the shadows between the rows of dryers.
Nothing moved.
And somehow that felt worse.
Because she could feel it.
The presence.
Watching her.
Waiting.
The bite beneath her dress throbbed hard enough to hurt.
Heidi grabbed the edge of the washer tightly.
“Nope,” she whispered shakily. “Absolutely fucking not.”
That was enough for her.
She hurried toward the apartment staircase so quickly she nearly slipped, locking the laundromat behind her again before practically sprinting upstairs.
By the time she reached her apartment, her heart felt seconds from exploding.
She slammed the door shut.
Locked it.
Bolted it.
Then leaned heavily against it trying to breathe.
The patio doors stood open across the room, moonlight and ocean air pouring softly through them.
Usually she loved that.
Tonight they looked like an invitation for something terrible to walk inside.
Heidi stared at them for a long moment.
Then crossed the room decisively.
“Not tonight, motherfucker.”
For the first time since moving to the island, she shut the ocean out completely.
As she approached the patio doors, the steady crash of waves rose up from below, rhythmic and familiar, the same sound that had lulled her to sleep every night since she’d arrived on the island. For three months, she had treated the ocean like a companion. She had left the doors open for it, welcomed the salt air into her sheets, let the sound of the tide fill the spaces where loneliness used to sit.
But tonight, the ocean did not feel like comfort.
It felt like access.
For the first time since moving above The Tiki Tumble, Heidi reached out and pulled the patio doors shut. The hinges gave their usual soft creak, but the latch clicked into place with a finality that made her stomach twist. Instantly, the smell of salt, seaweed, and damp night air faded behind the glass. The apartment quieted around her in a way that felt wrong, too contained, too sealed off from the world.
A prison with throw pillows.
She stood there a moment longer, one hand resting against the cool glass, staring out at the dark smear of ocean beyond the balcony. The waves still moved out there, black and endless beneath the moon, but now they looked farther away. Stranger. Like something she had offended by shutting it out.
“This is still mine,” she whispered.
Her voice sounded small inside the room.
She turned away from the doors and looked around the apartment, forcing herself to take inventory of the familiar things: the shelves lined with books, the mismatched cushions on the couch, the little ceramic bowl beside the door where she dropped her keys, the soft white curtains she had loved until an hour ago, now replaced by bare rods and the faint ghost of blood she couldn’t quite scrub from the wall.
It was still her home.
It had to be.
But the sanctuary had shifted somehow. The air felt charged, as if the room itself were holding its breath with her, waiting for the next sound, the next bell, the next impossible thing to announce itself.
Downstairs, the washer churned on.
The vibration traveled faintly through the floorboards, a low mechanical pulse beneath her bare feet.
Swish.
Swish.
Swish.
The bloody curtains were turning over and over in scalding water below, the machine doing what machines did best—pretending everything could be cleaned if you used enough heat, enough soap, enough time.
If only.
Exhaustion hit Heidi all at once then, so completely that her knees nearly softened beneath her. She moved toward the couch and sank into it, letting the worn cushions catch her weight. Just for a minute, she told herself. Sit. Breathe. Stop acting like a woman in the first ten minutes of a horror movie.
She adjusted the pillow beneath her neck and stretched her legs along the length of the couch, careful not to put too much pressure on the bite. Her body ached from fear and too little sleep, from sex and confusion and cleaning blood off tile, from trying to make sense of things that refused to line up neatly in her mind.
A slow inhale.
Hold.
Release.
The apartment settled around her.
The washer’s muted rhythm pulsed through the floor, steady and almost reassuring now, while the ocean whispered faintly beyond the shut doors. The two sounds braided together through the walls—water below, water beyond—until Heidi’s breath began to follow their cadence despite herself.
Swish.
Crash.
Swish.
Crash.
Her fingers traced idle circles in the couch fabric, grounding herself in the texture. Her eyelids grew heavy.
It’s just another night, she thought.
The lie softened as sleep took hold.
Below, the washer worked on, hot water stripping dark stains from linen, pulling blood from fabric thread by thread. Damage turning pale. Death diluting into soap. The machine hummed with a patient brutality, and somewhere inside Heidi, exhaustion answered it.
For a few fragile hours, she slept.
Not peacefully, exactly, but deeply enough that her body surrendered its constant vigilance. The sharp edges of the last few days blurred at last—the bells, the bird, Jacques’ worried eyes, Lila’s hands on her skin, the strange man from the ocean whose memory still moved inside her like a fever dream.
In sleep, something began to change.
At first it felt like relief.
A quiet loosening beneath the skin. A pressure easing. Something inside her unknotting itself in places exhaustion had carved hollow without her noticing. The sensation moved through her slowly, almost gently, as if some invisible hand were smoothing the jagged edges of her from the inside out.
It felt restorative.
Almost holy.
Her body, stretched across the couch in the dimness, seemed to follow the rhythm of the washer below. As the curtains churned through scalding water, stripped of blood and feathers and the seagull’s brutal ending, Heidi felt herself being rinsed too. Not awake enough to question it, not conscious enough to fear it.
Only aware, dimly, of lightness.
Of something lifting.
Of something old and heavy slipping loose from her bones and drifting away.
This wasn’t just sleep.
It was renewal.
For one suspended moment in the dark before dawn, Heidi felt clean.
Safe.
Whole in a way she had not felt in years.
As though whatever had marked her could still be washed out. As though the bite, the fear, the history, the rot she’d carried across the Atlantic—all of it had been drawn from her and sent spinning down some unseen drain.
The feeling lingered longer than it should have.
Then, just before dawn, pain ripped through her like a blade.
Heidi woke with a strangled gasp, her body arching violently off the couch as fire erupted in her leg. Her hand flew to the bite, fingers digging through the thin fabric of her dress into the swollen flesh beneath. The wound throbbed in furious, brutal pulses, heat radiating outward so intensely it stole the air from her lungs.
This wasn’t soreness.
This wasn’t healing.
It felt like she was dying.
The thought came with terrible clarity, almost conversational, as if some dark little hostess had stepped into the room and taken her coat.
Her skin burned as though something beneath it had woken up hungry. The heat was not on the surface anymore; it moved deeper, invasive and molten, dragging itself through her veins with a purpose that made her stomach turn. She could almost feel it searching, burrowing, reaching for bone.
No bandage could contain this.
No ointment could soothe it.
No lie could make it normal.
Something was wrong.
Deeply, biologically, spiritually wrong.
A fever swept over her in fast, suffocating waves. Sweat broke across her skin. Her thoughts began to loosen at the edges, slipping away from her every time she tried to hold onto them. She told herself it was shock. Stress. Lack of sleep. Infection, maybe. Something ordinary. Something she could take to a clinic and explain without sounding like a lunatic.
But the lie wouldn’t stick.
This was not ordinary.
This was inside her.
How could a bite—how could a man—leave something that burned like this?
Another surge of pain tore through her thigh, and she cried out, clutching the couch cushion with one hand as her vision spotted black.
Venomous.
The word surfaced from nowhere.
Venomous.
As if whatever had touched her had passed something into her body. Something old. Something unnatural. Something patient enough to wait until she slept before showing her its teeth.
“My fucking brain is melting,” she gasped.
The room tilted violently as she forced herself upright. Colors smeared at the edges of her vision. The walls seemed to breathe once, expanding and contracting in a slow, sick rhythm that nearly sent her to her knees.
Sunday morning.
Was anything even open?
The thought dissolved beneath a wave of nausea so strong she gagged, one hand flying to the wall for balance. Her limbs felt wrong now—too heavy, too far away, like her body belonged to someone else and she had only been handed temporary control in an emergency.
She had to get outside.
Why outside, she didn’t know.
Air. Help. The ocean. The laundromat. Lila. Jacques. A doctor. God. Death. Anyone.
She staggered toward the door, fingers numb and clumsy on the latch. Cool predawn air rushed over her skin when she finally got it open, and for one brief second the temperature shocked through the fever like mercy.
Then the stairs blurred beneath her.
Heidi grabbed the railing with white-knuckled desperation, trying to take one step at a time, but her leg buckled almost immediately. Her foot missed the next stair and she pitched forward, crashing hard onto the steps. Pain exploded through her hip and tailbone, bright and humiliating, but even that was swallowed by the fire in the bite.
“Fuck,” she whimpered, breath shallow and fast.
She dragged herself downward, half walking, half falling, her shoulder scraping the wall, her bare feet slipping against the salt-damp wood. Every step felt like a battle she was losing by inches.
By the time she reached the bottom, her legs gave out completely.
She collapsed onto the cold sand beside the building, the chill shocking against her burning skin. Moonlight washed over her in pale indifferent silver while the ocean crashed somewhere close enough to sound like breathing.
For one moment, she thought she heard bells.
Not the laundromat bells.
Something older.
Something beneath the water.
Heidi tried to lift her head, but the world had narrowed to sand against her cheek, salt in her mouth, pain in her leg, and darkness pressing in at the edges of her vision.
Hello, Death
The fever swallowed her whole.
As consciousness slipped away, the false peace from sleep vanished entirely, replaced by something far worse.
The certainty that whatever had taken hold of her had only just begun.
And then, from somewhere deep in the blackness, a voice seemed to answer the thought.
