The Watcher in the Walls
Vera Kane POV
The blood vial burns against my palm as I unlock my apartment door, hyperaware of every shadow in the hallway that could hide a watcher. Dr. Chen's photographs feel like live grenades in my jacket pocket, each image a potential explosion that could shatter whatever's left of my carefully constructed reality.
But as I step inside, something's wrong. Not wrong like furniture moved or windows opened—wrong like the air itself has been disturbed by someone else's presence.
I set the photographs on my kitchen counter and force myself to think systematically. If someone's been watching me, they'd need surveillance equipment. Cameras. Recording devices. Electronic eyes that could capture the life I don't remember living.
The obvious places first. I run my fingers along the picture frames, checking for tiny lenses. Nothing. The smoke detector yields only batteries and circuitry that looks standard. Even the expensive sound system Raven apparently purchased during one of my blackouts shows no signs of modification.
But the feeling persists. Someone has been here. Someone is still here.
I start in the bedroom, pulling out drawers, checking behind furniture, looking for anything that doesn't belong. My hands shake as I work, partly from fear and partly from something else—anticipation, maybe. Like part of me wants to find evidence that my life isn't what it seems.
The bathroom mirror reflects my face back at me, pale and frightened, but something about the reflection feels off. The angle is wrong by maybe half a degree, like the mirror has been moved recently and replaced slightly askew.
When I press against the mirror's frame, it gives.
"What the hell?"
The mirror swings inward on hidden hinges, revealing a space behind my bathroom wall that shouldn't exist. A space large enough for a person to stand in, lined with medical equipment that makes Dr. Chen's clinic look primitive by comparison.
IV drips. Monitoring equipment. A surgical table that folds down from the wall.
And clothes. Raven's clothes, hanging on hooks like costumes waiting for an actor. The black leather pants I woke up wearing this morning. The silk dress from the speakeasy. Others I don't recognize but know intimately—my body remembers the feel of fabric I've never consciously worn.
But it's the photographs that make my knees buckle.
Hundreds of them, covering every inch of wall space. Pictures of me sleeping. Eating breakfast. Sitting at my laptop. Walking to therapy appointments. Living my entire documented life under observation from angles that should be impossible—taken from inside the walls, from air vents, from spaces that don't exist on my apartment's floor plan.
Someone has been documenting my every moment for months. Maybe years.
A noise from the walls themselves—a soft scraping, like something moving through narrow spaces—makes me freeze. The sound comes from above my head, tracking across the ceiling toward the living room.
I'm not alone.
My camera. I need evidence. I pull out my phone and start shooting, capturing the hidden room, the medical equipment, the surveillance photos. Each flash illuminates details that make my skin crawl—injection schedules written in Raven's handwriting, medication dosages for drugs I don't recognize, detailed notes about my sleep patterns and behavioral changes.
The scraping sound moves to the kitchen wall.
"I know you're in there." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Come out."
Silence.
I press my ear to the living room wall, listening. Breathing. Definitely breathing, just on the other side of the drywall.
When I knock on the wall, the breathing stops.
"I found the room. I know what you've been doing." Fear sharpens my voice into something that could cut glass. "Who are you? What do you want?"
A section of wall near my bookshelf shifts, revealing a panel I never knew existed. What emerges isn't a threat—it's a man, maybe thirty-five, covered in dust and what looks like blood. His shirt is torn, his face bruised, and he moves like something hurts deep inside his chest.
"Jesus Christ, finally." His accent carries traces of something Eastern European, maybe Russian. "I thought you'd never find that room."
He's holding a tablet, the screen showing what looks like security footage. My building's lobby, but from cameras I don't remember seeing. Timestamp shows tonight, thirty minutes ago.
"Who are you?"
"Felix Gray. Building maintenance." He winces as he settles onto my couch, leaving dust and blood on the leather. "Though I haven't been maintaining much lately except your survival."
"My survival?"
Felix taps the tablet screen, and the security footage changes. Now it shows the building's underground parking garage, multiple black SUVs surrounding the structure. Men in tactical gear checking weapons, adjusting body armor.
"Dr. Voss's retrieval team. They've been planning this for weeks, waiting for the right moment." He coughs, and it sounds wet. "Tonight became the right moment when you visited Dr. Chen."
The blood vial in my pocket suddenly feels radioactive. "How do you know about that?"
"I know about everything. Your therapy sessions. The underground clinic. The fact that you're not who you think you are." Felix's eyes meet mine, and I see something I didn't expect—protectiveness. "I've been living in your walls for six months, keeping you alive."
"Living in my walls?"
"This building has a secondary structure. Maintenance tunnels, access shafts, spaces between the official floors. Perfect for surveillance, better for protection." He shows me another camera feed, this one showing my building's main entrance. More tactical vehicles. "They're setting up a perimeter. Once they move, you won't have time to run."
My brain struggles to process this. "Why are you helping me?"
Felix's expression hardens. "Because they killed my sister. Elena Gray. She was Dr. Voss's patient before you, another 'integration therapy' success story." He pulls up a photograph on his tablet—a young woman who looks like she could be my sister, similar bone structure and coloring. "She died during a procedure six months ago. Brain hemorrhage from forced personality fragmentation."
The room tilts. I grab the arm of my chair to steady myself.
"Dr. Voss told me I was her first successful integration."
"You're her first successful long-term subject. Elena was the prototype." Felix's voice carries the weight of grief and rage in equal measure. "When she died, I made it my mission to document everything. To gather evidence. To keep the next subject alive long enough to expose what Voss is doing."
He hands me the tablet. The security footage now shows teams positioned at every exit, every stairwell, every possible escape route from my building.
"They're not here to take you back to therapy, Vera. The integration protocol has been deemed a failure. Too much memory bleed, too much resistance from your original personality." Felix stands, moving toward what I now realize is another hidden panel in my wall. "They're here to terminate you and start fresh with a new subject."
"Terminate me?"
"Phoenix Cross was supposed to be permanently buried. Vera Kane was supposed to be the only personality that survived." Felix opens the panel, revealing maintenance tunnels that stretch into darkness. "But Phoenix kept fighting. Kept leaving evidence. Kept trying to surface."
The photographs in my jacket pocket suddenly make sense. Phoenix wasn't just leaving me clues—she was leaving proof of her existence.
"So they're going to kill me."
"They're going to kill both of you. Clean slate. No more complications." Felix pulls tactical gear from a bag hidden in the tunnel—body armor, night vision goggles, weapons I don't recognize but somehow know how to use. "Unless we move right now."
Through my floor-to-ceiling windows, I can see men rappelling down the building's exterior. Professional. Efficient. Moving with the kind of coordination that suggests they've done this before.
"Felix, I don't know how to fight."
"Vera doesn't. But Phoenix does." He hands me a pistol, and my fingers automatically check the magazine, engage the safety, verify the action. Muscle memory I don't remember developing. "She's been waiting for this moment. Let her."
The elevator dings in the hallway outside my apartment.
"Too late for the tunnels," Felix says. "We go up."
As we move toward the maintenance access panel, I catch a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. For just a moment, the woman looking back isn't frightened Vera Kane. She's someone else entirely. Someone who knows exactly how to handle tactical gear and isn't afraid of the fight that's coming.
Someone who's been waiting ten years for the chance to fight back.