Chapter 107
Jack
I sit in the living room, lighting yet another cigarette.
The flame touches tobacco ,that tiny flare, hungry and bright, before it dies and becomes nothing but smoke.
Fitting.
I tap the ash into a chipped dessert plate I dragged over from the kitchen, because apparently I don't even deserve a real ashtray in my own damn house.
The ember burns down slow.
Everything burns slow now.
Was the house always this quiet?
I genuinely don't know.
Silence stretches like cold marble over every surface — the furniture, the floors, my ribs.
Even the air feels wrong.
Like it isn't circulating anymore.
I don't smell Ciel's cooking, I swore I smelt cookies and walked to the kitchen ready to steal some but was met with silence.
I don't hear Nolan's vacuum, the hum that always somehow made this place feel like a home and not just… walls.
Instead, I hear my cigarette crackle.
And my bones.
Maybe my sanity too.
It's been two days since they left.
Forty-eight hours.
