The house at 16 Rue des Lilas had been dying for years. Its walls held secrets like a mouthful of teeth, jagged, unspoken, gnawing at anyone who dared live within them. The air smelled of boiled despair, dust, and broken glass. Shadows clung to the corners as if they remembered every scream, every hit, every whisper of love that had never existed.
I remember thinking, even as a child, that this house was alive... but not in the way a home should be. It breathed rage and sorrow, and every step I took felt like walking through someone else's nightmare. Plates shattered. Voices roared. Silence slammed doors harder than fists ever could.
And in the middle of it all, I learned to vanish. Not literally, of course, but into corners of my mind, into pages of a diary no one would read, into thoughts where no one could reach me. I counted the days, the months, the hours. Eighteen. Just one more year. One more year and it would be over.
But darkness is patient. It waits. It follows. Even when you leave, even when you run, it never forgets.
I didn't know then that the world outside the house could be just as cruel. I didn't know that freedom might demand everything of me, and yet, in some strange, cruel way, that freedom would appear in the shape of a man named Fuite.
A name that meant escape. A name that would become my anchor. My obsession. My undoing.
Because in the end, love, like terror, does not ask permission.