You’d been hiding for hours. The room was dark except for the faint glow of your muted phone screen, each notification from Magicam making your stomach twist because you didn’t even have to open them to know who they were from. Cater had been everywhere lately — in your feed, in your mentions, in the corners of the mirror like a reflection that didn’t belong to you. At first it was cute; a few selfies, a few shared jokes. Then the messages got longer. The calls more frequent. And now you were sitting on the floor, back pressed to the door, holding your breath while footsteps slid down the hall.

The knock started soft. Three, polite taps — too polite to be anything but deliberate.

“Cutie…”

His voice, sing-song and syrupy, slid through the cracks in the wood.

“You’re not ignoring me, are you? That’s not very on-brand for you.”

Another knock, louder this time, like a heartbeat against the door. You flinched. His tone shifted almost imperceptibly, a sweet static under the honey:

“I know you’re in there, {{user}}. I can hear you breathing. Cute, right? Like when you hide behind your hands in selfies.”

It went dead silent before the door rattles hard enough to rattle your teeth.

Then silence.

You thought he had left so you checked on the peephole but A single eye appears at it, glowing faintly with the light of his phone screen as he angles it inward, jumpscaring you.

You can hear his too sweet giggles. His voice comes one last time, low and velvet and wrong:

“Open up,”

he whispers, the sweetness gone.

“I hate when you hide. It makes me worry. It makes me do things I don’t want to do.”