Anaya sat in the dark with her laptop on her knees, the blue light painting shadows on her face. The rain had stopped outside, but the city still dripped. She hadn't changed clothes. Hadn't eaten.
The stories were open again—old ones, archived.
She wasn't reading now. She was digging.
Lines of raw HTML crawled across her screen like spiderwebs. Brackets. Tags. Code comments. Most of it looked normal—until one line caught her eye.
It was buried near the bottom of Story_004. Out of place. No text tag. Just a string of code that didn't match anything else on the page:
Her eyes narrowed.
She copied the string. Dropped it into a decoder. Waited.
A progress bar filled slowly.
When it finished, an MP3 file sat on her desktop. The name was simple, like a signature without a hand:
story_004_final.mp3
She stared at it for a few seconds.
Then clicked play.
The file opened in her media player. Just a black screen and a timeline crawling forward.
Then—silence.
Not empty silence. Loaded silence. The kind that waits for you to notice it.
Then, a voice.
Smooth. Warm. Male. Not too deep. Not dramatic. A voice you could imagine selling insurance or reading bedtime stories.
"The water was cold by the time she stopped moving. Her breath had left her quietly. As if it didn't want to disturb the quiet."
Anaya sat perfectly still.
He was reading the story. Not just repeating the words—performing them. Slowly. Carefully. Like a man trying to taste every sentence.
No background sounds. No music. Just that voice.
"Her hands were folded beneath her cheek. The rug had soaked most of the blood. Nothing leaked. Not anymore."
She checked the timestamp. Three minutes in.
She remembered this part.
"She wasn't afraid. Not in the end. Not when the lights dimmed. Not even when I stepped over her shadow."
Her fingers tightened around the edge of the laptop.
Then, near the end, something changed.
The voice slowed. The tone softened, like the speaker was leaning in closer to the mic. Or closer to her.
"You found this. I hoped you would."
Her stomach flipped.
That line wasn't in the written story.
She checked the printout beside her. Scanned the final paragraph. Nothing like that.
But the voice kept going.
"Most people read and forget. But you… you linger. You stare. You wonder who writes like this. You think the voice is the story. But it's not."
A pause.
Then, almost a whisper:
"You are."
Then the file cut off.
Not faded.
Cut.
Abrupt. Sharp.
Anaya sat frozen, the cursor blinking against the now-dead media player.
The voice wasn't reading the story anymore.
It was reading her.
She played it again.
And again.
The voice didn't change. Same rhythm. Same warmth. Same eerie calm. But on the third listen, Anaya caught something else—tone control. Whoever this was had done voice work before. The pacing, the softness on certain words, the silence between lines—it wasn't casual.
It was trained.
She closed her eyes, listening harder.
"You linger. You stare."
The way he said linger—just enough breath behind it to make it feel like an invitation. Or a threat.
Had she heard this voice before?
Not in the stories.
In real life.
She thought back. People she'd interviewed. Officers. Judges. Reporters. Coffee shop regulars. Past suspects. Lawyers.
But nothing clicked. The voice wasn't distinct enough to be obvious—but it wasn't plain, either. It was familiar like background music in a dream. You don't remember where you heard it, but you're sure you did.
She opened her recording app. Started copying the audio for analysis.
Then she checked the folder where the file had been saved.
Gone.
No audio file.
No cache.
No backup.
She stood quickly, heart racing, and yanked the USB from the port.
Too late.
She opened her downloads folder. Empty.
She hadn't lost a file.
She'd been given one.
Just once.
Just long enough to hear it.
And now, she couldn't stop hearing it.
Anaya stood in her small kitchen, staring at the sink without seeing it. The recording was gone. Completely. No trace on the hard drive. No fragments in her audio folder. Not even a temp file in the recycle bin.
It had played once. Maybe twice.
Then it had erased itself.
She wasn't used to feeling like the one being followed. She was the hunter. She asked the questions. She broke open secrets.
But now?
Now someone was speaking directly to her.
Not in public. Not through the news. Not even online.
Through a voice.
A private message wrapped in calm words and quiet pauses.
He had planned this.
Planted it.
Knew she would find it.
She pulled the curtain aside and looked out her window. No one stood across the street. No strange cars. No signs.
But still—
She felt it.
He didn't need to knock. He was already inside.
The screen of her laptop, still open, had gone black.
Then the cursor blinked once.
She moved the mouse. Nothing happened.
But for just a second—just long enough to make her freeze—white text flickered across the center of the screen:
" Now you're listening."
And then it vanished.
She didn't sleep that night.
She tried. Once. But every time her eyes drifted closed, that voice returned. Not in words. Not in any full sentence. Just presence. As if it had been tucked somewhere between her thoughts, humming softly, waiting for silence.
By 3:00 AM, she was back at the laptop.
She'd wiped it. Factory reset. Reinstalled her operating system.
Still, the machine felt... changed. Like the silence inside it wasn't the same.
By 3:30, she was on a burner laptop. No internet. Just a local file directory and a copy of her printed materials. She wasn't being paranoid. She was being methodical.
She brought up her case logs. Cross-referenced every voice recording she could access. Interrogation tapes. Body cam audio. Voicemails from suspects. Archived depositions. Even radio chatter from old sting operations.
Nothing matched.
But one file caught her attention—a 911 call from five years ago. Unsolved case. No body found. Just a trace call reporting "a slow sound in the walls." The dispatcher had flagged it for nonsense and dropped it after three minutes.
She played it.
The line was mostly static, broken by a single voice whispering something too soft to hear. But on the third playback, with the volume maxed and a filter applied, a fragment broke through:
"She was waiting to be written."
Anaya's blood ran cold.
Different words.
Same voice.
She leaned back, the hum of the hard drive thrumming in her bones.
This wasn't a copycat.
This wasn't an escalation.
This had always been happening.
She just hadn't been the reader yet.
Now she was.
And the next story?
She was already inside it.
---
End of Chapter 4.