“Your lasagna is just too good,” Aska said between bites, his tone light but sincere as he leaned back in his chair, savoring the flavors like a spoiled noble. “Can you make something for me while I’m away?”

  We sat at our usual table, the evening sun filtering lazily through the window. A faint melody hummed from the strange little musical device he insisted on keeping off-limits to me, likely to stop me from dismantling it in curiosity. The song had no lyrics, only rhythm and mood—something mellow, strangely intimate.

  I chewed slowly, the compliment settling into me like warmth from the food itself. There was no sharpness behind his words, no hint of manipulation. Just genuine appreciation. And strangely, that felt more disarming than anything else he could have said.

  Four years had passed since the incident in the shower—the day everything fractured, then slowly began to reshape. Since then, Aska hadn’t hurt me. Not physically. Unless we trained.

  And for the first time in our strange, winding history together, our relationship was... livable. Not perfect. Not even remotely healthy. But no longer toxic enough to drown in. We’d even made a pact a year ago—a vow to stop manipulating each other. A vow we broke almost immediately.

  The thing was, neither of us knew how to function without control. Without tension. So, instead of dropping our games entirely, we rebranded them. Instead of open deception, we tried making trades: "I cook, you wash me later." "You fix the wall I punched, I’ll sew your ripped shirt." It became transactional. Hollow. And, frankly, ridiculous.

  Worse, those deals exposed just how much of myself I still hadn’t reclaimed.

  I still couldn’t shower. Not even after all these years. The sound of rushing water still sent my body into frozen panic, my breath clawing up my throat like I was drowning all over again. Buckets I could handle—measurable, containable. Controlled. But the infinite supply that gushed from pipes and nozzles? No. That still held me hostage. And I hated that.

  If I’d learned anything, it was this: I feared what I couldn't control. Fire didn’t bother me anymore—even though Aska had once burned my hands—because I knew how to kill a flame. But water was unpredictable. Treacherous. Silent in how it crept and consumed. Pipes could burst again, another night could end with me choking and gasping in the dark. So I avoided it.

  Still, not everything had stagnated.

  Our daily lives evolved in unpredictable ways. His definition of training grew broader. Less torture, more... refinement. He taught me to dance. To move like a person who had a place in the world. He trained my voice—not just for speech, but for song, cadence, lies. He even taught me how to act. That one I loved the most.

  We turned acting into a game—our version of chess. If I managed to lie without him catching it, I got a point. If he saw through me, the point went to him. I lost more than I won, but I got better. Quick. And eventually, I stopped caring about the score. The thrill was in the game itself.

  And we didn’t stop there. I demanded that he teach me “boyish” things. Fixing things. Painting. Using tools. True to his promise, we started renovating the house together. The walls became a canvas for our chaos—paint fights, spilled buckets, and the occasional surprise splash over the shoulders. Somehow, amidst the mess, we finished it.

  We even started building a shack near the edge of the property, though he refused to tell me what it was for. Another one of his cryptic surprises.

  All of this led to today—my fifteenth birthday. A milestone, though neither of us marked it with a party or gifts. Instead, I made lasagna. Of course I cooked; I always did. Letting him into the kitchen was a culinary disaster waiting to happen. His last attempt at “help” had left the soup scorched and the stove smoking. So, I worked alone, humming under my breath, content in the knowledge that the meal would actually be edible.

  And I didn’t mind. Not really. This was our rhythm now.

  Aska, naturally, pretended not to watch me while I worked, but his eyes lingered a little too long. He never said thank you—not directly—but in moments like this, I saw it in how he savored each bite, how he asked me to cook again before leaving.

  Meanwhile, I munched happily, listening to the strange music box he’d installed—some sleek electronic thing with an energy field around it. The first time I’d tried to open it up, I got zapped. He'd actually programmed an electric barrier, laughing as I yelped and pulled back.

  “You're not dissecting that,” he had told me with a smirk. “Not unless you want a new hairstyle.”

  Since then, I’d only glared at it from across the room, plotting revenge.

  Still, in this quiet moment—us at our table, no games, no lies—I felt something unfamiliar settle in my chest.

  Stability.

  Not peace. Not yet. But something like it.

  “Oh, right! Today is your birthday, isn’t it?”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I stared at him, incredulous. The man had just sat down across from a cake with a gaudy red “15” candle perched right on top and two sparklers sputtering dramatically beside it, like little fountains of light screaming for attention. And somehow, somehow, Aska still managed to pretend like it hadn’t occurred to him what day it was. I had to admit—his commitment to playing dumb was impressive.

  “No, it’s not.” I replied flatly, reaching over to snatch the sparklers from the cake and extinguish them with a flick of my fingers. They hissed as I tossed them onto the table, still sizzling faintly. I caught a glance at him again. His eyes weren’t on me, or even on the cake. He looked distant, somewhere far off in his head. Not aloof. Troubled.

  Before I could dig into that, he suddenly spoke.

  “Alright then. Here’s your gift.”

  He pulled something from his coat pocket—small, round, metallic—and placed it on the table between us without ceremony. A compass. But unlike any I’d seen. It had two needles instead of one. One spun slowly, endlessly, like it was caught in a dance it could never finish. The other remained fixed, pointing steadily toward my right side. There were no cardinal directions, no markings—nothing. Just the two needles on a blank face.

  “What is this, really?” I asked, holding up the compass and gesturing toward it. I needed to pull something out of him—anything that wasn’t riddled with metaphors or delivered like a cryptic bedtime story.

  “It’s a compass,” he said with a smirk, his tone utterly unbothered.

  I closed my eyes. Breathed in. Breathed out. He wants you to snap. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Thank you so much for that brilliant deduction,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could infuse into one sentence. “But perhaps you could do me a tiny favor and explain where the hell these needles actually point?”

  He grinned, finally—finally—showing a glimmer of amusement at my growing frustration.

  “Sure. The one that spins in circles? That always points back to this house. No matter where you go. And the other?” He leaned forward just slightly, his voice lowering again. “That one shows you the direction of what you desire most.”

  I froze.

  The object of my desires? I glanced back at the needle—it hadn’t moved since I picked it up. Still pointing to my right.

  But that made no sense.

  I only wanted three things, and the needle didn’t align with any of them. Not freedom. Not power. Not revenge. Not even Aska. So what the hell was it pointing at?

  Once again, he had given me something that revealed more about me than I was ready to know. That felt like a trap. And worse—a loss. If he knew something about me that I didn’t, if he could see into the parts of me I hadn’t deciphered yet, that meant he still had the upper hand. He was still ahead in the game.

  I hated that.

  And so, I did the only thing I was ever really good at—matching his pettiness with some of my own. If I couldn’t get back at him with reason, then I’d do it the Aska way. The asshole way. By talking about what he certainly wanted to avoid.

  “Oh, by the way… where is my mum?” I’d read about it in a biology book once, the whole process of how a child comes into being, and it made me wonder about her. Where she was, why she’d left me alone with Aska. Sometimes, I even fantasized about what life might have been like if she’d stayed. But more often than not, I thought of her as my rival in love—even though I’d never met her.

  “Your mum?” Aska’s eyes flicked toward me, but his expression was blank, as if he’d just heard a word in a foreign language. Did I really have to explain everything?

  “Yeah. You know… when a man and a woman… and then the woman gets pregnant… and suddenly there’s a child. Oh, that’s me. So where is my mum?” It felt strange saying it aloud, especially because I knew I was a strange case.

  He hesitated, his fingers beginning to fidget with the edge of his plate as he looked away. “She…” His voice faltered. Did he not know what to say? Or was he simply unwilling?

  “She left you? I don’t see why she would do that. She must still love you, right? Otherwise, why leave me behind as a replacement for her?” The words came sharper than I intended, like little knives meant to poke at a raw wound. I’d always wondered why he cared for me at all—his child, strange as I was. Loving him never felt wrong to me, but I was painfully aware how strange our relationship must look to anyone else. I usually avoided this topic like the plague, but today I wanted to poke at the sore spot. I wanted to see him crack.

  “Where’s this coming from all of a sudden?” His voice was tight, laced with irritation. I smiled to myself—success. I’d gotten under his skin.

  “Oh, out of nowhere.” I shrugged, pretending nonchalance. “Could she sing? Was she an actress? Were her knitting skills as good as mine? How well did she fuc—”

  The plate shattered beneath his palm before I could finish the word. Sharp cracks echoed through the room, shards of ceramic scattering. I inwardly congratulated myself for enraging him so easily.

  “LUCINDA!” His voice was a harsh bellow, thunderous and raw, hands planted firmly on the table as if to steady himself. The fury in his eyes was something I was used to, yet I couldn’t stop the wicked satisfaction swelling in my chest. This was my doing. I had pushed too far—and he was right where I wanted him.

  “Oh? I’m just taking notes,” I shot back, voice dripping with venom, “on who you want me to be. I mean, you probably liked being the one in control in bed… did she like whatever this needle’s pointing to, too? Do you know so much about me because I’m just like the whore that is my mum?”

  His reaction was swift and brutal—a sharp slap across my cheek that left my skin burning. My neck jolted painfully, but a smile crept across my face as I rubbed the reddened flesh, relishing that I had his full, undivided attention now.

  “If this compass leads me to something my mother desired and I don’t know about yet… we…” I trailed off, voice dropping to a whisper, then without hesitation, I rammed the knife I’d been holding into the spot where his hand rested.

  His sharp intake of breath was almost satisfying as I grinned wider, watching his eyes flick downward. “We will have a problem.”

  I hated hurting him, truly. Still, this was necessary. I needed to make it clear—I wasn’t a replacement for my mother, and I had no intention of becoming her.

  I pulled the knife free and noticed dark, almost black blood dripping down the blade. I expected him to explode, to roar in pain or rage. But Aska remained eerily calm, as if waiting for the wound to heal on its own. The black blood was unsettling, but the swift healing was a reminder—he was no ordinary man. That he could be hurt at all was remarkable in itself.

  After a moment, he whispered, “If she ever comes back, what will you do?”

  The question surprised me, but the answer came almost instantly, clear and cold.

  I tilted my head, beaming with an angelic smile that belied the darkness behind my eyes. “You know exactly what I would do.”

  I would kill her.

  For leaving me alone with him.

  For daring to come back.

  For daring to take him away from me.