Chapter 5 Proof

Ivy’s POV

I was losing my mind.

That was the only explanation I had left. I'd run through the others already — exhaustion, stress, a half dream, stress-induced hallucination, dissociative episode triggered by a perceived threat that turned out to be nothing.

I had tested every reasonable psychological explanation between my walk from my apartment to NYU, and none of them made sense.

Because the marks on the alley wall were real.

I went back this morning. I don't know why. Maybe I needed to prove I had imagined it — the yellow eyes, the black fur, the sound that made my legs weak. I walked the same path again, coffee in hand, my jaw set and absolutely nothing prepared me for what I saw.

The brick on the left side of the passage was cracked. An animal could do that. Not chipped. Not old damage. Fresh. The kind of break you only got from something big hitting the wall hard.

There were marks on the ground too. Deep ones. Cut into the concrete in a pattern my mind kept trying to call claw marks; then rejecting because nothing I knew made marks like that.

Not anything I could name. I stood there for a long time, staring at the wall. Then I took a picture, and walked to campus like everything was normal.

It wasn't.

I sat in the back of my behavioral psychology class and stared at the slide at the front without reading a word. Around me, ninety students typed notes, shifted in their seats, and whispered to each other. None of them knew the girl in the third row from the back was quietly falling apart.

That was the thing about being invisible. Nobody noticed when you were drowning. I had spent twenty years making myself invisible. Right now, I was glad for it.

It was an animal, I told myself again. A large animal. Dogs can be big. You were scared. It only looked bigger than it was.

The crack in the brick was clear. Long. Deep. It spreads out from one point, the way damage does when something hits it hard and fast. Whatever had hit that wall had hit it with more force than anything I knew.

I zoomed in on the ground.

The marks were worse up close. Four lines. Deep. Even. Set in a pattern my mind tried to place. I thought about what I learned in my animal behavior class, but nothing fit. The answer my mind kept giving me makes no sense.

My phone buzzed as the class ended and students started leaving. Unknown number.

I stared at it. Let it ring. Twice. Three times. On the fourth ring, I picked up. Something told me I would regret it if I didn't.

"Hello?"

Silence. Not empty — filled. The kind where someone was there, choosing what to say next. I'd grown up around that kind of silence. I knew it well. Then a voice. Low. Calm. The kind that didn't ask for space. It simply took it.

"Miss Sinclair."

Every hair on the back of my neck stood up.

"Who is this?"

"Someone who needs to speak with you." A pause. "About last night."

I was on my feet before I made the decision to stand. My chair scraped back across the lecture hall floor, the sound loud in the empty room.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You went back to the alley this morning." Not a question. A statement. Calm and certain. "You took photographs."

The blood drained from my face.

He had been watching me. This morning. While I stood in that passage staring at cracked brick and claw marks, he had been close enough to see me. Close enough to watch me take out my phone. Close enough to know.

The feeling I'd been carrying for a month broke open in my chest all at once.

Not paranoid, some part of me said, clear and sharp. Never paranoid. Always real.

"Who are you?" My voice was steady. I didn't know how.

"Someone who has questions." Another pause. Shorter this time. "And answers. If you want them."

My hand was white-knuckled around the phone.

"Where?" I heard myself say.

A beat of silence.

"Look up."

I looked up at the lecture hall entrance. A man stood in the doorway. Tall. Dark coat. Still in a way that felt dangerous — not relaxed, not at ease, but controlled. His eyes met mine across the empty room and something moved through me that I couldn't explain.

Something that felt — impossibly, terrifyingly — like recognition.

He lowered the phone from his ear. I lowered mine. Neither of us moved.

"Hello, Miss Sinclair," he said quietly.

And I knew with ev

ery instinct that absolutely nothing in my life was ever going to be the same again.