Page 112 of Reckless Obsession

And the floor comes alive.

For a second my brain refuses to understand what I’m seeing. It just registers motion, too much motion, black, thick and fast, spilling over stone in a churning mass that glints in the half-light.

Tarantulas.

Huge ones.

Hairy legs. Round bodies. Too many of them. Far too many.

The air goes thin in my lungs.

I’m not a child who scares easily. Even at ten, I know that much about myself. I know how to bite pain back. I know how to go quiet. I know how to survive men with knives, cameras, and laughter like broken glass.

But there is something unsettling about this.

Something unspeakably wrong in the way they scatter over the floor, then correct course, all those jointed legs carrying them toward me with horrible purpose. Something in the darkness behind them, in the wet stone, in the laughter of the men already backing out of the room.

“Enjoy your company,” one of them says.

Then the door slams shut.

Darkness swallows everything except movement.

They keep coming.

One reaches my bare foot, and I feel the delicate, impossible weight of its legs against my skin—

That is when I scream.

The sound tears out of me black and wild, scraped raw from somewhere deeper than fear. I kick, scramble, crush backward into the wall even though there is nowhere left to go. My whole body convulses in panic, every breath turning jagged, useless. They’re on the floor, on my legs, crawling closer, and I can’t stop them, I can’t stop them, I can’t stop them—

I jerk awake with a violent gasp.

The scream dies in my throat and becomes air—harsh, desperate, dragged into lungs that don’t remember how to do this gently. For one blind, awful second, I still don’t know where I am.

My body is rigid. My chest is heaving. Everything feels too white, and my heart is pounding so hard it makes the room tilt.

Then there’s a hand on my shoulder and another at the side of my face.

“Maksim.”

My eyes snap toward the voice.

Mom.

She’s already leaning over me, one hand steady on my shoulder like she’s anchoring me to the bed, to the room, to now. She’s smiling, but the smile trembles at the edges, and there’s sadness in her eyes so deep and immediate that it almost undoes me before I’ve even properly surfaced.

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “You’re safe.”

Safe.

The word takes a second to land. I blink hard and look around.

White walls.

Muted light.

The steady hum of hospital machinery.