Sweet Romance12 min read
The Two Voices in the Villa
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"I heard your voice downstairs," I said aloud to the empty hall as if speaking would steady me.
"Come down, have a snack," the voice said again, soft and familiar. It was Edward’s voice — the voice that had read my drafts, corrected my commas, whispered ideas in the dark. I smiled because habit is a shelter.
Then another voice said the same thing from the opposite direction.
"Don't go. I heard someone downstairs too."
I froze. "Who's there?" My own whisper sounded foolish in the wide corridor.
Silence answered, and then both voices, synchronized like a cracked record. "Kora, come here."
I was living with Edward for the week in a rented country villa so we could write without the city’s static. Two writers under one roof, a bargain for solitude that had felt sweet and right. I hadn't expected the villa to be a house of echoes.
"First date present?" the voices asked in the same cadence.
"A book. Roland's Intimacies," both said.
My bones hollowed. Two identical voices, two identical memories. Every time a pause happened, my chest wanted to outrun itself.
I moved down the hall. The door at the end to Edward’s room creaked, and a hand appeared on the jamb — pale, knuckled, definite.
The face that followed was Edward’s, and his fingers closed on my wrist and hauled me back inside as if his hold could stitch sense into me.
"Kora, don't go out," he said, eyes wide and kneading panic into his jaw. "There's something wrong."
"Edward?" I laughed, the sound brittle. "What is happening? Who was downstairs?"
He grabbed both my shoulders. His hands were cold and sweaty. "I haven't told you. He—my brother escaped from the psychiatric ward last week. He looks like me. He sounds like me. He will lie. He will—"
"Don't go. I heard that voice too." From the other side of the door: the same voice but trembling, raw. "Kora, come into my room. Please."
Edward's face shifted to anger, to fear, to devotion in less than a breath. "He’s a psychopath. He'll hurt you."
The house echoed. The staircase carried steps that were not ours. "If Edward is upstairs, then who is downstairs?" The thought ran cold down my spine.
"Hide," Edward whispered. He shoved me into the wardrobe and slammed the door. The coats swallowed me like waves.
"Hide," he said again, voice breaking. "Go now."
I crouched among winter coats, heels scraping the wood, the scent of wool and his cologne and something older. I listened as his lock clicked. The hall sounded like a throat clearing.
There was pounding at the door. "I know you hate me, but don't hurt Kora!" a voice roared, grief shredding it.
"Stop pretending," Edward called back. "You were the monster with the dog. You killed it. You left the body near my bed when we were children. You did that."
The man outside spat with a voice like mine but rawer. The house auditioned two lives. "He'll hurt her," the voice outside said. "He left me in the forest bleeding. He’s the one who hurt me."
Then the door gave. The wardrobe breathed my breath in and out until a hand, white and skeletal, slid into the cracks and dragged me free.
"Don't hide," the man said softly, and I saw his eyes: Edward's eyes, but colder.
"I'm not Edward," he said, almost too fast. "I’m his brother. I had to get here. He’s dangerous."
My hand found the lock of my phone and it was empty. The sim was gone; my alarm buzzed seconds before he opened the door — an old hour reminder I'd set to avoid long stretches without moving — and I fumbled to silence it as if noise could be contained.
"Your first name," he asked, leaning his head like a curious child. "You don't have his mole on your chin like Edward does."
"You’re not Edward." I said it like a talisman.
He looked at me, urgent, the corners of his mouth twitching with a shape I couldn't name. "Kora, I am not a killer. I am just trying to save you. Edward is the killer."
He spoke fast, pouring out accusations and confessions. "He killed a girl. He framed me. He hated the dog and put it on your bed to hurt me."
I wanted to believe him. The story fit the blank edges. But stories can be traps. I stepped toward the corridor. My feet found nothing but a hush. Edward was not there.
Then the fight: a sudden crash, a grunt, a thud, then eerie silence. Edward came back into the room, face white, hands shaking. "He's down," he said. "He tried to kill me. It's done."
I felt like I was an animal watching a thunderstorm. Mind wanted to catalogue every detail: the light on his jaw, the cut of his knuckles, the way he refused to look at the wardrobe where I lingered hidden. He didn't look at me at all.
"Come out," he said finally. "He'll wake. You must leave, Kora. He's dangerous, he'll play games."
I moved slowly. The hallway was empty. I smelled iron, a stale hospital scent. When I reached the stairwell, I could have sworn I heard someone whispering my name in the stairwell behind me and below me at once.
"Hide in the cellar," he begged. "There is a diary there. You'll know the truth."
I ran down. The cellar door groaned, smelling of dust and old paper. In the center of the cellar, a yellowed diary lay. I blew the dust off and read, fingers trembling.
"My son Edward has been acting strange. He loves his brother too much. He thinks he can be him. He can't. I'm afraid." The handwriting went on, panic staining the ink. "He pretends. He leaves the dog by the bed, he cries and says I did it. He told me once he paints a mole on his chin. I fear for him. He will hurt us if we don't get help."
The final paragraph cut with anger and desperation. "Please, God, help. He says he'll play the game until I can't tell who is who. I don't want to live with this. I don't think I'm safe."
My breath stuck. There were only two possible explanations: there was an actual twin, a frightened man hidden away; or one person had worn both skins and had worn them well enough to fool everyone.
Then, the cellar door shifted.
"Open up, Kora. It's me, Edward," someone whispered. "Please, hurry."
A scream from above. Footsteps. I could hear the thunder of shoes.
I climbed into the ducts, an instinctual animal leap. The iron grated cold against my palms. The shaft swallowed me. Up above, someone whispered in a voice I knew. "Kora, where are you?"
A shadow passed in the cellar doorway. Then the lights died.
In the black, a shape moved like a shark. A blade hummed. I smelled wet earth and terror, then a scream close enough to split my ear.
When the light flared back, the figure standing in the doorway was tall in a white dress, hair covering half its face, holding an axe. My muscles contracted. The shape in the dress lunged.
"Stop!" a voice cracked, high and thin. "Don't."
The hand that clipped my hair and nearly tore skin was Edward's, but he had a wig. Red lipstick smeared too bright across his mouth. For a moment, my world snapped — Edward's face under a mother's façade, his voice fluttering like a torn flag. His lips moved in a cadence I had heard that night and in his own whispers.
"You're killing me," he said, then slipped. "You took him down to the lake."
He began to falter, words and faces flipping like cards. He played the mother's voice, the brother's voice, the child's voice. Then he laughed too loud and the axe came down.
I pressed my palms over the cut across my cheek when it brushed me. My phone, a pen — anything — I grasped. I threw the pen at the opposite wall. He spun toward the noise. I bolted.
He chased me in heels. The sound of those heels on stairs is a sound I'll hear for the rest of my life. "Lucy," he cried. "Kora, stop. I am protecting you."
The attic door slammed behind me. I pulled it up and cranked the ladder. I jammed it, heart hammering in my throat, and hid under dust and old pictures. There was a photograph on the floor: two boys and a mother. One boy had a tiny dark mole on his chin. The other was clean-faced. Under the photograph was more handwriting.
"I was wrong," it said. "I thought he had died. They swapped. I can't tell what they are anymore. I'm so sorry."
The attic dropped into a hush. A man’s voice crawled along the beams. "I'm going to tear you open," he promised. "I will cut you into pieces."
He came up the ladder. He had an axe. He had Edward’s face. He had the patience of a storm.
He caught me, pinned me, pressed the axe toward my face. I closed my eyes and counted breaths. I felt his hand tremble as if holding the life of someone else. He pulled away, as if in pain.
He ripped the wig off and then, in a single, raw motion, he became himself in a new way — hands gentle, eyes soft, the voice pleading. "Help me. Don't let me be him."
He placed his free hand open, and there, on his palm, lay a tiny brass key. He pushed it into my palm and whispered, "Run. Before I change."
I bolted. The door at the bottom opened. Rain gnawed at the windows and glass reflected a figure in a long white dress outside, a woman with red-stained shoe tips: the memory of a story that had been rehearsed.
At the car, the key was gone. He appeared at the window, the face pressed to the glass, smiling in a way that split my bones. He dangled the keys. "You left them in the house," he said. "You must be tired."
I lunged for the keys. He dropped one with a flourish like a stage magician. "You can't leave," he said. "Not yet."
He said nothing about police. He said nothing about remorse. He stepped back into shadow, and I drove away with hands shaking and rain like knives on the windshield.
Days later, Edward stood trial in public. He had been brought in from the villa, alive though battered, his body a patchwork of scalpel marks and bandages. I stood behind the glass in the courtroom press gallery. The courthouse plaza outside had swollen with people: neighbors, reporters, families that had lost someone, curious onlookers. News vans braided static into the air. The moment required ritual. I knew the law would ask for proof, and the city would need a story folded neatly. What followed was a public punishment that didn't obey private terror.
Cullen Schmid, the prosecutor, took the floor with a patience honed on paper. "Edward Leone," he said into a microphone that threw his voice like a rock into water. "You stand accused of masquerading as his own brother, of violent assault, and of causing multiple deaths through deception and direct action. We will show that you created alternate lives and used them to destroy."
Edward sat at the defendant's table, hands shackled but his eyes free to dart and fix. His posture was a study in resistances: sometimes slumped in apparent sorrow, sometimes erect and smiling as if performing for a crowd. His hairline scar, the mole painted at one point, the bandaged knuckles — all of it was part of a story the city wanted to hear.
Aurora Barr, a reporter I had seen in the villa’s driveway before, read out messages from old neighbors, texts, an audio sample where he whispered like two people. "He would dress as his mother to frighten," she read. "He would record himself downstairs and then play the recording to convince neighbors two voices existed. He said the house itself was alive with his family."
"Do you deny these staged recordings?" Cullen asked.
Edward's voice changed as if he had a wardrobe backstage. "I deny nothing. I did not intend..." He paused. "I did what I had to do."
The plaza outside swelled. Voices rose in rhythm like waves. People pointed fingers like they could pluck truth out of him. Someone shouted, "Monster!" Someone else sobbed. A woman from a nearby town held a photo of a missing girl and cried, "You took her smile."
Cullen laid out the evidence like a surgeon showing a wound: the diary entries, the recordings, the false alarms, the witness testimonies, the places where he had been spotted in a wig. The prosecutor had everyone’s attention. "He premeditated how to be two people," Cullen said. "He rehearsed, he recorded, he tricked. He crossed the line."
I heard a murmur: the crowd buying the shape of the story. The press cameras clicked like cicadas. Edward shifted. "You're not real," he whispered under his breath. "You think you can see me?"
"Look!" someone shouted. A set of pictures were projected for everyone to see — old family portraits from the villa, the yellowed diary page, a video of him setting up a speaker in the cellar and hiding, then whispering the other voice into the microphone. The people outside saw the trick laid bare.
At first, his face flattened into a smirk — the eager arc of someone who enjoys the performance. Then the courthouse felt his momentum break. "No," he said under his breath. "No, no." He tried to laugh it off but found he could not. The crowd’s tone shifted: curiosity curdled into disgust.
"You're a liar," an elderly woman shouted. "You played dead and let children suffer."
"You're a coward," said another, whose son had been frightened into silence by the staged voices.
I felt hatred rise hot and sharp behind my ribs, but my hands stayed clasped. The prosecutor never raised his voice, but he didn't have to. He let the evidence work like water on rock.
Edward began to twist under the attention. He tried to speak but stammered. His act — the practiced cadence, the soft mother-voice, the pleading one — started to falter. His smile yielded to a twitch and then to a gasp. He stood and began to babble, trying to redirect to some private scene, but the judges and the people had seen the recordings. The listener had the final say.
"Was anyone with you when you planted the speaker?" Cullen asked.
"No," he said. He looked at me then, not like a man staring at his lover but at a costume left on a hanger. "I only wanted them to hear. I want them to know."
"You wanted them to know you were two men, so you could be spared," Cullen replied. "You wanted to avoid being alone with your impulses."
The crowd hissed and laughed, the laughter heavy and public. Cameras swallowed him in light. He folded smaller. His cheeks went pale and the bravado drained out of him. "You're a fake," someone in the gallery shouted. "A pathetic actor."
He tried to look defiant, but the humiliation was a slow machinery. The judge read the list of charges, each one a nail. He was escorted out of the public view and into a holding room. The plaza emptied in ragged ribbons. People touched each other like survivors.
The punishment didn't come as a single blow. It came as a sequence: exposure, the peeling back of performance, the faces of those he'd frightened leaning into cameras and naming what he had taken. They called him liar, murderer, con man. They took turns and the words felt like washing away. He had to stand in that light, to watch his games become evidence, to hear the crowd refuse any sympathy. He went from sly and dangerous to shamed and isolated in plain sight.
When he tried to speak again, his voice had lost its costume. He stammered, "I didn't mean—"
"No one is buying your theater," Cullen said softly. "Not today."
The worst cruelty of public punishment is not the verdict. It is being rendered small while everyone watches. Edward's posture crumpled. The crowd's volume rose then ebbed into whispers of disgust. Phones recorded his tears. They took pictures of him sitting alone in a cell behind glass. The cameras stayed.
I thought the judgment would heal me. It didn't. It made memory feel heavier, like a garment to be carried until it rotted.
Weeks later, I was in a hospital bed, because trauma is a body as much as a mind. Foster Robinson, the doctor, had a careful expression and a steady voice. He told me things in slow sentences like medicine: "You were found in shock. You were involved in a confrontation. You have physical wounds, and the mind..."
"Do I remember anything?" I asked.
"You have a functional memory," he said, "but there are fragments. People with deep immersion in violent fiction sometimes blur the lines. You were writing a novel. You were also playing at the dangerous edges of identity."
Foster spoke gently about diagnoses: dissociation, identity fractures, how the mind sometimes borrows characters and lives to survive. He told me I had come to occupy the role of both my protagonist and the monster I'd written. "You thought you were Kora," he said. "But sometimes, you were the other."
"Edward?" I asked. "He—"
"He is detained," Foster said. "He is being processed. You are safe here."
For months, I sat with words that had teeth. Then came the relapse. The doctor, so careful and kind in his white coat, felt then like someone who might not understand the edges of what I'd seen. When his back was turned in a quiet corridor, when he asked me "Do you remember who you are?" with a light that assumed my compliance, something in me recoiled.
"Who are you?" I asked, and the voice that answered was not mine. "Hello, doctor," the voice sang with a grotesque politeness. "First time we meet. Call me Edward."
The last thing Foster saw was my hands around his throat. The body knows the gesture of violence like a learned chord. He tried to wrench free. He tried to plead. "Kora," he said, breath rasping, "Kora—"
But the name fell like a bell whose clapper the wind had stolen. I smiled and said, "Hello, Doctor. I'm always so glad to meet..."
My hands tightened. The world narrowed to a single line.
After, there were headlines that split themselves into versions. Some said the doctor died; others claimed he had plunged into his own hospital chart and left an open wound. Some crowds shouted that the monster had won; others said I had been failed by a system that could not separate fiction from person. They scribbled the story into shapes.
In my final quiet, a nurse held me down and the other me whispered into a microphone. "My name is Edward," it said, as if auditioning for an audience. "I told you it would be this way."
The last thing I remember with any steadiness is a dim light and a name on a badge: Foster Robinson. He looked into my face as if seeing a patient. The second after, he was gone, and the room filled with the sound of uniforms and the radio voice of Cullen Schmid calling for restraint.
I lay back and tried to find Kora among the what-ifs. I tried to count breaths, to catalog the moments where the two voices had been different, to find a line that would let me stitch myself whole again.
Outside, people argued about what justice looked like. Some wanted to reenact the public punishment again, to drag what had happened into the light and lay it bare. Others wanted silence, the kind of quiet that lets memory gather like dust.
When they asked me what I remembered I could only whisper, "I remember two voices. One said he loved me. One said he wanted to kill me. I can't tell you which was which."
And the world, as if weary of drama, decided to do what it does best: it told the story it preferred.
The End
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