The more the man spoke, the more Tessy couldn't shake the feeling that she had heard his voice somewhere before. It curled around the edges of her memory, clawing at a faint echo she couldn't quite reach.
Yet no matter how hard she searched her mind, it refused to yield an answer. The voice felt oddly familiar, like a half-remembered melody heard in a dream, but the face?
His face didn't ring a bell at all. She was sure she would have remembered it. There was no forgetting a face like that—part of it grotesquely maimed, leaving behind a patchwork of scarred skin and hollowness where a cheek should have been. It was the kind of face that haunted nightmares. And if she had seen it before, she would have woken up screaming. She would've remembered.
"Do you like my face?" the man asked suddenly, his voice slicing through her thoughts like a jagged blade as if he had been reading her mind.
Tessy blinked, startled.
