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The digital clock read 2:37. She hadn’t closed her eyes longer than a blink, gaze drifting between the clock and the floor-to-ceiling window beside the bed. The ocean roiled under the moonlight, waves disappearing from view to crash against the cliff that the house was perched atop of.

His breathing had been perfectly steady for three hours. It was time. If she didn’t do this now, she wasn’t going to do it at all.

Swallowing hard, she twisted her neck to see her husband laying behind her. His expression was calm and peaceful, but his arm was heavy on her waist. With aching care, she took his wrist and lifted his arm enough for her to slip out from underneath. Once her feet were planted firmly on the floor, she slid a pillow in her place and set his arm down over it.

He drew in a deeper breath than normal, and she froze. But he didn’t wake.

Never taking her eyes off him, she grabbed her phone from the nightstand. She moved backward and skirted around the bed, feeling as if any movement would cause the floorboards to creak. This house was perfectly solid, however. It was perfect in every way imaginable—a dream house than anyone would kill to live in. As she tore her eyes away from the bed to look at the sprawling open-floor around her. It almost didn’t seem real. How did she, a lower-middle class girl, end up in a place like this? She spared her husband another glance.

She knew exactly how.

Clenching her jaw, she tiptoed away on socked feet. The bag she’d hidden deep in her closet was untouched, much to her relief. He had no idea what she was up to. She grabbed it and slung it over her shoulder, careful not to rattle it in any way. She crept past the bed again, then the living room and kitchen, until she reached the front door. She set the bag down—a task that should have taken less than a second, but lasted for nearly half a minute with how quiet she was trying to be. She left her phone on a table by the door.

The easy part was over with. Now came the moment that could end with her bruised and bleeding on the floor.

She had no choice but to disable the alarms. In all her weeks of planning, she had come to the conclusion that there was no way around it. Even if he didn’t know what she was doing right this moment, she had no doubt that the possibility was on his mind all the time. Leaving would not be as simple as waltzing out the front door.

But disabling the alarms meant going down into his space.

Not far from the front door, she paused in front of another doorway, bracing herself. For all his paranoia, he didn’t leave it locked, as though the idea of her rifling through his projects was so far outside of reality. As though she wouldn’t dare.

The door gave way to a short set of carpeted stairs. After taking each measured step that led her to the bottom, she flipped on the lights and was nearly blinded. Lit glass cases displayed his inventions. How strange that she had seen this room more in online articles and magazines than she did in real life. There was no way she could deny it—her husband was brilliant.

Within the glass cases were machines and technology that could change a person’s body chemistry and biology. He had saved countless lives, for the right price.

As she set her sights on the long desk filled with sleek monitors, she noticed there was one closet-sized case that appeared empty in the middle of the floor. There was a monitor and a panel on both the inside and outside. It seemed to be humming idly, and she wondered if the case itself was the machine. He must have left it on, considering he’d been working on some project so feverishly the past year, refusing to say a single word to anyone—her or the press—about what it was for.

She didn’t care. It could be the fucking key to immortality, and even that wouldn’t make her stick around to see it work.

She carefully made her way to the monitors. There, she could see herself on camera. But most importantly, she could see that he was still in bed, in the exact same position she had left him. The small victory made her nerves stand on end with excitement.

A low whine at the doorway made her flinch. The dog was at the top of the little staircase, sporting his shock collar. He padded down the steps and toward her, tail wagging. He was a vicious-looking thing, yet the gentlest soul she had known since her marriage. At the moment, however, he was well on his way to ruining everything.

“No, Zeus,” she hissed, rushing to quiet him.

He thought it was a game. He bounced backwards, his tail smacking against the humming glass case. This startled him, causing him to flinch and bump even harder against it.

The idle hum of the machine turned into full-on whirring. Skittering back, the dog ran off and went back up the stairs.

Whispering curses, she hurried back to the monitors to look at the camera feed. She gave a whimpering breath of relief. Her husband had not moved. But the noise was getting louder, and it was only a matter of time before it woke him up.

She rushed over to the machine as quietly as she could, circling around it to find some way to shut it off. It was apparently still in a prototype phase after all this time. The monitor on the outside displayed code rather than finalized output. She hadn’t the slightest idea what to do—all she knew was that she needed this damn thing to turn off. She pushed a button at random, but that only made it louder.

She eyed the other monitor panel and hurried inside to reach it, hoping she’d have better luck. She squinted—why did it seem so much brighter inside the glass case?

Before she could reach the panel, harsher light exploded around her, blinding her worse than when she’d first come into the room. That was the least of it. Pressure grinded against every inch of her body, knocking her to her hands and knees. She would have screamed if she had the capacity to. She felt like she was being dragged against the floor in every direction.

When the sensation ended, a tingle still danced on her skin, and the air felt colder. She drew in a gasping breath and hunched forward, rubbing her eyes. Very slowly, she dropped her hands to her lap and blinked.

At first, she thought her eyes were permanently damaged. It looked like she was no longer in the lab. But as her vision cleared completely, she realized it must have been her brain itself, not her eyes.

Things towered over her like distant glass buildings, stretching past her line of sight. The white flooring spread on forever in every direction. She staggered to her feet and turned to the side. In the distance, like perfectly right-angled cliffs, were the stairs she had come down mere minutes ago.

But that was impossible. Those couldn’t be the stairs. They were massive.

Unable to breathe, she gave her surroundings another once over. Realization dawned slowly, then came crashing down like a lead weight.

She hadn’t left the room. She was still in the glass case. Everything was the same, but gigantic beyond what she could process.

Finally, breath entered her lungs. And it came out in the form of a scream. No, no, no, no. She looked up at the machine, which was no longer whirring.

It shrunk her.

He shrunk her.

This couldn’t be happening. She pushed her hands through her hair, gripping the sides of her head. She squeezed her eyes shut, willed herself to wake up, but when she opened her eyes, everything was still enormous. Scrambling out of the building-sized glass box, she touched the bottom and circled around it. The sides were too sleek for her to climb up and try to find a solution.

Panting with frantic sobs, she looked all around before setting her sights on the stairs and bolting toward them. Luckily for her, the carpet allowed her to pull herself up, ledge by ledge. She didn’t want to think about it, but judging by the height of each step, she couldn’t be more than four inches tall. Her arms were burning by the time she made it up the sixth and final step.

She didn’t even want to look at the sprawling house when she made it past the doorway. She ran to her bag by the front door, only to remember that she had left her phone on the table. Twisting around, she looked up and up, knowing there was no way she could get up there. She was trapped.

Covering her mouth with one hand, she tried to steady her breathing as she turned slowly to look behind her. The wide-open space made her dizzy. She couldn’t look. She sprinted to duck under the low platform of the hall table. Huddling down, she allowed numbness to wash over her. It locked her in place, made her mind go blank from sheer disbelief of what had happened to her.

Minutes ticked by, then hours. She didn’t sleep, but her mind had all but shut off. She never closed her eyes, idly watching dawn light pour from the windows and brighten into late morning.

Then in the distance, there was a creak of bedsprings. She shivered, her heart leaping to her throat and pounding madly. She willed him to go back to sleep, to not notice her disappearance for just a little while longer.

“Cecilia?” His deep voice was like thunder rolling through the house, bouncing off the pristine surfaces. The bed creaked louder, accompanied by the harsh rustle of sheets. She could picture him sitting bolt upright, glaring at the pillow she had put in her place. The thunder cracked louder, angrier. “Cecilia!”

Thudding pounded from the distance. She thought for a second that he was throwing things around in a rage, then came to the cold realization that those were his footsteps. She buried her face in her hands as the pounding came closer. It paused, and he cursed, then strode away. Less than a minute later, the thudding became even more solid. She peeked through her hands to find a pair of truck-sized boots stomping in the direction of her hiding place.

She skittered back, but he moved right past the table. He was likely planning to run outside and search for her, but he paused in front of her bag. It flew up from the ground, out of her view. Clothes and plastic baggies rustled as he rummaged through her runaway kit. He slammed the bag down to the floor, making a scream catch in her throat. The boots came dangerously close as he stood in front of the table. He had spotted her phone.

“Cecilia!” he roared. “Where the fuck are you?”

She bit her lip hard as he stepped past the table and headed for the open lab door. Once his footfalls had disappeared down the steps, she crept out of her hiding spot and peeked past the doorway, trembling in her nightgown. He went over to the machine and shut it off, dashing her hopes that she might get some clue as to how to fix herself. But that disappointment paled in comparison to the fear that spiked through her when he went to the monitors to look at the cameras.

“No,” she breathed. “Oh no, please…”

It had not even crossed her mind. She stood there, frozen, as he furiously jabbed at a keyboard and tapped the touchscreen of the main monitor. He paused and watched the screen. Though she couldn’t see the screen herself, the realization that began to dawn on his massive face made her bolt. He must have played back the footage from last night. He knew.

She darted back under the table, wondering if there was a camera that pointed to where she was right at that moment. She couldn’t remember. For the life of her, she couldn’t fucking remember. For all she knew, he was well aware of exactly where she was hiding.

A chuckle floated from the lab, chilling her to the bone.

“Well, isn’t that something?” His thudding boots came back up the stairs and paused in the doorway. He raised his voice, calling out to her in the house. It gave her some semblance of hope that he didn’t know where she was, but the sound of his booming voice right above made her want to break down weeping. “Looks like you’ve got yourself into some trouble, babe. Come on, you can come out from wherever you’re hiding.” He waited a few seconds, with no response. “Well, since you want to play games, why don’t I set the rules? If you can go twelve hours without me finding you, I’ll fire up the machine so you can set yourself back to normal.”

He paused, as if she might come out to tell him what a great idea that was.

“Or… if you come out right now, we can skip all that,” he said. “I’ll put you back to normal right away, and we can forget any of this ever happened. I never saw the bag. You never went into my lab.”

She didn’t budge, keeping her hands over her mouth. He was lying. He had to be. He wasn’t going to restore her size, no matter what he claimed. He lived for his control over her when she was five-three. She could already hear the grin of ecstacy in his voice at the prospect of getting his hands on her at four inches.

He waited a few minutes in the doorway, then paced right in front of the table, oblivious to her cowering mere inches away from him. When she refused to show herself, he sighed as though she was being terribly inconvenient.

“Have it your way,” his voice rumbled as his devastating footsteps trailed right past her hiding place. “Just remember—you chose this. Ready or not, here I come.”

Fresh sobs built in her chest, panic clouded her mind. He was going to find her—there were a limited number of places she could hide in this vast, wide-open house. She couldn’t reach anything off the floor, and he knew it.

There was little she could do but watch as he started by looking under the kitchen island. He dropped to his hands and knees, and she caught a glimpse of his face. There was a faint smile of anticipation that made her blood run cold.

The moment he stood and headed around to the other side of the counter, perhaps to check under the sofa in the living room, she didn’t think. She acted. Chest tight with terror and unfriendly to breathing, she burst out from under the table and sprinted for the kitchen island, pumping her legs for all she was worth. She had to keep to the places he had already checked if she wanted any chance of evading him.

By the time she was beneath the direct center of the island, she was still shivering all over and muffling frantic whimpers behind her hand. Listening closely, she could hear that he was still moving about in the living room. Her breath steadied out in a relieved shudder. He hadn’t noticed her.

For nearly half an hour, he looked without saying a word. So when his movements came to a stop and his voice boomed through the house again, she had had cover a gasp.

“One more chance, babe,” he said.

She didn’t move.

Much to her dismay, his footsteps trailed into the kitchen. He opened the fridge, and she had to endure the sounds of him making a very late breakfast—omelettes, her favorite. She knew him. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that it would lure her out, but it would certainly make her suffer all the worse. He didn’t let her eat yesterday when he found out she had snuck an extra serving onto her plate during dinner the night before.

“Now, that bag you packed,” he called out while he idled in front of the stove. “That just pisses me off. And can you blame me? I’ve given you the perfect life. One any woman would kill for. And are you grateful? Sure as fuck doesn’t seem like it to me.”

You’ve given me a golden cage and top-of-the-line makeup to hide what you do. Even at her normal height, she never would have said such a thing to him. But it was almost as if he could look her in the eyes and know exactly what she was thinking. As she huddled under the island, she was at least grateful that he could not look at her. He had no choice but to guess where she was.

He strode off to the dining table to eat, and she flinched at every one of his footsteps. Even as he ate, she didn’t dare come out to switch hiding places. For all she knew, he could be looking at the right place at the right time when she came out. So she stayed,

She endured the creeping hours. After breakfast, he cleaned up. He made calls for work, boasting that the prototype was coming along sooner than he expected. He skipped lunch and went to his lab. There was definitely no moving for her now, with the cameras available at his leisure. She was terrified he’d play back footage from the morning and try to spot where she went, but he didn’t come out again to track her down.

All the while she waited, her mind raced with ideas. Maybe when he went to bed, she could find a way to reach his phone or hers. She had no idea what to expect if she called the cops. What could they do? Force him to change her back to normal? How would any of this play out legally?

For all she knew, his company would find a way to get his hands on her and run tests on her like a lab rat.

But she had no choice. No one could be worse than him.

When he finally came back to the kitchen, he made dinner. By then, the sun had set and cast the inside of the house in shadows, save for the dim lights he turned on. She felt weak all over, and her stomach was growling so ravenously that she was terrified he’d hear it. He made pasta; she could smell the sauce on the stove. She tried to ignore it, tried to pretend she was anywhere else.

While serving it onto his plate, some pasta spilled onto the floor. She stared at where it landed by his boots, well within running distance of her. Seconds ticked by, and he didn’t pick it up. There was no doubt in her mind he had done it on purpose—to tempt her with something she wouldn’t dare to do.

Soon enough, the temptation was stolen. The dog trotted into the room and ate the pasta off the floor when her husband’s back was turned. When he turned and saw the dog licking the floor, he made a noise of disgust.

She winced, knowing what would come next. He kept the remote to the shock collar in his pocket. There was a beep, and the dog gave a high-pitched whimper before running off.

“See, just like you,” he said, “Zeus doesn’t learn.”

His boots carried him out of the room. While he ate, she couldn’t help but watch from the distance. He was dropping bits of pasta by his feet. He was too much of a neat freak to be a messy eater. Good to know he was overcoming that obsession just to fuck with her.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she reminded herself over and over that he had to sleep eventually. She looked again when he stood. He left the mess there and returned to the lab, making it impossible once again for her to leave her spot. That food was like bait in a mousetrap.

Why hadn’t he looked for her? She had no doubt that this twelve hour game was bullshit, but his set time was almost up. What was the point of him teasing her with it in the first place? He was never going to let her go, no matter her size. And now, she had made it all the easier for him.

No one was coming.

She’d fallen out of touch with family, friends, all because of him. It would take months before anyone noticed that she was gone. She pulled her knees to her chest and tried to calm herself. Just a little longer, she begged. Just keep it together a little longer. He has to go to sleep. I’ll figure something out. I will. Already, she was dreaming about the fallen food the moment he went to bed. She didn’t care if she would be eating scraps like a mutt. If she wanted any chance of survival, she needed to eat.

Finally, he came out of the lab. As he walked over to the dining table, her heart sank to the floor. She couldn’t believe she’d been stupid enough to think he’d leave the scraps there while he ate. He was so good at pretending she wasn’t there, even she had come to believe it. Tears pricked at her eyes at the hollow pang in her stomach. Sighing, she hugged her knees tighter.

She hardly paid attention to him as he came back into the kitchen to throw out the scraps. So it didn’t occur to her that she was in danger when he paused in front of the kitchen island.

Before she could register what was happening, his knees crashed to the floor and his hand swept into her hiding place. She jolted to her hands and knees and tried to scramble away, but his forearm rammed into her. It was like being hit by a semi-truck. In an instant, she was forced out into the open, right between where his hands were planted on the ground.

She jumped to her feet and didn’t dare look up, unable to bear seeing the look on his face as he loomed above her. She ran.

He shifted to block the way under the island, moving at a leisurely pace. She stepped back, trembling, primed to run with nowhere to go. There was movement behind her, and she peeked over her shoulder to find him starting to stand. The distraction cost her. A finger and thumb raced to meet her, plucking her up by the back of her nightgown skirt.

A strangled scream rattled in her throat as she was hoisted upside down, feeling like she’d slip through the silk at any moment.

“No!” she wailed. “Adrian, put me down!”

He straightened slowly, bringing her up to eye level. It’d be like jumping from a building if she fell. Her gaze danced around wildly, looking for anything to save her. He was dressed impeccably despite not having left the house. His cold gray-green eyes regarded her. His lips pulled into a smile.

“You really thought I didn’t know where you were?” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Nothing happens in this house without me knowing it.”

He let go of her nightgown. Another scream tore through her and was cut short in a harsher cry when she hit the palm of his other hand. No sooner than she oriented herself to sit with her hands propped behind her, his finger slid close to probe her outer thigh and hip.

“Don’t touch me!” She skittered away, feeling desperately backwards with her hands up the wall of fingers to straighten herself. “Change m-me back! I’m sorry, I-I’m sorry! I won’t leave you, babe, I-I promise, and I won’t tell anyone! Adrian, please…”

He wasn’t listening. He jolted his hand, forcing her to fall to a seat. Quick as lightning, his thumb came down to pin her thighs down like a lap bar. When she tried to kick and shove it off, he didn’t budge. Then his other thumb and finger joined in the torment, grabbing her forearm and utterly engulfing it. He could rip it off with a mere twitch.

She sobbed harder, throat raw from screaming. “Don’t hurt m-me,” she begged. “I’m sorry, I-I’m so sorry.”

His gaze softened, and he let her arm go, but not her legs. His other hand wouldn’t leave her alone. A fingertip reached for her face and brushed at the tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached up to lay her hands on his finger, shoulders shaking as she tried to push it away. For all the good it did, it was as though she was embracing him.

“You’re so cute like this,” he sighed, sounding like he meant it. “Better than I could have ever imagined.”

A chill crawled up her spine. He had been imagining this. Perhaps he had planned to use his machine on her all along—she had only sped up the process and vaulted herself right into his fantasy.

The world shook as he walked off and took her into the bedroom. With one hand, he pulled his nightstand away from the bed. As he lowered her to the surface, she realized it was meant to maroon her with no possibility of reaching the bedsheets to climb down to the floor. The moment she was able, she ran as far from him as the nightstand would allow. She hugged herself and stared at the smooth surface, anything to keep herself from looking up at him.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he promised. “Don’t go anywhere.”

That was her only moment of reprieve—him changing into his nightclothes. And that moment was far too short by the time he came back to her.

“Babe,” she croaked when he paused to observe her. She forced herself to look up and saw that he was wearing only boxers. She swallowed hard. “I haven’t eaten in two days…”

He cocked his head, then dropped to a crouch so suddenly that she gasped and fell back, arms raised in defense.

His once-crooning voice was lower now, intense. “See, here’s the thing. I gave you a chance this morning, and you didn’t take it.”

She glared through her arms. “You wouldn’t h-have changed me back anyway!”

“And here I thought my lovely wife would trust me more,” he scoffed. “Well, you lost the game, so I guess you’ll never get to find out.”

His hand came at her again, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. A finger and thumb pinched her under the arms, no matter how she tried to squirm away. He got into bed and propped himself up halfway with the pillows, lowering her down to his bare chest.

She knelt there for a second, shivering despite the warmth of his skin. Then she bolted, aiming to jump down onto the mattress. He caught her ankle with ease and dragged her back, then let go. Panting, she looked up to see him watching like she was a particularly interesting animal in a zoo exhibit.

Hysterical sobs beginning to shake her chest, she tried to run again. He caught her, put her back in place.

Again. Again. Again.

Until finally, she collapsed where he put her, and she buried her face in her hands.

“That’s it,” he purred. When she peeked out, she saw him brush a fingertip along the path she had tried to run. “But I have to admit, that felt… interesting.”

Without warning, he grabbed her in a loose fist and put her over his heart, manipulating her with his fingers until she was laying precisely the way he wanted. She was on her side, legs slightly tucked. He rested his hand over her, and she couldn’t move a muscle even if she had it in her to run again.

The pressure increased when his chest rose and fell with a windstorm of a sigh. Her sobs had quieted into soft gasps, and her gaze had gone blank.

“Behave yourself, and maybe I’ll let you have some breakfast in the morning,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”