Insight of a Kenyan Girl

Lilly didn’t sleep.

She sat on the floor till the first threads of dawn slipped through the blinds, casting bars of light across the room like a quiet warning. The chain was still wound around her fingers. The ring—now cold and heavy—rested in her palm like a threat.

Lena’s voice echoed in her mind:
“Was it the red envelope?”

By morning, the silence had morphed into something else. Not peace. Not calm.
A countdown.

She forced herself into action. Shower. Coffee. Hair pulled into a messy braid like she used to wear in college—before she was “Tilly from Mystique.” Before secrets and red envelopes. Before masks and missing voices.

Lena wasn’t answering. Not texts. Not calls. Her Instagram stories had vanished. Her profile photo was gone. Deleted or deactivated.

Or… hidden.

Tilly’s next thought was irrational—but she acted on it anyway.

She went back to Mystique.

It was closed—Tuesday was cleaning day. Only the skeleton staff would be there, mostly downstairs. She let herself in through the back, disarming the alarm with the code only she and Roselyn knew. Her heels echoed on the marble floors as she moved through the empty club, the silence now too familiar.

She went straight to the archives.

Not the digital feed—those she already saw. This was deeper.

Behind the manager’s office was a narrow hallway, leading to a storage room few even knew existed. It smelled like dust and secrets. Tilly reached up and pulled the chain light. Fluorescent light flickered, revealing stacks of old paperwork, forgotten guest books, abandoned security tapes.

And something else.

A wooden box.

She remembered it vaguely—something Roselyn once told her never to open. “Old history,” she’d said. “Mystique was built on layers. Some things are better left buried.”

But now Tilly didn’t have the luxury of caution.

The box creaked open.

Inside, yellowed envelopes. All red. Dozens.

Some torn open. Some sealed. Each with a name scrawled in looping handwriting.

She pulled them out one by one.

Sasha Green.
Jordan Laine.
T. Morgan.

She froze.

T. Morgan was her.

Before she became Tilly. When she was just—

Tara Morgan.

Hands trembling, she tore open the envelope with her name.

Inside, just like the one from last night:

A silver ring.

A message.

And a photograph.

It was her. Years ago. Laughing. At a party. And beside her—

Lena.

Tilly dropped the picture like it had burned her.

She remembered that night.

It was the last night she saw Sasha Green. The last night before everything changed. The night Lena disappeared for a week without explanation.

And in the corner of the photograph—blurred but unmistakable—was the figure in the white porcelain mask.

Watching.

Even then.