When A Villain Falls [Yandere Villain x Hero]

Chapter 25 - Missing

Where are you, Joey?

Please, please be okay.

He couldn't just disappear like this.

Not Joey. My mind raced with scenarios - maybe he's playing a trick, hiding to surprise me. Or maybe... maybe something terrible happened.

The ramshackle house looked just the same as it always had, peeling paint and slanting porch railings. But an eerie stillness hung over the property, one that set my teeth on edge.

"Joey?" I called out, the sound of my voice swallowed by the heavy silence. "Joey, you out here?"

There was no answer, no blur of motion from around the side of the house or up in his rickety treehouse refuge. Just...emptiness.

Stomach churning with trepidation, I crept up the cracked front steps, each one creaking ominously under my slight weight. The door was unlocked - never a good sign in this neighborhood.

"H-hello?" I ventured, easing the door open a crack. "Mrs. Merrick? It's me, Y/N..."

The house was dark, blinds drawn tight against the fading evening light. A stale, musty odor hung in the air, like the place had been vacant for weeks. Panic seized my chest as I pushed inside, calling out Joey's name again and again.

But the place was deserted, not a single sign that anyone had been there recently. No dishes in the sink, no towels hanging in the bathroom, no signs of life at all. It was as if the Merricks had packed up and vanished into thin air.

I made my way to Joey's bedroom, the one place in the house that had always radiated his warmth and light. The door creaked open to reveal...an empty room, stripped bare.

No posters on the walls, no toys or dirty clothes strewn about. Just bare walls and vacant spaces where his life had been.

That's when I saw it - a glint of tarnished gold peeking out from beneath the bare mattress. My heart stuttered as I reached for it with trembling hands.

It was Joey's locket, the one he had gifted to me all those years ago in our treehouse sanctuary. The delicate chain had been broken, the locket itself lying cold and discarded on the barren floor.

In that moment, the fragile threads of hope I'd been clinging to snapped like a bone. My best friend, my brother in all but blood...was gone. Vanished without a trace, leaving behind only ghosts and a battered locket as the last remnants of his existence.

I crumpled to the floor, sobs wracking my small frame as I clutched the broken necklace to my chest. The enormity of Joey's disappearance crashed over me in waves, an anguish so profound that I thought I might drown in it.

Where was he?

What had happened to tear him from my life so abruptly, so completely? And why, why had he left his most prized possession behind?

The questions battered me from all sides, a relentless onslaught with no answers in sight. All I knew was that my best friend, the person who made me feel whole and truly seen, was gone.

And in that moment, a piece of me was lost as well.

An innocence shattered, a light extinguished - never to be rekindled.

If only I had known then just how permanent that loss would be.

How the darkness would eventually return, this time wearing the face of the boy I once loved like a brother.

If only I could have realized that the warmth and light of Joey's soul was forever eclipsed, consumed by the obsession of Plague.

But such wisdom was beyond the comprehension of a heartbroken child. All I could do was surrender to the maelstrom of grief, clutching his discarded locket as the last fragile tie to the friend I had lost.

Little did I know, it would not be the last time Plague's obsession would leave me adrift among the ashes of innocence lost.