Hollow Hours:
A Romance of Control, Ruin, and Quiet Monsters

In a near-future Manchester glazed in neon lights and nicotine haze, nineteen-year-old Oliver Williams is trying, and failing, to be a normal college student.

On paper she almost passes for ordinary:

Media course.
Second-year.
Band rehearsals in damp practice rooms.
Gigs in cramped venues.
Cheap beer, MDMA in bathroom stalls, late buses home.

In reality, she is a resurrected experiment.

Five years earlier, Oliver died in a Dublin bombing. Her body, broken and stilled, became raw data to Dr Moira O’Deorain, disgraced geneticist and secret Talon operative. Using forbidden regenerative techniques and temporal lattice frameworks, Moira pulled Oliver back across the threshold and rebuilt her into something that should not exist.

Now Oliver carries unstable temporal power in her bones. She can stretch seconds, stutter moments, rewind heartbeats. Her abilities are instinctive and emotion-driven, as volatile as her mind. Overuse brings headaches, dizziness, fugue states. Sometimes she simply loses time.

Moira taught her how to survive the power.

Moira also taught her she cannot survive it without Moira.

They live together in a city-centre apartment, a knife-edge fusion of domesticity and captivity.

Oliver’s bedroom is an explosion of adolescence she never got to live: posters, smoke-stained walls, piles of band merch and cables, guitars resting where childhood toys should have been. Talon’s ghost still lingers in the way she locks the door.

Moira’s space is surgical, all clean lines and hidden apparatus. Whiskey glass, clinical notebooks, immaculate surfaces. A lab wearing the skin of a home.

Between them unravels a relationship that refuses to fit any simple word.

Moira is guardian, lover, captor, savior, tormentor. She controls the money, the medications, the explanations. She does not track Oliver’s movements or demand constant check-ins, because she does not doubt the gravity of her own pull. She knows Oliver will always come back.

Control is most effective when it looks like freedom.

Outside, Oliver builds a fragile life:

Smoking breaks and sardonic banter with her best friend Rowan “Roe” Mercer, a punk-hearted girl with scarred knuckles and a gaze that misses nothing. Roe recognizes the flinches, the strange marks, the dissociation. She knows the language of abuse in her bones, even if she cannot yet name the abuser.

Sessions in a half-serious college band; recording riffs that carry more feeling than Oliver can voice. Tutors who mark her absent more often, then send polite emails that grow steadily sharper.

Small joys: the shared cigarette with Roe behind the college, the thrill of a new pedal, the low buzz of a crowd pressing against a stage.

For a while, Oliver convinces herself it is enough.

Then her guitar videos start to circle the local scene online.

A comment appears from a verified account that does not seem real at first.

“killer tone.”

Alex Korr. Thirty-four. Guitarist of cult alt-metal band Whitelocust. London scene legend. Permanently exhausted, permanently almost-famous.

He slides into her messages.

What begins as genuine musical interest quickly becomes a late-night ritual: voice notes, gear talk, riffs traded back and forth, selfies, sleep-starved confessions. Alex is warm, self-effacing, generous with praise. He knows she is nineteen. He does not pretend otherwise.

Oliver, quietly starving for attention that is not weaponised like Moira’s, falls fast.

When she impulsively takes a train to London to meet him in Camden, it feels like stepping into a different timeline. Music shops, drinks, shared laughter over missed notes and stupid inside jokes. He smells of sweat and stale venues; he treats her like she is both talented and adorable.

She spends the night.

It is messy and too fast, and she tells herself it is what girls her age do.

Back in Manchester, Moira notices the texts, the sudden brightness in Oliver’s features, the faint bruises that do not match the furniture. She says nothing. She never forbids. Instead she waits, observing like a scientist watching mold bloom in a sealed dish.

When Whitelocust tours up north, Roe drags Oliver to the Manchester date, all sharp smirks and secret concern. Backstage, Alex folds Oliver easily into his world: dim green room, cans of lager, stolen kisses behind equipment stacks.

He is rough in a way that makes Oliver’s heart slam.

Hand on her throat with just enough pressure. Bruises blooming on her hips and wrists where he pins her. Words like “you’re so small” and “you’re so young” slip from his mouth between praise, not shy, not accidental. He wants her obedience. He wants her pliant.

He frames it as adoration.

He pushes sex when she drifts, speaking to her like she is both cherished and owned. Oliver notices the wrongness in flickers, but it never feels fully real. Dissociation bends the edges of memory, and all that stands sharp is his voice calling her “good girl” while she trembles.

She thinks, over and over:
This is wrong, but I like it.

As their entanglement deepens, his demands grow bolder.

Skip class.
Skip rehearsal.
Come to London again.
Be good and I’ll give you something pretty.

Cutting, once a private ritual of control and release, becomes something Alex gently claims. He suggests it while they are both drunk. Quietly. Intimately. A reward.

Only where clothes will hide it. Only for him to see. Only if she is very, very good.

Oliver agrees. She pretends it is still hers.

He never tells anyone about her.

He never has to.

Meanwhile, Moira sharpens her tools in silence.

She never interrogates. She never rages. Instead, when Oliver staggers home from trips to London with new marks and haunted eyes, Moira opens the door, opens her arms, and says softly:

“You’re shaking, a chroí.”

Wordless embrace. Gaelic pet names that bypass Oliver’s defenses and tap directly into the years of conditioning layered under her skin. Hands tracing over every bruise and line with slow, possessive care. A scientist cataloguing. A lover reclaiming.

Later, in darkened sheets, Moira uses pleasure as scalpel and suturing thread.

Oliver learns what it is to be edged until she sobs, to be denied release until she whispers the right answers.

“Not until you say who you belong to, a chroí.”

At first, Oliver breathes it barely audible.

“I… I belong to you.”

Moira hums. Murmurs, “Again, louder.”

Each repetition is a knot in a leash. Each climax a carefully rationed privilege. Orgasm becomes proof of loyalty, something Moira can give or withhold at will. Oliver discovers that nothing turns her inside out like being made to prove, over and over, that she is Moira’s.

On the rare nights when Alex has cut her and Moira finds the evidence, the dynamic twists tighter. Moira’s fingers linger at those lines, touching them as if she might erase his presence by claiming it.

“These are mine,” she breathes against Oliver’s skin one evening. “You are mine.”

Oliver shakes with arousal, guilt, and a flicker of thought she does not want to examine:
She could really hurt me.
She is the only one strong enough to hold me.

Between these two gravitational bodies, Oliver’s life disintegrates.

She misses lectures. Tutors log absences that march steadily across the term. Emails escalate from gentle concern to formal warning. Her bandmates joke about “losing” their lead guitarist to some mysterious relationship. Friends at venues ask where she has been. Oliver makes vague excuses and goes home to her monsters.

Roe watches the slow withdrawal like a car crash in unbearable slow motion.

She sees the bruises on Oliver’s throat and wrists. She notices how Oliver stares at the floor when certain subjects arise. She does not know about Talon or time anomalies, but she knows the pattern: someone has their hooks in her friend. Someone is tightening their grip.

She asks questions Oliver never answers.

“Who put that on your neck?”
“Why do you flinch when your phone buzzes?”
“Who’s got you this scared?”

Oliver dodges with half-lies and subject changes. Roe’s eyes go sharp and distant whenever Oliver lets too much slip, which only accelerates Oliver’s shutdown.

At a midpoint in this descent, Oliver visits Roe alone for an afternoon that should have been ordinary. They share a joint, swap songs, flick ash from a cluttered windowsill. Oliver skirts dangerously close to confession, words hovering on her tongue.

“There’s… this guy…”

She sketches details without names: older, musician, bruises that do not come from fights, cutting framed as intimacy. Roe goes very still. Her jaw tightens. Her eyes turn hard and faraway. She says nothing.

The silence feels like a verdict.

Oliver looks down at the floor. Something folds closed inside her. The truth recedes. She changes the subject with an almost cheerful pivot.

“Are you still going that Whitelocust support thing?”

They talk about gigs instead, standing at the edge of something neither can quite cross. They share a cigarette that feels like a goodbye neither of them have language for.

The Whitelocust support show becomes the last gig Oliver ever attends.

In the crowd, watching friends laugh and sway, Roe pulled into the churn of bodies, Oliver stands on the outskirts and realizes she is untethered from this world. The music roars. Lights pulse. Everyone else seems connected, synchronized.

She feels spectral. Wrong-timed. Not built for this kind of life.

Outside in the smoking area, her hands trembling around a cigarette, she texts Alex:

I miss you.

His reply arrives with chilling speed:

be good and come see me

Oliver opens a train app before the song in the venue has even finished. She checks times. She chooses what lecture to skip, what lie to tell herself. Being “good” quietly reshapes her schedule, her friendships, her future.

She does not notice that she no longer considers refusing a real option.

Across the academic year, an invisible paper trail forms behind her: attendance reports, warning emails, clinical notes from a brief hospital visit after a time-slip and blood loss. Roe’s messages pile up on her phone in various tones.

Where are you?
You ghosting me or what
This isn’t funny anymore
Please answer me, Liv

Oliver reads them all. She replies to few.

Inside the apartment, Moira sharpens her ownership through subtler boundaries.

She reassures without ever denying her own cruelty.

“At least I would never do that to you.”

She offers to email tutors on Oliver’s behalf, positioning herself as savior from the consequences of the very isolation she benefits from. She never forbids Alex. She merely presents herself as the one constant, the only person who will not turn away.

When Alex grows more openly predatory, Oliver experiences a second split.

He pushes sex when she is not fully present, but always with verbal consent. He wraps his hand around her throat, pins her wrists, drags sounds out of her body that make shame and desire blur. He comments on how small she is under him, how young. He asks for photos, videos, proof.

He suggests cutting as a treat when she has “been good.”
Only he gets to see.
Only he knows.

Oliver tells herself she is complicit, not a victim. She likes it. She asks for it. It feels like agency, like choosing the shape of her own damage.

With Moira, she sinks into the comfort of being handled by someone who knows exactly when she will break. With Alex, she basks in the thrill of being wanted in all the ways that scare her most.

Both relationships crack against her already fragile mental health: BPD, autism, depression, derealisation. Her time-slips increase with stress and arousal, making certain nights a blur of overlapping sensations and mismatched memory.

She can recall Moira’s whisper: “Again, louder.”

She can recall Alex’s purr: “Look at you taking it.”

She cannot always remember which bruises came from which hands.

At a certain point, Oliver’s body, mind, and sense of time align only in one certainty:

Normal life is no longer possible.
Normal love never existed for her.
This is what she knows instead.

The spiral tightens toward a final journey.

Near the end, Oliver boards a train alone, ticket in her pocket to London Euston. She is thinner. Quieter. Her tutors are out of patience; Roe’s messages have shifted fully from banter to pleading. She has not told anyone she is leaving.

As the train glides into motion and the city recedes, she stares at her reflection in the window. Dark hair, faint red ghost-roots at the scalp, mismatched bruises. Scars layered over scars. A girl built from catastrophe and held together by the hands that keep hurting her.

Her phone vibrates with background noise: college notices, Roe’s unanswered texts, a voicemail icon from a tutor who has finally given up.

Oliver opens a chat instead.

Alex.

Her fingers hover over the keyboard. She begins to type the only question that matters in the warped world she has allowed around herself.

do you still want me

The announcer’s voice fills the carriage, almost kind.

“Next stop, London Euston.”

Somewhere between these syllables and the dark mouth of an approaching tunnel, reality stutters.

Oliver’s power, always reactive to emotion, shivers awake. Time falters around her. Sound stretches and thins. The world blurs at the edges, like a frame caught between cuts.

She blinks.

The train enters the tunnel.

The moment splits.

The narrative breaks.

We do not see whether she sends the message.
We do not see whether Alex replies.
We do not see whether she steps off at Euston, turns back to Manchester, or slides entirely out of sequence altogether.

We are left with the nausea of suspended impact.

No cathartic rescue. No righteous exposure. No clean escape. Only a young woman caught between two beautifully constructed cages, disappearing into an uncertain pocket of time, still craving the very people who poisoned her.

Hollow Hours is a dark, intimate psychological romance about a girl who can bend time but cannot unlearn the shape of captivity. It is a story of eroticised control and the slow erosion of self under the hands of those who claim to love you best.

Through an unreliable, pleasure-drunk lens, the book traces how abuse can feel like safety, how ownership can be mistaken for devotion, and how sometimes the most terrifying horror is not violence in the open, but tenderness used as a trap.

There are no neat monsters here.
Only the people Oliver loves.