They found her in a child's antique chair, painted white once, now faded to the yellowed hue of old bone. The wood was chipped at the edges, its carved roses dulled by time, but it had been cleaned and wiped down. Prepared. As if the killer had set the stage before arranging his masterpiece.
She sat upright, unnaturally so, her spine perfectly aligned, as though braced by invisible wires. Her limbs had been positioned with surgical precision: elbows bent just so, hands resting gently in her lap, fingers curled like a doll left mid-play. Her knees were drawn together demurely, feet placed flat and parallel in slippers too small for her adult size. She looked… posed. Not left behind, but presented. Offered.
Her head tilted slightly to the left, just a few degrees off center, the angle achingly intentional—like she was waiting for a lullaby that would never come—or listening for a voice that had gone quiet long ago.
But it was her face that made the world tilt for a moment.
Her eyes were gone.
Not gouged or mutilated, but… removed. Cleanly. Carefully. The sockets were stitched shut with the fine thread used in embroidery—pale pink, delicate as breath, almost invisible unless you were looking. Under the stark morgue lights, it shimmered faintly. In their place, nestled and sewn into flesh, sat two buttons. One glossy black. The other a misty sea-glass blue. Mismatched and inhuman. They'd been attached with the same thread, so tiny and neat it might've passed for ornamental—if not for the horror behind it.
The mouth had not been spared. Its shape had been altered—no, sculpted—into a grotesque imitation of joy. The lips pulled wide at the corners, far beyond the limits of natural anatomy, forced into a permanent, bloodied grin. The gums peeked out in a jagged line beneath, torn and bruised, red where they should not be. And her lips… they gleamed.
Not with lipstick.
The color had been painted on—painstakingly. A doll's crimson, too rich and too sharp. It was her blood. Layered, dried, then painted over again and again until it took on the sheen of porcelain. This wasn't rage. This wasn't panic. It was patience. Intent. A quiet, chilling craftsmanship.
Her hair had been curled into soft ringlets. Neat. Uniform. Still damp with setting solution, like they hadn't even dried before death—or after. Four pale blue satin ribbons had been pinned in place, equidistant on each side, tied in bows so precise they might've come from a pattern. A child's dress-up doll. A relic from some forgotten nursery.
She wore a white cotton nightgown, trimmed in delicate lace, the sort sold for little girls in catalogs long out of print. The gown was several sizes too small for her frame. The cloth had split at the shoulders, torn seams exposing the sharp jut of collarbones and the pale curve of her upper arms. But even that seemed deliberate. A design choice. Not just mutilation—but a message.
There was no dirt beneath her fingernails. No bruising beyond what had been crafted. Her skin had been washed—scrubbed clean. Dried. Dusted with a faint trace of powder that smelled like lavender and old dolls. She didn't look dead.
She looked displayed.
And on the floor beside the chair, a final touch—a pink-painted wooden box, aged and chipped, decorated with cherubs now faded and flaking. The lid sat slightly ajar. Inside, nestled in silk, were her eyes. Preserved in saline, perfectly intact. Staring up like tiny drowned moons. And between them, a scrap of paper, hand-cut into the shape of a heart.
No writing. No name.
Just the faintest scent of lavender oil, and the silence of something watching.
It was a ritual. Ceremony. Not his first.
It was the fourth.
But this one… this one had a name we knew. A name Addie recognized before she even saw the face.
Claire Renner.
Twenty-nine. A librarian. The kind of woman people liked easily. Sweet-voiced. Soft-featured. Someone who sent birthday cards with hand-written notes, who remembered the details most people forget. She'd known Addie—well enough to ask about her cases, to share dinners, to gift a necklace once in quiet thanks for something long forgotten.
Nothing romantic. Nothing tangled with desire or dulled by longing. No confessions. No lingering glances. Nothing charged or complicated or wrapped in the kind of ambiguity that lets a person pretend it meant more.
Only kindness.
Simple. Unadorned. Quiet in the way true mercy often is. And somehow, that made her death worse. There was no betrayal to blame, no doomed affair to unravel, no emotional entanglement to point at and say, that's where it all went wrong. The absence of complexity gave way to something colder, more precise. It turned the scene into something deliberate. Not a frenzied kill, not a moment of weakness, but a ritual, built with patience and executed with care.
It wasn't about the murder.
It was about Addie.
Which made the art of it—the buttons in place of eyes, the blood-painted lips, the delicate way her limbs had been posed like a child in reverence to some forgotten porcelain god, all the more unbearable. Whoever had done this hadn't been content to end a life. They wanted to own it. Dismantle it. Reduce it to something beautiful in the most brutal way possible. And watching Addie step forward, step closer, I felt a tension in her that vibrated beneath the surface of her skin like a wire stretched too tight across the bone.
She pulled the sheet back slowly, her hands trembling despite the rigid line of her shoulders, as though some part of her still hoped she was wrong. That her instincts had betrayed her. That this body—so impossibly still, so cruelly altered—belonged to someone else.
But it didn't.
And she knew it before the sheet reached the collarbone.
She didn't gasp. I didn't cry out. There was no dramatic collapse, no shattering sob. Her body stayed upright. Her chin didn't falter. But the recognition hit her like a wave striking stone—quiet, violent, inevitable. I saw the breath catch in her throat, sharp and shallow. Not the kind that fills lungs, but the kind a person takes when they're trying to hold themselves together through sheer will. And I watched her begin to unravel, not all at once, but slowly, meticulously, like something sewn too tightly now pulling loose at the seams.
Her eyes told the story her body refused to show. They didn't glaze or widen. They cracked. A hairline fracture ran through the center of her resolve, growing wider with every second she kept looking, every beat her heart managed to survive in the presence of what had been done.
Grief didn't crash into her.
It seeped.
A slow, invasive cold pressed in through every pore, settling in the marrow of her bones, rooting itself where hope once lived. Guilt followed, curling around her spine. Horror clung to her like fog. And though the tears didn't fall—though her face remained dry, her expression blank—I knew she wasn't holding back.
She was drowning.
And the silence she held was not strength, but surrender.
But the grief was there. In the way, her shoulders curled forward. On the way her hands began to tremble and her mouth pressed shut to trap the sound of something breaking loose inside her.
She stepped back, just one step as if the floor had tilted. She didn't speak. She couldn't. And I stood there—watching her fall apart—knowing exactly what it meant that he had taken someone from her.
He hadn't just killed.
He'd declared war.
And in that moment, I felt it, something ancient and sharp rising in my chest, not for the dead, but for her. The need to protect. To destroy. To put me between her and the thing that had turned a woman she cared for into this… sculpture of horror.
I followed her when she left the morgue, her coat still draped over the back of a chair, her hands streaked with antiseptic and sorrow. She walked like she carried something too heavy for bone or blood to bear. Her footsteps didn't echo. They whispered. And I trailed behind her, not as a predator, not even as the creature I so often became, but as a man.
As a man who knew he had already failed to keep her safe.
And who would never forgive himself for it?
Not as a killer. Not as what I have become beneath centuries of hunger and shadow. But as something closer to the man I used to be. The man I buried so long ago I sometimes forget the shape of his voice. The one she doesn't know is still clawing, desperate, toward the surface—through layers of blood, rot, and regret.
She didn't speak when the door shut behind us.
She didn't need words.
Her body gave out the way storms do at sea—no lightning, no crash, only the quiet collapse of something that has been holding too much for too long. Her knees buckled first. Then her shoulders. Her weight folded inward, spine curved in surrender, breath hitching as she sank toward the tile. She didn't reach for anything. Didn't try to stop the fall. Her grief wasn't loud.
It was final.
I crossed the distance before I even registered to move. Dropped to one knee beside her and caught her with both arms. Not fast—just firm. The way I've caught things breaking for centuries. Small animals. Men in battle. Lovers in their last breath.
She didn't pull away.
Instead, she leaned into me with a kind of instinct that didn't feel like trust so much as needed. A deep, human need for warmth, for contact, for proof that her body hadn't fractured beyond repair. I wrapped my coat around her. Pulled it tight across her shoulders. The fabric swallowed her up, oversized and trembling with the way she shook against me. It wasn't much—just wool and worn lining—but it was all I had to offer. A barrier between her skin and the cold, and between her heart and the horror still echoing in that sterile room.
She pressed her face into my chest.
Folded into me like something hunted and still. Her hands clutched my shirt, fingers curled tight in the fabric like she couldn't breathe without holding on to something. Her sobs started low—rough in her throat, dragged from the center of her. No shame. No hesitation. She cried like she was finally alone in the world. And I held her like I could convince her otherwise.
My hand moved through her hair, slow and steady, fingers brushing strands still scented faintly of lavender and morgue antiseptic. I didn't say anything. Words would've been wrong. Empty. I've learned to keep quiet in grief. It's one of the only things that ever feels honest.
She soaked through the fabric.
Trembled harder when I tightened my hold. And I let her. I let every sound tear through me. Let her weight around me. Let her break against me like waves against stone. Because I've held dying things before—but none of them ever mattered like this.
The room fell away after a while. Time drifted off like smoke, the minutes stretching long and thin until I didn't know how long we'd been on the floor. Her breathing slowed. The trembling eased a little, though it never fully stopped. I stayed still. Let her decide when it was time to come back.
Eventually, she shifted.
Not much—just enough to look up. Her face was pale and flushed at once, streaked with tears and raw around the eyes. Her mouth trembled; lips parted like she had to coax the words out piece by piece. Her voice cracked when it came.
"Why do I feel safe with you?"
Her voice barely made it past the tangle of emotion still lodged in her throat, and for a moment I thought she might take it back, might pretend it had been meant for the silence rather than me. But her eyes met mine—storm-wrecked and fragile in a way that made something deep in my chest throb with the kind of ache no century had ever managed to dull—and I knew she needed an answer. Not a lie. Not comfort. Something real.
There were a thousand things I could have said. Because I knew how to hold pain without trying to fix it. Because I didn't turn away when the jagged edges of her sorrow sliced through the room like shattered glass. Because there was something broken in both of us, and the quiet between us wasn't absence, but recognition—one monster to another, nodding through the darkness with reverence instead of fear.
But none of that would have helped her.
None of it would have dulled the weight pressing down on her chest or quieted the trembling in her fingers as they clung to my shirt like it was the only solid thing left in the world. The truth would have only widened the chasm she was already trying not to fall into.
And so I told her nothing.
Though I should have. I should have let the words crawl up my throat and spill into the space between us, no matter how much damage they would leave in their wake. I should have confessed that whatever safety she believed she'd found in me was nothing more than proximity to something darker than what she feared, that the calmness she felt wasn't peace but paralysis, a stillness that came before the storm. I should have told her that the arms she'd buried herself in were the same arms that had once held dying men and never flinched, the same hands that had taken lives not in defense, not out of necessity, but because I could—because I wanted to.
I should have told her that what she mistook for the sanctuary was a ruin with soft lighting. That the blood in my history had been warm and pleading and sometimes innocent, and that whatever gentleness she saw in me now was nothing more than erosion—a slow wearing away of a man I no longer recognized.
But I said nothing.
Because even monsters have their cowardice's.
And in that moment, mine was her.
And in that silence, I looked at her, truly looked—at the hollow places beneath her eyes, at the slow rise and fall of her breath, at the softness that still clung to her despite all she had seen. Every fractured inch of me ached, ached with the want to do something I had no right to want, ached in that deep narrow way that leaves men hollowed out from the inside.
Still, I leaned closer.
Slow enough to feel the space collapse between us, slow enough to memorize the warmth of her breath as it mingled with mine, carrying the sharp salt of tears and something gentler beneath it, something faint and floral that clung to her hair and would haunt me for days.
Her lips parted—not an invitation, not quite—but as if her body had taken over where words no longer mattered. Her eyes drifted half shut, lashes trembling in a way that made her look impossibly young, impossibly vulnerable, like a cathedral on the verge of ruin. We hovered there, caught in a breath that didn't belong to either of us, close enough for my mouth to remember the curve of hers before I had ever tasted it, close enough that her grief seemed to seep into me, warm and bitter and unbearably intimate.
But I didn't kiss her.
I couldn't. Because if I kissed her, I wouldn't stop. I would shatter every line I had drawn between what I wanted and what I had no right to take.
So I vanished.
Slipped from her side before she could open her eyes and see what was truly there. Not a comfort. Not a man. Not anything safe.
That night, I didn't sleep.
My body lay still, but my mind unraveled, slow and relentless, spinning scenes that never happened into truths that felt more real than memory. I saw her again—not in the morgue, not in grief, but in my bed, my hands on her, her mouth open and gasping, no longer weeping but speaking my name in a rhythm that made something ancient stir inside me.
She writhed beneath me like a flame—wild and bright and consuming—her fingers clawing down my back, not to escape, but to hold me in place, to keep me there, to pull me deeper into a moment that felt like worship and desecration all at once.
And I gave in to it.
In the dream, I sank into her with the kind of hunger that has no beginning and no end. I tasted her skin, her cries, her surrender. I became the thing I've spent centuries trying to bury. Not a man. Not a savior. A shadow. A ruin.
When I woke, my hands were shaking so violently I could hardly breathe.
My mouth still tingled with the ghost of a kiss I had never taken, slick with the imagined taste of her skin, her sorrow, her heat.
And in that moment, stripped of pretense, shivering with desire and disgust in equal measure, I knew I had already lost.
Not to her.
To myself.