Page 67 of He Sees You

She'll be back.

And next time, she won't leave.

CHAPTER TEN

Celeste

The words flow from my fingers like blood from an open vein—dark, necessary, unstoppable.

I've written forty pages in three days, the best work of my career.

Every sentence pulses with the kind of authenticity that can only come from lived experience.

My heroine no longer pretends to understand darkness; she embodies it.

She doesn't fear her stalker—she craves him.

She doesn't want to be saved—she wants to be consumed.

Because I've been consumed.

Three nights ago, in Cain's library, surrounded by evidence of my father's failures and first editions of books about beautiful violence, I gave myself to a killer.

And I'd do it again. Will do it again.

Tonight, if he'll have me.

The scene I'm writing is the most graphic I've ever attempted:

She watched him work with the fascination of a student observing a master. Each cut was deliberate, artistic. He waspainting with blood, composing a symphony of screams. And she, his willing audience, felt herself growing wet with each stroke of the blade. This was what she'd been searching for in all those safe men with their gentle hands and fearful hearts—someone who could show her that love and violence were not opposites but dance partners, moving together in terrible harmony.

My phone buzzes.

Another text from Dad:

Working late again. Don't wait up. Keep doors locked.

He's been distant since he found me by my car that night, pretending to be lost.

I don't think he believed me, but the alternative—that I was with Cain—is something he can't process.

So, we exist in this state of willful ignorance, both pretending things are normal when nothing will ever be normal again.

He's been spending more time at the station, pouring over Jake's personnel file.

I know because I saw it on his desk this morning at the house, pages of complaints highlighted in yellow.

He’s so invested in this that he’s bringing his work home with him, which is unusual.

Sarah's name circled in red. My father's own signature on the bottom of reports dismissing the allegations.

The weight of his complicity aging him by the day.

The house feels different now.

Not like a sanctuary but a stage, waiting for the next act to begin.

Every shadow could be Cain watching.