Page 187 of Little Spider

Just to say: I’m still here. And I know what I’ve done.

She falls asleep before I do.

Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she just stops moving, stops breathing so loudly, and lets her body go soft when it trusts it won’t be touched.

That’s a kind of sleep too.

My hand rests on her back, steady, not stroking. Just there. A point of contact, like maybe my palm, can convince her skin it’s safe.

I don’t deserve that faith.

Not after what I’ve done.

But she’s here anyway.

And I’m not sure if it makes me feel alive or if it just deepens the ache that never fucking leaves.

The room is quiet. The kind of quiet you can’t buy, only earn with exhaustion and ruin. Her breathing, the faint hum of the refrigerator, the distant wet shuffle of tires on the street outside—nothing else. Even the city’s gone still for us.

My eyes stay open.

They always do when it’s real.

I trace the lines in the ceiling, then lower my gaze to my hand. The right one. Still resting lightly against her spine.

Venator.

The tattoo looks darker tonight. Or maybe that’s the blood pooling beneath the memory.

I was sixteen when I inked it onto my own skin with a stolen needle and a bottle of industrial ink meant for machine parts. Latin. Hunter. A word I carved in because I thought it meant I’d never be prey again.

I thought it made me brave.

But really, it made me something else.

That night, after they found her—Brielle—curled in the alley, crying and cut and torn from the inside out—I followed the whispers back to his name. The man who did it. The one nobodycould prove. I broke into his home while the city slept and carved my name across his face so he’d never forget who was watching.

Only I didn’t use my name.

I used Venator.

I didn’t want to be myself when I did it.

I wanted to be a shadow.

A punishment.

A myth.

And it worked. For a while.

Every monster I chased, every echo I silenced—I wore the name like a shield.

Until it started following me back.

Until the line between the men I hunted and the one I became stopped being a line at all.

She was never supposed to be part of that.