**Chapter sixteen: The Rules of Normalcy**
*Five years.*
Five years since they'd carried those broken girls out of Voss's basement. Five years since the mass funerals—the unnamed girl finally laid to rest under a headstone that read *"Beloved. Remembered."* Five years since the city tried to forget.
Luna stood at the kitchen window, watching John kneel in the backyard grass, helping their two-year-old daughter chase fireflies. The scars on his wrists caught the golden light—thick and ropey where Voss's scalpels had found him during that final confrontation.
*Her husband.* The word still sent warmth through her chest. John had insisted on marrying her the moment the last victim was buried. *"Almost losing you once was enough,"* he'd said, sliding the ring onto her finger with hands that no longer shook.
A perfect life. A *normal* life.
The glass of water in Luna's hand trembled.
She didn't trust normal.
Behind her, the radio murmured the evening news—another missing girl, last seen near the abandoned train yard. Luna's fingers drifted to the scar beneath her collarbone. The cops had scrubbed Voss's name from the records, but she remembered.
*So did the cold thing inside her.*
*"Mommy?"*
Luna turned so fast she sloshed water onto the floor.
Lilian stood in the doorway, firefly guts smeared across her tiny palms like glitter. Her dark curls were wild from running, her cheeks flushed pink. But her eyes—
Her eyes were *wrong.*
*"The man in the garden says you're not supposed to remember,"* Lilian said, tilting her head. *"But I told him you do."*
The glass slipped from Luna's grip.
It shattered.
John appeared behind Lilian, his cop instincts flaring at the sound. "Everything okay in—?"
Luna couldn't speak.
Because hovering just over John's shoulder, visible only in the black reflection of the microwave door—
—stood Elias Voss.
*Smiling.*