🖤 THE COLLECTOR
"Some things are never truly lost. They're simply waiting… to be collected."
She ran barefoot through the woods, branches slashing at her skin like punishment.
The night was cold — unnaturally cold for late September — but she felt nothing. Not the damp dirt clinging to her legs, not the burn in her lungs, not even the blood dripping steadily from her palm. Only the sharp pulse of terror that pounded behind her eyes.
She didn't know where she was anymore. Somewhere between the trees and the dark.
Somewhere he had brought her.
The forest swallowed her screams, greedy and unkind. Moonlight flickered through the leaves like the last sputter of a dying bulb. Somewhere behind her, she heard the snap of a twig.
No footsteps.
Just the sound of her own breath catching.
Then a voice — smooth, velvety, horrifying in its calm.
"Wrong turn, little one."
She froze.
The voice wasn't angry. Worse — it was disappointed.
He stepped into view like a shadow stepping out of another shadow, face half-hidden beneath the hood of his coat, the other half caught in the moonlight. He wasn't breathing heavily. He hadn't been chasing her.
He'd simply been there.
Watching.
Waiting.
Collecting.
She tried to back away, but her foot caught on a root and she crumpled to the ground, trembling. His boots moved closer, slow and patient. Like he had all the time in the world.
And maybe he did.
He knelt beside her, brushing a strand of blood-matted hair from her cheek. His touch was cold. Reverent. Like she was a relic instead of a girl.
"I thought you might be her," he whispered, almost regretfully. "But you cry too easily."
A knife gleamed briefly in his hand — not raised. Just...present. Like a reminder.
"She won't run from me," he said, more to himself than to her. "She'll come to me willingly."
He stood, turning his back to her as if she no longer mattered.
And maybe she didn't.
"Sleep now," he murmured.
Then silence.
Somewhere, miles away, a quiet librarian turned off the porch light of her small apartment. Unaware that, from the other side of the street, a camera shutter clicked once.
She was perfect.
[End of Prologue]