Rain smeared the blood on the classroom window like wet paint.
Detective Maria Reyes knelt beside the body, her flashlight carving shadows across the girl's pale face—lips parted in a silent scream, a single crimson rose clamped between her teeth. The school's empty halls hummed with the aftershock of sirens, but Maria's focus snagged on the note tucked under the rose's thorny stem. Two lines, typed in jagged font:
"Love is a game of hide and seek. You'll never find me, but I'll always be watching... –C.P."
The security footage, they'd tell her later, showed nothing. Just static, then a flicker of a boy's silhouette—hooded, gloved, vanishing like smoke. But Maria knew. This wasn't a crime of passion. It was a calling card.
Across town, Ethan Voss traced Lily Mercer's name in the fogged-up window of his bedroom, breath steady, hands steady. The police scanner chirped on his desk, spitting updates about the "deranged killer" loose in Ravens Hollow. He smiled. Deranged was such a lazy word. They didn't understand the artistry of it—the way fear could bend a person, reshape them, make them yours.
He'd left the rose for her, of course. Not the girl in the classroom. That was just... practice. A warm-up. Lily would come later, when she was ready. When she finally saw him for what he was: not the quiet boy in the back row, but the architect of her unraveling.
His phone buzzed. A news alert: "High School Honors Student Missing—Foul Play Suspected." Ethan swiped it away, pulled up Lily's Instagram instead.
There she was, laughing in a sunflower field, oblivious to the strings already tightening around her.
"Soon," he whispered, pressing a rose petal to the screen.
Somewhere, a clock ticked.
And the game began.