Blackness.
Then... pain. An explosive, white-hot, deafening impact.
Thomas gasped, a ragged, desperate sound that tore through his throat. His body lurched, a violent, full-torso convulsion. The world... was wrong. It wasn't black. It was beige.
He was on his back, staring at a white, acoustic-tiled ceiling. The air was still. There was no flashing neon, no carnival music, no... stench. The air smelled of... nothing. A faint, sterile hint of lemon polish and old paper.
But the pain... the pain was real.
A dull, throbbing, phantom ache radiated from the right side of his head, just above the temple. It was the echo of the kick. The memory of her boot, so vivid, so precise, that his own nerves recreated the trauma, a perfect, ghostly replay. It always felt real.
'It's not. It's not real.'
His heart was a frantic drum, pounding a desperate rhythm against his ribs, still convinced it was in the alley. The cold, clammy sweat of the nightmare coated his skin, but the room's air maintained a neutral, controlled temperature.
He was lying on a couch. The leather was smooth and cool against his neck, a stark contrast to the gritty, vomit-slicked pavement his mind had just left.
He sat up, too fast.
The movement was a mistake.
The phantom pain in his head flared, and the sterile, beige room spun. He grunted, his hand instinctively flying to his temple, pressing against the spot, as if he could physically hold the memory at bay.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
He was... older. A few years older. The man from the alley had been terrified, but this one... this one was just tired. More gaunt, the skin stretched tighter over his cheekbones. The dark, haunted circles under his eyes were no longer a symptom of a few bad nights; they were a permanent, etched-in feature.
"Take it easy, Thomas."
The voice was not Lilith's.
It was calm. Measured. It was the sound of practised, professional empathy. A woman's voice, slightly older, with a smooth, modulated tone that was designed, specifically, not to be alarming.
He opened his eyes.
The room snapped into focus. A psychiatrist's office.
It was always a psychiatrist's office.
This one was all soft, muted colours—beige walls, a non-descript blue rug, a few framed, abstract prints that meant nothing. A heavy, dark wood desk sat in the corner, and across from him, in a comfortable, high-backed armchair, sat the voice.
Dr Grace Milgram.
She was in her early fifties, her short, practical brown hair streaked with strands of grey at the temples. She watched him through simple, professional glasses, her eyes observant but... placid. She was a picture of non-threatening stability, from her neat blouse to her oatmeal-coloured cardigan.
She offered him a small, gentle smile.
"Reliving trauma is always difficult," she said, her voice the same, unwavering, soothing pitch. "Even when we know it's in the past. Your body... it doesn't always know the difference."
Thomas let his hand fall from his head. He didn't answer.
'Trauma,' he thought, the word echoing in his mind with a bitter, hollow sound. 'That's... an understatement. A pathetic, clinical, fucking understatement.'
He stared at his own hands, resting on his knees. They were trembling. Just slightly. He balled them into fists, angry at the betrayal.
Dr Milgram made a slight, almost imperceptible sound, the sound of a professional noting a detail. She leaned forward, just slightly.
"What did you see this time?"
Her tone was patient. She wasn't asking if he had seen something. She was asking what.
Thomas took a breath, his heart rate finally... finally... beginning to slow. He let the adrenaline recede. He pushed the nightmare down, back into the black, iron-bound box in his mind where it lived.
He spoke. His voice was a dry, rasping thing, alien in the quiet room.
"The carnival."
He didn't need to elaborate. She knew. She had the files. She had the hours upon hours of his own, detached, clinical retellings.
"The house of mirrors," he continued, his voice flat, emotionless. "The... the clearing. Dr. Aris."
He looked past her, at the wall, at the meaningless, swirling blue-and-grey print.
"It was... a couple of years ago. But..."
'It feels like yesterday,' he thought. 'It feels like thirty seconds ago. It feels like it's happening right now, in the next room.'
He didn't say that. He just... stopped.
Dr Milgram nodded, her gaze empathetic. She was a professional listener. She absorbed his broken, fragmented statements and filed them away.
"Was there anything... new... in the recollection?" she probed, her voice still gentle. "Anything different? Sometimes, when we're... stuck... on a memory, our mind is trying to show us a new detail. Anything she said to you... did anything strike you as... as odd, this time?"
Thomas was silent. His mind went back. Back to the alley. Back to the flashing red and blue, to her, looming over him, her voice a cruel, intimate hiss.
'You're a finder... you don't stop things.'
That was true.
'What does it take... to really find a monster... if not another?'
He felt a cold, familiar dread settle in his stomach, a feeling that had nothing to do with the nightmare's adrenaline. He looked away from the wall, and his tired, bloodshot eyes met hers.
His voice was quiet.
"Dr Milgram..."
He hesitated, the question thick and cancerous on his tongue. He had to ask. He had to hear her answer. Her, the professional. The sane one.
"...do you think I'm a monster?"
The question hung in the air.
The silence in the room suddenly became absolute, thick, and suffocating.
Dr Milgram's expression didn't flinch. Her professional calm was a fortress. She didn't react with shock or pity. She just processed.
She shook her head, a slow, gentle, reassuring motion.
"No, Thomas. I don't," she said, her voice firm, but still kind. "A 'monster' is a title. It's a title we reserve for people who, through their actions, have forfeited their humanity. People like Lilith."
She leaned forward again, her safe expression firmly in place.
"It is not a title for the men who hunt them."
She offered another small, practised smile. "And please, Thomas. We've been seeing each other for... what, six months now? Call me Grace."
The name hung in the air, a polite, useless offering.
Thomas didn't acknowledge it.
He didn't accept her comfort. Her words—"People like Lilith,""the men who hunt them"—were just words. They were the neat, tidy labels of a woman who slept at night, a woman who had never stood in a dark alley and smelled the air change.
Her sanity was a wall between them, an ocean of placid, ignorant water.
He let out a short, harsh breath that was almost a laugh. It was a dry, ugly sound.
He leaned forward, dropping his face into his trembling hands, and pressed his palms hard against his eyes. The beige room vanished, replaced by the familiar, comfortable, swirling blackness behind his eyelids.
He crouched over his lap, his shoulders hunched, a man bracing for a physical blow.
His voice, when he spoke, was a muffled, fractured thing, robbed of all its clinical precision. It was the voice of the man in the alley, not the consultant in the chair.
"Why me?"
He didn't look up. He couldn't.
"Why... why was I chosen? Why could I... find her... when no one... no one else could?"
This was the real question.
This was the cancer.
It wasn't the nightmares, it wasn't the kick, it wasn't even the horror of what she'd done. It was the connection. The grotesque, intimate understanding that had existed between them. The part of him that had resonated with her madness, the part that had allowed him to follow her bloody, intricate path.
'It takes a monster to find one.'
The office was silent.
"Thomas..."
Grace's voice was different. The practised, soothing melody was gone. It was... careful. Deliberate. He heard her shift in her armchair, the sound of leather creaking.
"...I have always respected your intellect. Your... process. So I am not going to offer you a simple, placating answer. I am going to be honest with you. Is that... acceptable?"
He let out a slow, shuddering breath. He hadn't realised he'd been holding it. He nodded, once, his face still buried in his hands.
"Yes."
"Then... look at me," she said. It was not a command. It was a request.
Slowly... agonisingly... he did. He lifted his head, dropping his hands to his knees. His eyes felt raw, his gaze pleading, stripped of all its defences.
Grace held his gaze. Her professional, placid mask was still there, but her eyes, behind the simple glasses, were sharp, analytical, and... pitying.
"To understand why you... we have to first, clinically, understand her," she said, as if opening a file in her mind. "Eight years ago, an unidentified female serial killer, given the codename 'The Artisan of Truth,' began a spree of... performances... across twelve states."
'Performances. Yes. That's the word she'd use.' Thomas's hands clenched on his knees.
"The official count is thirty-seven victims," Grace continued, her voice a flat recital of fact. "Minimum. The true number is suspected to be... significantly higher. The victims had no apparent connection, at first. A circuit court judge in Oregon. A high-profile philanthropist in Boston. A celebrated neurosurgeon in Chicago. Politicians, academics, artists..."
"Her primary motive," Grace went on, her gaze unwavering, "was believed to be a form of... philosophical correction. A punishment and exposure of hypocrisy."
She held up three fingers, a lecturer at a podium. "Her process, as you were the first to identify, was a three-stage ritual. First, infiltration. She was a genius at social engineering. She could become anyone—a new colleague, a lost friend, a patient—to gain their trust."
'To learn their secrets,' Thomas thought, his stomach churning.
"Second," Grace said, ticking off another finger, "was the game. She didn't just kill. She... deconstructed. She trapped her victims in elaborate, cruel, psychological scenarios, designed to lay their lives, and their specific sins, bare."
"And third..." Her voice softened, the clinical tone wavering, just for a moment, with human revulsion. "...the tableau. She never hid her victims. She... staged them. She created horrific, theatrical, symbolic public displays. Each 'creation'... each... corpse... was a story, a grotesque piece of art telling the world the secret sin the victim had tried to hide."
'Infiltrate. Deconstruct. Display.' It had been his own mantra, the one he'd repeated to a dozen blank-faced, sceptical detectives.
"Her profile was... unprecedented," Grace said, her hands clasping in her lap. "Genius-level intellect. A polymath. She possessed a sophisticated, expert-level understanding of art, philosophy, psychology, and forensics. Her temperament was...perfect."
'A True Psychopath,' Thomas's mind supplied, the old, dry, academic term.
"Extreme narcissistic and 'God' complexes," Grace confirmed, as if reading his thoughts. "She operated with zero... zero... empathy. She saw her victims as a... 'canvas.' She was patient. She was meticulous. She was, for five years, forensically flawless."
Grace paused, her throat visibly dry after the long, grim monologue. She reached to the side table, her hand closing around a simple glass of water. She lifted it, but paused, her eyes meeting his over the rim.
"Does this sound familiar, Thomas?"
Thomas felt a cold, bitter smile touch his lips. It was a dead, hollow thing. He nodded once.
"Of course," he rasped. "It's the report I wrote."
'Almost all of it, anyway.'
He stared at the water glass.
The real end, the one that wasn't in the file... the one that wasn't in the newspapers... it was so much simpler. So much... stupider.
'She died from an aneurysm.'
The thought was so absurd, so... anticlimactic... that he almost laughed again. All that monstrous, untouchable genius... all that pain, all that art and in the end, a weak blood vessel in her brain had just popped.
'By some miracle. Some... divine justice. Or just a cosmic, dark joke. I don't care.'
He had found her again, last year. Not in a maze. Not in an allegorical trap. In a shitty, rented apartment, dead on the floor.
Dead for two days. She had died... alone.
But not before she had used him. Not before she had dragged him through two dozen of her... tableaus. Not before she had seen him coming, seen him watching, and had started creating her art for him. An audience of one.
Not before she had systematically, piece by piece, broken his mind, just to see what was inside.
Grace put the glass down. Her expression softened back into that of the kind, empathetic doctor.
"Exactly… you were the one who wrote that profile, Thomas," she said, her voice gentle, reassuring. "You were the one who saw the pattern. You were the one who understood her psychology when no one else could."
She shook her head, a flicker of genuine sadness in her eyes. "A prodigy hunting a monster. And now... she's dead, and you're here. The only one who survived to see thirty. You caught her, Thomas. In the end, you stopped her."
She leaned forward, her voice full of a genuine, if misplaced, conviction.
"You're a hero. Even if you can't... feel like one right now. You tried your best. You did your best. You did all that you could."
Thomas's gaze dropped back to his own clenched fists.
'I didn't, though.'
He didn't say it. He didn't have the energy. But the thought was a cold, hard, heavy stone in his gut.
'I didn't do my best. I didn't stop her. A blood clot stopped her. And I... I just... watched. I froze. At the end. Every. Single. Time.'
The silence descended again, heavier this time. It was a thick, oppressive blanket.
Grace glanced at the watch on her wrist. A small, gentle, professional smile returned to her face. The mask was back in place.
"Well... it looks like we have about thirty minutes left," she said, her voice back to its normal, soothing, beige tone.
"Was there... anything else... you wanted to discuss in today's session?"