Aya
The air in the Mitso forest had grown so cold I could see my own breath hitching in front of me like a frantic ghost. Beside me, the man who called himself the real Kaito Mori stood as still as the trees. His scarred face was a testament to a decade of hiding, a life stolen and burned until only the embers remained.
"He's here," Kaito whispered.
I didn't need him to tell me. The silence of the woods had changed. It wasn't the peaceful silence of nature anymore; it was the suffocating, artificial silence that precedes a surgical incision.
A figure emerged from the thicket of cedars. Detective Ishii didn't look like a man who had escaped a prison cell. He looked like a man who had never been in one. He was wearing a long grey overcoat, his silver hair neatly combed, his expression as calm as a lake before a storm. He wasn't even breathing hard.
In his hand, he held a heavy service weapon. It looked like an extension of his arm.
"Aya," Ishii said, his voice carrying that same grandfatherly warmth that had once made me feel safe. "I told you not to come back to the tree. Curiosity really is a terminal illness in the Takeda family."
"You killed her," I said, my voice surprisingly steady. I held the USB drive up between my thumb and forefinger. "You didn't just hide the killer. You created him. You forced that boy to break, and when he didn't break the way you wanted, you tried to burn the evidence."
Ishii chuckled, a sound that made my skin crawl. He stepped into the clearing, his eyes flicking momentarily to the scarred man beside me.
"Ah, the real Kaito," Ishii mused. "I must admit, your resilience is the only variable I failed to calculate. You should have stayed in the fire, Kaito-kun. It would have been much less painful for everyone involved."
"The experiments are over, Ishii," Kaito said, his voice raspy but firm. "Aya has the files. The world will know what you did at Tokyo Central. They'll know about my mother. They'll know about the basement."
Ishii stopped ten feet away. He raised the gun, pointing it directly at my forehead. "The world only knows what is reported. And the report for today will say that Aya Takeda, overcome by the trauma of her sister's killer's death, returned to the woods to take her own life. And the 'stalker' in the yellow raincoat? He'll be found nearby, the tragic culprit who pushed her over the edge."
"You're obsessed with the report," I spat. "With the 'perfection' of the record. But you're just a murderer, Ishii. A pathetic old man playing God with children's lives."
Ishii's finger tightened on the trigger. "God is just a surgeon with a bigger theater, Aya. Now, give me the drive."
I looked at the oak tree. I looked at the hole I had dug—the same spot where Sakura had hidden the truth ten years ago. She had died to protect this. She had been the only one brave enough to stand up to him, and she had paid for it with her heart. Literally.
"No," I said.
Ishii sighed, a sound of genuine disappointment. "Very well."
Before he could fire, Kaito lunged. He didn't have a weapon, but he had ten years of concentrated rage. He slammed into Ishii's side, the two men tumbling into the dirt. The gun went off—a deafening roar that sent the remaining crows screaming into the sky—but the bullet went wide, striking the trunk of the oak tree.
I didn't run. Not this time.
I dove for the gun, which had been knocked out of Ishii's hand and slid across the wet leaves. My fingers brushed the cold metal just as Ishii kicked me in the ribs. The pain was blinding, a white-hot flash that turned my vision to static. I gasped for air, crawling through the mud.
Ishii was on top of Kaito now, his hands around the younger man's throat. He was stronger than he looked, fueled by a clinical, cold-blooded desperation.
"You were always a failure, Kaito!" Ishii snarled. "Just like your mother! You lacked the vision to see the beauty in the dark!"
I reached the gun. My hand closed around the grip. It felt heavier than I expected. I rolled onto my back, pointing it at the two struggling figures.
"Stop!" I screamed. "Stop or I'll shoot!"
Ishii didn't stop. He squeezed harder. Kaito's face was turning a bruised purple, his hands clawing weakly at Ishii's sleeves.
"You won't do it, Aya," Ishii choked out, his eyes locked on mine. "You're a designer. You create things. You don't destroy them. You don't have the stomach for the blood."
He was right. My finger was shaking on the trigger. My heart was thumping against my ribs like a trapped bird. Everything in my upbringing, everything in my nature, told me to lower the weapon. To wait for the 'authorities'. To be the victim.
But then I saw Sakura's face in my mind. Not the face in the jar. Not the face on the news. I saw the girl who used to braid my hair. I saw the girl who had looked a monster in the eye and told him he was sick.
She hadn't been afraid. Why should I be?
"This isn't for me," I whispered.
I didn't aim for his head. I didn't want a 'perfect' kill. I aimed for the shoulder—the part of him that held the brush, the part that held the scalpel.
Bang.
The recoil sent a shockwave up my arm. Ishii let out a sharp cry of pain and slumped sideways, clutching his shoulder. Blood, dark and real, began to seep through his grey overcoat.
Kaito scrambled away, gasping for air, his chest heaving.
I stood up, the gun still trained on Ishii. I walked toward him, my boots squelching in the mud. He was whimpering now, the 'Sensei' reduced to a wounded animal.
"The report is going to be a little different today, Ishii," I said.
I pulled my phone out with my free hand. I didn't call the local police. I called the national press line of the Mainichi Shimbun. I had a contact there—someone who had been trying to dig into the Mori family for years.
"My name is Aya Takeda," I said into the phone, my eyes never leaving Ishii's. "I am standing at the Takeda shrine in Mitso. I have evidence of a decade-long conspiracy involving the Metropolitan Police and Tokyo Central Hospital. And I have the man responsible held at gunpoint. If you want the story of the century, you have ten minutes to get a helicopter over these woods."
I hung up.
Ishii looked at me, his face pale from shock and blood loss. "You've ruined it. You've ruined the work."
"The work was garbage," I said.
I turned to Kaito. He was sitting against the oak tree, looking at the sky. For the first time, his scarred face looked... peaceful.
"Is it over?" he asked.
"Not yet," I said. "But the secret isn't buried anymore."
The next hour was a blur of noise and light. The press arrived first, followed by the police—the real police, the ones Ishii couldn't control. They found us in the clearing: a wounded detective, a scarred ghost, and a woman holding a tin box like it was the most precious thing in the world.
As they led Ishii away, he didn't look at me. He looked at the oak tree, his eyes vacant. He had lost his theater. He had lost his subjects.
Kaito was taken to a different ambulance. Before they closed the doors, he looked at me and nodded. A silent thank you from one survivor to another.
I sat on the bumper of an ambulance, a shock blanket draped over my shoulders. The reporter I had called, a sharp-eyed woman named Yuki, was standing in front of me with a microphone.
"Aya-san, the world is going to want to know... after everything you've been through, how do you feel?"
I looked at the woods. I looked at the spot where Sakura had been found ten years ago. I felt the weight of the USB drive in my pocket. It contained the truth, but it wouldn't bring her back. It wouldn't erase the image of the man I had dated, a man who was both a victim and a monster.
"I feel like the surgery is finally over," I said.
Two weeks later.
I stood in my apartment in Tokyo. The boxes were packed. I couldn't stay in this city anymore. Every scalpel in a window, every white coat in a crowd, made my heart skip a beat.
The "Surgeon of Shadows" case had dismantled the board of directors at Tokyo Central. Ishii was awaiting trial, and the man I had known as Kaito Mori—the boy Haruki—had been buried in a quiet grave next to my sister. It was the only 'reunion' I would allow.
The doorbell rang.
I opened it to find a courier. He handed me a small, square package with no return address.
My hands trembled as I opened it.
Inside was a small, hand-carved wooden fox. It was the same design as the statues at the Mitso shrine. And pinned to the bottom was a small note in neat, precise handwriting.
"Precision is a gift, Aya. Use it to build something beautiful. The forest is quiet now."
I walked to the window and looked out at the Tokyo skyline. Somewhere out there, the real Kaito Mori was starting his own life. Or maybe it was someone else.
I picked up my keys and my suitcase. I didn't look back at the apartment. I didn't look back at the shadows.
I had learned one final thing from Freida McFadden's world:
The twist isn't that the monster is real. The twist is that you survived it. And sometimes, surviving is the bravest thing you can ever do.
I stepped out into the hall and closed the door.
The click of the lock was the most perfect sound I had ever heard.