Five Years Before Blackwood
Wren
I don't remember deciding to go inside.
I was bored. I was always bored. The world moved too slowly, people were too predictable, and nothing—nothing—made my chest feel anything except the familiar empty ache that had been there as long as I could remember. I'd been walking past the university, watching students rush between buildings, and the doors were open. Warm air spilled out. I followed it.
The lecture hall was huge. Rows and rows of seats sloping down to a podium. Graduate students with coffee cups and laptops. I slipped into the back row, into the corner where the light didn't reach. Stolen hoodie pulled over my hands. Invisible. Safe.
I didn't expect anything.
Then he walked in.
Tall. Dark-haired. Young for a professor—maybe late twenties. His face gave nothing away. Gray-green eyes swept the room once, taking inventory, missing nothing. He moved like someone who'd been hurt and decided the world would never see it.
He didn't smile.
"I'm Dr. Cassian Thorne," he said. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the room like a blade. "Today we're going to talk about why people kill."
I stopped breathing.
For the next hour, I didn't move. Didn't blink. Didn't exist anywhere except inside his words.
He didn't talk about monsters. He talked about people. Broken people. Lonely people. People who'd been hurt so badly they forgot how to feel anything except rage, or nothing at all. He talked about the ones who killed because they couldn't stop themselves, and the ones who killed because they'd never learned why they shouldn't. He talked about the ones who wore masks so long they forgot there was a face underneath.
And somewhere in that hour, something shifted in my chest.
For the first time in my life, I wasn't bored.
I wasn't empty.
I was seen.
Not because he looked at me—he didn't, not once. But because someone in this cold, hollow world understood. Understood that darkness wasn't always evil. That broken wasn't always bad. That sometimes people did terrible things not because they were monsters, but because no one had ever taught them how to be human.
When the lecture ended, I stayed in my seat while everyone else filed out. I watched him gather his notes. Watched those steady hands close a leather folder. Watched him pause at the podium and stare at something only he could see.
I wanted to go to him.
Wanted to say something—anything—that would make those gray-green eyes turn my way.
But I didn't. I was small and invisible and wearing a stolen hoodie, and men like Cassian Thorne didn't look at boys like me.
So I left.
But I took something with me.
A name. A face. A feeling I couldn't name and couldn't forget.
I carried it with me through the years that followed. Through the foster homes and the running and the petty crimes that became something worse. Through the nights when the emptiness was so loud I thought I'd drown. Through the moment everything went wrong—the moment they put me in handcuffs, the moment they locked me away.
I carried Cassian Thorne's face like a candle in a dark room.
And when they transferred me to Blackwood Psychiatric Hospital for evaluation, when I saw the name on the door of the doctor assigned to my case, I finally smiled.
Dr. Cassian Thorne.
I'd been waiting five years.
Now, finally, the waiting was over.