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Table of Contents:

Chapter 1. The Town’s Air Between Hope and Dread

Chapter 2. Red and Turquoise Lights Underwater

Chapter 3. Empty Room on an Isolated Hill

Chapter 4. Rain on Cobblestones, His Unseen Gaze

Chapter 5. Dr. Grundlos’s Voice, My Hollow Feeling

Chapter 6. Midnight Empty Room, Chlorine and Grief

Chapter 7. His Energy Reaching Me Before Dawn

Chapter 8. Salad Bar Talk and Electric Embarrassment

Chapter 9. Marika’s Warning, My Secret Looking Forward

Chapter 10. A Small Gift Changes How I Breathe

Chapter 11. Wet Ferns, His Touch on My Arm

Chapter 12. Footsteps Where No One Walks

Chapter 13. Lentil Steam, Burned Bridges, His Name

Chapter 14. Herb Garden Kiss Where Anyone Could See

Chapter 15. Half-Clothed at the Forest Edge

Chapter 16. Rotting Floorboards, Konstantin’s Sudden Arrival

Chapter 17. Full Supernatural Union Changing Reality

Scene 1

The train window burned against my cheek, summer heat pressing through the glass like a fevered palm. Outside, the Brandenburg countryside blurred past—endless fields of rape and wheat broken only by dark stands of pine that seemed to lean toward the tracks, as if listening. I had not wanted to return to Finsterwalde. But wanting and needing were different creatures entirely, and need had won, dragging me back to this town that sat at the edge of the ancient forest like a last outpost before the world turned wild.

My phone screen still showed the last message from my university advisor: “Take all the time you need, Casilda. We’ll be here when you’re ready.” But I knew I would never be ready. Not after Jan. Not after finding him beneath his dormitory window, his body arranged at angles that bodies shouldn’t know. The counselor had called it a tragedy, but I knew better. It was an escape—one I had contemplated myself during those long nights when my mind felt like a room with no doors.

The train shuddered to a stop at Finsterwalde station, and I hauled my suitcase down from the overhead rack. The platform shimmered with heat mirages, making the few other passengers look like ghosts dissolving at the edges. Already, I could smell it—that particular mixture of pine resin, coal dust, and something earthier, older, that belonged to the forest. It stirred memories I had tried to bury beneath four years of city life and academic ambition.

The walk to my parents’ apartment took me through the town center, past the shuttered textile factory where half the town had once worked, past the Vietnamese restaurant that had somehow survived when everything else closed. The buildings seemed to huddle closer in the heat, their facades peeling like sunburned skin. A few elderly women sat on benches outside the grocery store, fanning themselves with sale flyers. They watched me pass with eyes that recognized but didn’t welcome.

The Plattenbau building where I’d grown up stood at the town’s edge, five stories of prefabricated concrete panels that had been painted a cheerful yellow sometime in the nineties. The paint had faded to the color of old bones. I climbed the stairs—the elevator had been broken since I was twelve—each step echoing in the stairwell like a countdown.

My mother opened the door before I could knock. She looked older, grayer, as if my absence had accelerated time. “Casilda,” she said, and in that single word I heard everything: disappointment, worry, a kind of grim satisfaction that I had failed and come crawling home.

“Hi, Mama.”

She stepped aside to let me in. The apartment smelled exactly as I remembered—cabbage and floor polish and the faint mustiness that came from keeping windows closed against the summer heat. “Your room is ready,” she said. “I didn’t change anything.”

“Thanks.” I dragged my suitcase down the narrow hallway, past the photographs of better times—my high school graduation, my acceptance letter to university proudly framed, my grandfather before his heart gave out last spring. His death had been the excuse I’d given for leaving university, but we both knew it was only that—an excuse.

“Are you hungry?” my mother called after me. “I made rouladen.”

“Maybe later.” I pushed open my bedroom door and was immediately thirteen again. The same narrow bed with its blue coverlet. The same desk where I’d studied for exams that would take me away from here. The same view of the forest, a dark wall beyond the last row of buildings. Even my old posters remained—The Cure and Bauhaus, their gothic aesthetic now feeling less like teenage rebellion and more like prophecy.

I unpacked slowly, placing my few belongings—mostly black clothes, some books, my laptop—into drawers that still held artifacts of my former self. A dried corsage from a school dance. Movie tickets from the single cinema that had closed three years ago. A photo of Jan and me at a university party, both of us smiling with the confidence of people who believed they had escaped their small-town fates.

My mother appeared in the doorway. “Dr. Grundlos called yesterday. He said you can start the therapy group whenever you’re ready.”

I folded a shirt, not meeting her eyes. “How did he know I was coming back?”

“Small town,” she said, which explained everything and nothing. “He’s a good man, Casilda. It might help to talk to someone.”

“I’m fine, Mama.”

She made a sound that could have been agreement or dismissal. “Your father will be home at six. He’s looking forward to seeing you.”

After she left, I stood at the window, pressing my palm against the glass. The forest seemed closer than I remembered, as if it had crept forward while I was gone. The setting sun painted the treetops red, and for a moment I imagined I could see movement between the trunks—shadows that didn’t match the trees casting them.

That evening, I forced myself to walk through town. I needed groceries, I told myself, though really I needed to remember how to exist here. The streets were nearly empty—most people retreated indoors once the sun began its descent. Only teenagers lingered near the döner shop, their laughter sharp and brittle in the thick air.

At the small Edeka supermarket, I filled a basket with vegetables, hummus, the ingredients for the simple vegan meals that had become my refuge. The cashier, a woman my mother’s age, studied me as she scanned my items.

“Casilda Martens,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “I heard you were back.”

“Just for the summer,” I lied.

She nodded slowly. “The town has a way of holding onto people. Even when they think they’ve left.”

I gathered my groceries quickly, eager to escape her knowing look. But as I walked home through the gathering dusk, her words followed me. The shadows between buildings seemed deeper than they should be, and twice I turned, certain I heard footsteps matching mine. But the street behind me was empty except for the first bats emerging from their roosts, their ultrasonic cries just at the edge of hearing.

Back in my room, I put away the groceries and sat on my bed, listening to the familiar sounds of my parents’ evening routine—the television news, the clink of dishes, their quiet voices discussing the day. Outside my window, the forest had become a solid black wall, and I found myself straining to see into its depths, though I couldn‘t say what I was looking for.

I had come home to heal, to find some kind of peace after Jan‘s death and my own unraveling. But as I lay in my narrow childhood bed, listening to the night sounds of a town I‘d tried so hard to escape, I felt something else entirely. Not peace, but a strange anticipation, as if I were waiting for something I couldn’t name. The forest seemed to breathe beyond my window, and I breathed with it, already caught in its rhythm.

Scene 2

The swimming pool building squatted at the edge of town like a relic from another era, its brutalist concrete facade softened only by the neon sign that flickered between turquoise and death. Inside, the chlorine hit me like a slap, sharp and chemical and somehow comforting in its predictability. I had come for the late-night swim session, desperate to wash off the day’s accumulated weight—my mother’s careful silences, the town‘s oppressive familiarity, the heat that clung to my skin like shame.

The woman at the reception desk barely looked up as I paid my three euros. “Changing rooms are to the left,” she muttered, though I remembered perfectly well. Some things about Finsterwalde never changed.

The pool itself was nearly empty, just an elderly man doing a slow breaststroke in the far lane and a mother coaxing her young daughter through swimming lessons in the shallow end. The lighting was pure 1970s ambiance—underwater spots that shifted from red to turquoise to white in a hypnotic cycle, turning the water into something otherworldly. Steam rose from the surface, fogging the high windows until the outside world disappeared entirely.

I slipped into the water and felt my body sigh with relief. The cool embrace was exactly what I needed—something to shock my system back into the present, away from the endless loop of Jan’s last message, the sound his body had made hitting the pavement, my mother’s eyes when I told her I was dropping out.

I swam laps methodically, trying to empty my mind with each stroke. The elderly man left. The mother gathered her protesting daughter and headed for the changing rooms. And then I was alone, or thought I was, until I surfaced at the deep end and found someone else in the water with me.

He seemed to materialize from the shadows near the diving platform—tall, pale, moving through the water with an unsettling quietness. The shifting lights played across his face: red, then turquoise, then white, each color revealing different angles of sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes. His dark hair was slicked back with water, and when our eyes met, I felt something shift in my chest, like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know existed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low and somehow rusty, as if he didn’t use it often. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t,” I lied, treading water, unable to look away from him. He wasn’t my type—too thin, too pale, too still. I had always preferred men like Jan, golden and laughing and full of life. But something about this stranger made my pulse quicken in a way that felt more like fear than attraction.

“I work here,” he said, as if that explained his sudden appearance. “Night maintenance. I check the chemical levels, clean the filters.” He paused, studying me with an intensity that should have been uncomfortable. “You’re new.”

“I’m not new. I grew up here. I’ve been away.”

“Ah.” The red light cycled on, turning the water between us into blood. “Welcome back, then.”

We floated there in silence for a moment, the pool’s circulation system humming beneath us. I should have swum away, continued my laps, but I couldn’t seem to move.

“I‘m Casilda,” I heard myself say.

“Konstantin.” He spoke his name like an apology.

“That’s an old-fashioned name.”

“Yes.” The lights shifted to turquoise, and for a moment his eyes seemed to glow with their own inner light. “My mother had romantic ideas about the past.”

“Is she from here?”

“She lives in the nursing home now. Dementia.” He said it flatly, but something flickered across his face—pain or hunger or both. “I should go. I have work to do.”

But he didn’t move, and neither did I. We stayed suspended in that strange blue light, two bodies in water that suddenly felt too warm, too thick. I became hyperaware of every sensation—the chlorine burning slightly in my nose, the way my swimsuit clung to my skin, the current his subtle movements created.

“Do you swim here often?” I asked, immediately cringing at the cliché.

“Every night.” He tilted his head, studying me. “The water helps me think.”

“About what?”

“About how to stop thinking.” The white light returned, bleaching all color from his skin until he looked carved from marble. “I should go,” he said again, and this time he did, pulling himself from the pool in one fluid motion.

I watched him walk toward a door marked “Staff Only,” his black clothes clinging to his lean frame. At the threshold, he paused and looked back at me. The distance and the steam made it hard to read his expression, but I felt the weight of his gaze like a physical touch.

“Swim well, Casilda,” he said, and then he was gone.

I tried to continue my laps, but my rhythm was broken. Every time I turned my head to breathe, I expected to see him there, watching from the pool‘s edge. The water felt different now—heavier, more resistant, as if it were trying to hold me. After ten more minutes, I gave up and headed for the changing room.

The walk home was worse than the swimming. The streets were empty, lit only by the occasional streetlamp that created pools of yellow light surrounded by deeper darkness. My wet hair dripped down my back, sending chills through me despite the warm night. And with every step, I felt it—that crawling sensation of being observed.

I turned around twice, certain I would see him following me, but the street remained empty except for a cat that darted between parked cars. Still, the feeling persisted, growing stronger as I climbed the stairs to our apartment.

In my room, I toweled my hair dry and changed into sleeping clothes, but sleep felt impossible. I stood at my window, looking out at the forest, and could have sworn I saw a figure at the tree line, still and watchful. When I blinked, it was gone.

I lay in bed, listening to the night sounds—my father’s snoring, a dog barking somewhere in the distance, the settling of the old building. But beneath it all, I felt something else. A presence. Not malevolent exactly, but intense, focused, as if all of Konstantin’s attention were fixed on me through the walls and distance.

“You’re being ridiculous,” I whispered to myself. “He’s just a strange man who works at the pool. You‘re projecting because you’re vulnerable and sad and looking for distraction.”

But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. Something had happened in that red-blue-white water, something that defied my careful rationality. I thought of his pale skin under the lights, the way he‘d moved through the water without creating ripples, how he’d appeared and disappeared like a fever dream.

I pressed my face into my pillow, trying to chase away the image of his eyes—grey like winter sky, like something ancient and patient and hungry. But it was no use. He was there behind my eyelids, in the rhythm of my pulse, in the very air I breathed.

Somewhere in the forest, an owl called, its cry threading through the summer night like a warning I was already too far gone to heed.

Scene 3

The pool lay still as a corpse beneath the harsh maintenance lights, all its mysterious colors drained away. This was my preferred time—after the last swimmer had gone, when I could move through the building without pretending to breathe, without remembering to blink at human intervals. I pulled the long-handled net through the water, collecting the day’s detritus—hair ties, a forgotten earring, the wrapper from someone’s energy bar. Such mundane tasks helped anchor me to what I had been, before.

But tonight, the routine brought no peace. Her scent still lingered in the chlorinated air—strawberry shampoo and something deeper, warmer, that had nearly undone me in the water. Casilda. Even her name felt dangerous in my mouth, like swallowing broken glass.

I had not meant to enter the pool while she swam. The plan had been simple: wait in the maintenance room until she left, then complete my duties. But I had heard her in the water, the steady rhythm of her strokes, and something in me—the predator, the fool, the desperately lonely man—had overruled sense. Just one look, I had told myself. Just to see her up close.

The moment I slipped into the water, I knew my mistake. Her heartbeat echoed through the liquid medium, amplified until it was all I could hear. The scent of her skin, her blood pumping just beneath the surface, had made my teeth ache with want. And when she had turned and seen me, when her pulse had quickened with that intoxicating mix of fear and interest, I had nearly lost myself entirely.

Three months. That was all the time I’d had to learn control since she—my maker, whose name I never learned—had left me gasping and changed in the forest. Three months of fumbling through this new existence, teaching myself through trial and catastrophic error what I could and could not do. I had made so many mistakes in those early weeks. The drunk man behind the gas station whom I had fed from too deeply, leaving him unconscious but alive—barely. The jogger in the forest whose proximity had sent me fleeing deeper into the trees, afraid of what I might do.

And then, the worst night: standing outside my mother’s room at the nursing home, her familiar scent twisted into something that made my stomach clench with hunger. Through the window, I had watched her sleep, this woman who had sung me lullabies and bandaged my scraped knees, and all I could think about was the blood moving through her fragile veins. I had not returned since.

I checked the chemical levels mechanically, adding chlorine where needed, adjusting the pH. My reflection in the testing kit’s small screen showed what I had become—paler than before, sharper somehow, as if hunger had whittled away everything unnecessary. My eyes had changed the most. Once a simple grey, they now held depths that seemed to shift and swirl, especially when the hunger grew strong.

As it did now, thinking of her.

I had noticed Casilda the day she returned to town. Not intentionally—I tried to avoid noticing anyone—but she had walked past the pool just as I arrived for my shift, and something about her had made me stop. Perhaps it was the weight she carried, visible in the set of her shoulders. Perhaps it was the way she looked at the forest, as if she heard it calling too. Or perhaps it was simply that I was weak, and she was beautiful in her sadness, and I had been alone so very long.

Since then, I had watched. I told myself it was for her safety—the town held other dangers besides me. But that was a lie I couldn’t swallow, even with my newfound ability to deceive myself. I watched because I was hungry for more than blood. I watched because she made me remember what it felt like to want something beyond mere survival.

Tonight in the pool, when she had said my name, I had felt something crack inside me. The careful walls I had built, the distance I maintained from all human contact, had trembled. She had looked at me without running, had stayed in the water despite every instinct that should have screamed danger. And for a moment, I had imagined what it would be like to be normal again, to be just a man meeting a woman in a pool, with nothing more dangerous between us than the possibility of rejection.

But I was not just a man. I was a thing that fed on blood, that could hear her heartbeat from across the building, that had to lock myself away during the full moon when the hunger grew teeth. And worse—I was new to this condition, unstable, unpredictable. My maker had left me with nothing but hunger and enhanced senses, no guidance for navigating this existence.

I moved to the pump room, checking the filters with unnecessary thoroughness. The mechanical hum helped mask the sound of her heartbeat, which I could still track as she moved through her apartment eight blocks away. This was what terrified me most—not just my obsession, but how my interest might serve as a beacon to others. The forest held older things than me, creatures that had learned to hide in the spaces between civilization‘s cracks. My maker had been one of them, and she had chosen me for reasons I still didn’t understand.

If they noticed my fixation on Casilda, if they decided she was interesting because I found her so...

I gripped the pipe wrench hard enough to bend it, then forced myself to loosen my hold. Control. I needed control. But how could I maintain it when every cell in my body pulled toward her? When I could taste her scent on the air even through the chlorine? When the thought of never seeing her again felt like a second death?

I finished my duties and left through the staff exit, stepping into the pre-dawn darkness. The town slept, but I could hear its collective heartbeat—all those lives pulsing behind thin walls, unaware of what walked among them. I should leave Finsterwalde, I knew. Pack my few belongings and disappear before I did something irreversible.

But even as I thought it, my feet turned toward her street. Just to check, I told myself. Just to make sure she was safe. The lie came so easily now, smooth as water, cold as my skin had become.

In the distance, a wolf howled—not a normal wolf, but something that wore wolf shape when it suited. A reminder that I was not the only predator in these woods, and perhaps not even the most dangerous.

But I was the one focused on Casilda Martens, and that made me dangerous enough.

Scene 4

The knife slipped through the cucumber with a sound like whispered secrets, each slice falling onto the metal container with mechanical precision. I had been working at the Natural Balance Café for three days now, and already the routine felt like a liturgy I performed while my real self floated somewhere near the ceiling, watching. Chop, arrange, replenish. Check the sneeze guard for fingerprints. Refill the hummus. Smile at customers who remembered me from before, their eyes full of questions I wouldn’t answer.

“Casilda, can you bring up more tomatoes from the walk-in?” Petra, the owner, barely looked at me as she spoke, too busy arranging quinoa salads in the display case.

I nodded and headed for the cooler, grateful for the excuse to escape the dining area’s chatter. But even in the cold storage, surrounded by boxes of organic produce and the hum of refrigeration, I felt it—that persistent sensation of being observed. My skin prickled with awareness, as if someone were tracing their fingers along my spine without quite touching.

It had been three days since the pool. Three days of feeling Konstantin’s presence everywhere and nowhere, like a melody I couldn’t quite place. I would turn, certain I’d glimpsed him in my peripheral vision, only to find empty air. At night, I stood at my window and searched the tree line, but saw only darkness and the occasional flutter of bat wings.

“You’re losing it,” I muttered, hefting the box of tomatoes. But my body betrayed my rational mind—pulse quickening at shadows, breath catching at the sound of footsteps that matched no visible person.

The afternoon heat hit me like a physical weight when I left work. Hauptstraße shimmered with mirages, the asphalt soft beneath my feet. I walked slowly, telling myself I was in no hurry to return to my parents’ apartment and the careful silence that filled it. But really, I was listening, waiting, every nerve attuned to the possibility of encounter.

An elderly man nodded as I passed—Herr Kaufmann, who had run the hardware store until it closed. “Hot enough for you?” he asked, the same question everyone asked, as if acknowledging the heat might somehow diminish it.

“I’d forgotten how summer feels here,” I replied.

“Different from the city, yes? Here, the heat has nowhere to go. It just builds and builds until...” He made a gesture like something exploding.

I forced a smile and continued walking, but his words followed me. Building and building. Yes, that was exactly how it felt—this strange tension that had taken root in my chest since meeting Konstantin, growing stronger with each passing hour.

At the small park near the town center, I sat on a bench and pulled out my phone. Dr. Grundlos had texted, asking how I was settling in, reminding me about the therapy group that started next week. I stared at his words, trying to summon some feeling beyond polite disinterest.

He was everything a woman should want—stable, educated, genuinely concerned for others’ wellbeing. During our initial consultation, he had listened to me talk about Jan‘s death with such focused attention, his brown eyes warm with professional compassion. He had a nice face, I told myself. Kind. Safe. The sort of face you could wake up to for forty years without surprise or disappointment.

So why did the thought of him leave me so cold?

I typed a brief response, saying I was fine, that I would attend the group. My fingers hesitated over the send button as I felt it again—that watched feeling, stronger now. The park was nearly empty in the afternoon heat, just a mother pushing a stroller along the path, but I knew with absolute certainty that I was not alone.

“This is ridiculous,” I said aloud, hitting send with more force than necessary. “He’s just a pool maintenance worker. You’re projecting because you’re vulnerable and—“

A crow cawed from a nearby tree, cutting off my self-lecture. It stared at me with one black eye, head cocked as if listening. When I stood to leave, it followed, hopping from branch to branch, maintaining a careful distance.

At the grocery store, I moved through the aisles like a sleepwalker, filling my basket with things I didn’t really want. The fluorescent lights hummed with a frequency that made my teeth ache. Other shoppers moved around me, their conversations a distant buzz. I felt separate from them all, as if a glass wall had descended between me and the normal world.

“Casilda? Is that you?”

I turned to find Frau Weber, my mother’s friend from church. She examined me with the frank curiosity of someone who had known me since birth.

“You look different,” she announced. “Thinner. Are you eating enough?”

“I’m fine.”

“Your mother worries, you know. She says you spend too much time alone.” Frau Weber leaned closer, lowering her voice. “A young woman shouldn‘t isolate herself. It’s not healthy. Not natural.”

I murmured something noncommittal and escaped to the checkout, but her words echoed. Not natural. No, nothing about the past few days had felt natural. Not the way my skin seemed to hum with electricity. Not the dreams that weren’t quite dreams, where pale hands reached for me through dark water. Not the way I found myself holding my breath, listening for footsteps that never quite materialized.

The walk home took me past the pool. I told myself I wouldn‘t look, wouldn’t slow down, but my body had other ideas. The building squatted in the evening light, its windows dark. Was he in there now, testing chemicals, skimming debris from the water? Did he think of me the way I thought of him—constantly, helplessly, against all logic?

The crow from the park perched on the pool’s fence, watching me with unnerving focus. I quickened my pace, but I could feel its gaze following me all the way home.

In my room, I dropped my groceries on the desk and went straight to the window. The forest spread before me, darker than the darkening sky. Somewhere in that green darkness, I felt sure, eyes were watching. Not malevolent, exactly, but intense with a focus that made my breath shallow and quick.

My phone buzzed. Dr. Grundlos again, saying he looked forward to seeing me at the group, that he thought I would find it helpful to connect with others who understood loss.

I set the phone aside without responding. Others who understood loss. But what I felt wasn’t loss anymore—it was something else entirely. A gaining, perhaps. A filling up with something I couldn‘t name, something that whispered to me in the space between heartbeats.

The crow cawed once more, closer now, and I realized it had followed me home. It perched on the balcony railing of the apartment below, its black eye fixed on my window. When I finally closed the curtains, I could still feel its gaze, and beyond it, another gaze that burned even through walls and distance and the thick summer air that pressed against the glass like a living thing.

Building and building, until something had to break.

Scene 5

The therapy center occupied a renovated textile factory on the better side of town, its brick facade scrubbed clean of decades of soot until it gleamed like freshly exposed bone. Inside, everything whispered wellness—potted plants, essential oil diffusers, motivational posters in sans-serif fonts. The receptionist smiled at me with professional warmth as I signed in, and I found myself missing the honest indifference of the swimming pool’s ticket booth.

“Dr. Grundlos is ready for you,” she chirped, gesturing toward a door marked with his nameplate.

I had dressed carefully for this appointment—a sundress instead of my usual black shorts, hair pulled back neatly rather than in its perpetual messy bun. Playing the part of someone who was trying, someone who wanted to get better. But as I knocked and entered his office, I felt like a child wearing her mother’s clothes, pretending at adulthood.

“Casilda.” He rose from behind his desk, and something in the way he said my name—possessive, pleased—made me want to step backward. “Please, sit. Would you like some water? Tea?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

He was handsome in that particular way of men who took care of themselves—pressed khakis, a blue shirt that brought out his eyes, hair styled with just enough product to look effortless. Forty-two years old, according to the brief bio on the center’s website. Young for a therapist with his own practice, accomplished in ways that should have impressed me.

“How are you settling back in?” He settled into the chair across from me, notepad balanced on his knee. But his eyes weren‘t on the paper—they were on me, traveling from my face to my bare arms to the hem of my dress with an attention that felt too heavy for professional interest.

“It’s an adjustment,” I said carefully. “The town feels smaller than I remembered.”

“That’s common when we return to childhood spaces. They can’t contain who we’ve become.” He leaned forward slightly, and I caught his cologne—something expensive, assertive. “Tell me about your week. Have you been sleeping?”

I thought of the nights spent at my window, searching the darkness for a pair of grey eyes. “Not well.”

“Nightmares about Jan?”

The question jolted me. I had almost forgotten that Jan’s death was why I was supposedly here. “No. Not nightmares exactly. Just... restlessness.”

“Grief manifests in many ways.” His pen moved across the page, but his gaze never left my face. “Sometimes what we need is to feel grounded again. Connected. Have you been socializing at all?”

“I started working at the Natural Balance Café.”

“That’s wonderful.” His smile was too bright, too eager. “Connection is so important for healing. In fact, I was thinking—there’s a nice coffee shop near here. Perhaps after one of our sessions, we could continue our conversation in a less formal setting?”

The suggestion hung between us, clearly more than professional interest. I should have been flattered. Dr. Konrad Grundlos was successful, attractive, interested in me despite—or perhaps because of—my damaged state. This was what normal looked like, what healthy attraction should feel like.

So why did I feel nothing but a vague discomfort, like wearing shoes that were the right size but the wrong shape?

“I’ll think about it,” I managed.

He nodded, undettered. “Of course. No pressure. I just think you’re a fascinating person, Casilda. Your insights during our last session were remarkablefor someone so young.”

There it was—that assumption of ownership over my thoughts, my story. He spoke as if he had already catalogued me, filed me away in whatever system he used to organize his patients. So different from Konstantin’s sparse words, the way he had looked at me in the pool like I was something dangerous and incomprehensible.

“Tell me,” Dr. Grundlos continued, “have you given any thought to what you want from your time here? What would healing look like for you?”

I stared at the certificates on his wall, all those credentials that proved he knew how minds worked, how to fix broken people. “I don’t know. I suppose I want to feel like myself again.”

“And who is that? Who is the real Casilda?”

The question should have been therapeutic, but from his lips it felt invasive. He wanted me to break open for him, spill my insides across his neat desk so he could arrange the pieces into something that made sense. But what if I didn’t want to make sense? What if I wanted to dissolve into the summer heat, to follow the pull of something wild and inexplicable?

“I’m still figuring that out,” I said.

He wrote something down, nodding sagely. “That‘s perfectly normal. Recovery isn’t linear. But I want you to know—“ He looked up, fixing me with those warm brown eyes that promised safety and understanding and suffocation. “I’m here for you. Not just as your therapist, but as someone who genuinely cares about your wellbeing.”

The session continued for another thirty minutes, his questions gentle but persistent, always circling back to my isolation, my need for connection. He recommended joining the therapy group, perhaps taking up yoga, establishing routines that would anchor me to the world of the living. All sensible advice that felt like trying to cage smoke.

When our time ended, he walked me to the door, his hand hovering near the small of my back without quite touching. “Think about that coffee,” he said. “Sometimes the best healing happens outside these walls.”

I nodded and escaped into the afternoon heat, gulping air like I’d been holding my breath for an hour. The sun beat down mercilessly, but I welcomed its honest brutality after the climate-controlled comfort of his office.

The walk home took me through the old town square, past the fountain that had been dry for as long as I could remember. I sat on its rim, trying to imagine what it would be like to date Dr. Grundlos. Coffee shops and restaurants, discussions about psychology and literature, his hand on my back gradually becoming more familiar. A life mapped out in sensible progressions, each milestone celebrated with appropriate enthusiasm.

The thought made me want to scream.

Instead, I stood and continued home, my shadow stretching long across the cracked pavement. With each step, I felt the hollow sensation growing—not grief for Jan, not depression exactly, but a yearning for something I couldn’t name. Something that didn’t speak in therapeutic terms or offer coffee dates or promise to fix me.

Something that might devour me instead.

At the apartment, I went straight to my room and lay on the bed, still in my sundress that now felt like a costume I couldn’t wait to shed. Outside, the forest waited, patient and dark. And somewhere in this town, Konstantin moved through his night routines, testing chemicals and skimming pools and thinking thoughts I would never guess at.

Dr. Grundlos had asked who the real Casilda was. But lying there in the gathering dusk, I thought maybe the real question was who I was becoming. And whether that person would choose safety or let herself fall into the beautiful, terrible unknown that called to her with every sunset.

The hollow feeling spread through my chest like water finding its level, and I closed my eyes, almost hoping to feel watched again. At least that sensation made me feel real, made me feel chosen by something that didn’t want to fix me but to know me in all my dangerous, unfixable complexity.

Scene 6

The chlorine burned my nostrils—one of the few sensations that still registered as discomfort in this new body. Three a.m., and the pool building felt like a mausoleum, all concrete and echoes and the persistent drip of a faucet I kept meaning to fix. I moved through my maintenance routine like a ghost haunting his own life, checking levels that didn’t need checking, adjusting settings that were already perfect. Anything to keep my hands busy while my mind circled its obsession like water down a drain.

Casilda.

Even thinking her name sent hunger racing through my veins—not just the blood-hunger that was my constant companion now, but something deeper, more dangerous. A wanting that threatened to crack the careful control I had built these past months.

I had followed her today. Not intentionally, or so I told myself, but my feet had carried me past the Natural Balance Café just as she arrived for her shift. Hidden in the shadows of the closed butcher shop across the street, I had watched her tie her apron, pull her hair back, begin the ritual of preparing vegetables. Such ordinary movements, yet they mesmerized me. The way she frowned slightly when concentrating. The absent way she pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. The pulse at her throat, visible even from my distance.

The crow had appeared then—the same one that seemed to shadow her everywhere now. It perched on the café‘s awning and fixed me with one black eye, as if it knew exactly what I was. As if it were reporting back to something. I had fled then, but the bird’s knowing gaze followed me all day.

“I’m not hurting her,” I said aloud to the empty pool, my voice echoing off the tiles. “I’m just... watching.”

But even I could hear the lie in that. Every night I stood beneath her window. Every day I tracked her movements through town. I knew her routines now—the way she walked to avoid the busier streets, her preferred bench in the park, how she unconsciously rubbed her wrist when anxious. I knew things about her that no one should know without permission.

I was violating her with my attention, and the shame of it burned worse than chlorine, worse than hunger. Yet I couldn’t stop. The thought of not knowing where she was, of not being able to sense her heartbeat somewhere in this town, sent panic racing through me like poison.

And tonight had been the worst. I had felt her emotional state during her appointment with that therapist—Dr. Grundlos, whose scent marked him as someone who took what he wanted and called it helping. The hollow feeling that had radiated from her as she sat in his too-bright office had nearly driven me to break down his door. She was trying so hard to feel something for him, to want the safety he represented. But her body knew better. Her body pulled toward darkness, toward me, and the knowledge of it made my teeth ache with need.

I gripped the edge of the pool until the concrete cracked under my fingers. This had to stop. I was a danger to her—not just physically, though that threat was real enough. My obsession was becoming visible to others, sending ripples through the supernatural ecosystem of this place.

The forest had been restless lately. Things that usually kept to the deep woods were venturing closer to town. Last night, I had caught a scent that made my new instincts scream warnings—something old, something that had walked these woods since before the town existed. My maker had left me with just enough knowledge to recognize the danger: the old ones didn’t appreciate new vampires drawing attention.

And I was drawing attention. Every night I watched Casilda, every time I let my hunger focus on her like a beam of cold light, I broadcast my weakness to anything with eyes to see. She was becoming my territory in their eyes, and territories required defending. How long before something decided to test me? How long before my weakness put her in real danger?

I should leave. The thought came as it did every night, and as always, I even took steps toward it. I finished my maintenance duties and walked to the staff room where my few possessions waited in a locker. My hands moved mechanically, gathering things. The photograph of my mother. The spare clothes. The envelope of cash I kept for emergencies.

I made it as far as the parking lot before the pain started.

It began as a tightness in my chest, as if invisible hands were squeezing my dead heart. Each step away from the town center, away from her, intensified the sensation until I was doubled over beside the dumpsters, gasping unnecessarily. My body shook with the effort of fighting the pull, that invisible thread that connected me to her whether I wanted it or not.

“Please,” I whispered to no one, to the night, to whatever force had made me this way. “Let me go. Let me leave her in peace.”

But the night gave no answer except the distant howl of something that wasn’t quite a wolf. And my traitorous feet were already turning, carrying me back toward the town center, toward her street, toward the building where she slept unaware of the monster who couldn’t stay away.

I found myself at my usual post—the shadow between two buildings that gave me a clear view of her window. The curtains were drawn, but I could sense her there, restless in sleep. Did she dream of me? The thought sent equal parts hope and horror through me. I wanted her to think of me. I wanted her to forget I existed. I wanted to disappear into the forest and never return. I wanted to climb to her window and—

No. I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars that weren’t really there. Control. I needed control. But how could I maintain it when every instinct screamed for her? When my very nature had twisted around her like vines around a tree?

The crow appeared then, landing on a streetlamp nearby. It cocked its head at me, and I could have sworn I saw intelligence in its black eye. Understanding, even. It knew what I was, what I wanted, what I was becoming. And somewhere in the forest, other eyes watched through it, calculating, waiting.

I was running out of time. Either I would lose control and hurt her myself, or something else would notice my obsession and hurt her to get to me. Both options ended with Casilda’s blood on my hands, metaphorically if not literally.

Yet still I stood there, watching her window like a prayer I couldn’t stop repeating. The hunger built and built inside me, for blood, for touch, for connection, for an end to this terrible isolation that she had somehow made worse by existing.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered toward her window. “I‘m so sorry.”

The words dissolved into the humid night air, meaningless as all my apologies. Because I would be here again tomorrow night, and the night after, until something broke.

And in the distance, the forest waited, patient as death, ready to collect whatever pieces remained when that breaking finally came.

Scene 7

Sleep had become a foreign country I could no longer find the borders to. I lay on top of the sheets in just a tank top and underwear, my skin slick with sweat despite the fan turning lazy circles above me. The book I’d been trying to read—something about finding inner peace through mindfulness—had fallen closed against my chest, its weight negligible compared to the heaviness of the air, the night, the persistent feeling that I was not alone.

It had been building all evening, this sensation. Through dinner with my parents, where I’d pushed food around my plate and made hollow conversation. Through my shower, where I’d stood under cold water until my teeth chattered but still felt feverish. Through my attempts at meditation, at journaling, at all the healthy coping mechanisms Dr. Grundlos would approve of.

None of it helped. Because the feeling wasn’t coming from inside me—it was coming from out there, from the darkness beyond my window, from wherever Konstantin spent his nights when he wasn’t at the pool.

I set the book aside and sat up, pulling my knees to my chest. The curtains were drawn, but I could feel eyes on me as surely as if they were hands. My skin prickled with awareness, every nerve ending suddenly, violently alive.

“This is insane,” I whispered to the empty room. “You‘re imagining things. No one is watching you. No one can... feel you from a distance.”

But even as I said it, the sensation intensified. It started as warmth along my arms, as if someone were trailing their fingers just above my skin, close enough to disturb the fine hairs but not quite touching. My breath caught. The feeling traveled up to my shoulders, across my collarbones, and I shivered despite the heat.

I should have been terrified. This wasn’t normal, wasn’t possible. But my body had other ideas, responding to the invisible attention with a flush of heat that had nothing to do with the summer night. My nipples hardened beneath the thin fabric of my tank top, and I crossed my arms over my chest, embarrassed by my reaction to... what? A feeling? A fantasy?

But it wasn’t a fantasy. I knew with absolute certainty that this was Konstantin, that somehow across the distance between us, he was thinking of me with such intensity that I could feel it. The knowledge should have sent me running to my parents, to the police, to anywhere safe and sane. Instead, it sent liquid warmth pooling low in my belly.

The invisible touch moved to my face, and I could almost see him—those grey eyes dark with hunger, those pale hands that had cut through the water with such grace. Was he in his apartment, thinking of me? Was he standing outside even now, projecting his desire through the walls?

“Konstantin,” I breathed, and the name seemed to intensify everything.

The sensation swept down my body like a wave, leaving me gasping. It felt like fingertips tracing my ribs, palms skimming my hips, breath against my inner thighs. But there was nothing there, no one in the room except me and this impossible presence that made my body arch and ache.

I fell back against the pillows, my rational mind screaming warnings while my body surrendered to the feeling. My hands moved of their own accord, one sliding beneath my tank top to cup my breast, the other pressing between my legs where I was already embarrassingly ready. But it didn’t feel like my touch—it felt like his, like he was guiding my movements from wherever he was.

The feeling built slowly, inexorably. I bit my lip to keep from making noise, aware of my parents sleeping just down the hall, but small whimpers escaped anyway. Every stroke of my fingers felt amplified, as if he were feeling what I felt, as if we were connected by more than just this strange awareness.

I thought of his face in the pool, lit by those shifting colors. The way he’d said my name like it hurt him. The careful distance he’d maintained even as his eyes devoured me. Was this what he’d wanted to do then? Touch me like this, make me writhe and gasp and come undone?

The release hit me like a lightning strike, sudden and overwhelming. My back arched off the bed, my free hand fisting in the sheets, and for one impossible moment, I could have sworn I felt him—really felt him—pressed against me, his mouth at my throat, his hands where mine were. I saw stars that weren’t there, tasted copper and chlorine, felt a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.

And then, as quickly as it had come, the presence vanished.

I lay there panting, my body still trembling with aftershocks, my mind reeling. The room felt suddenly too quiet, too empty, too real. I pulled my hands away from myself, staring at them as if they belonged to someone else. What had just happened? What had I done?

More importantly—what had been done to me?

I sat up shakily and grabbed the water bottle from my nightstand, drinking deeply. My reflection in the dark window showed a woman I barely recognized—hair wild, eyes too bright, lips swollen as if from kisses I hadn’t received. I looked debauched. I looked claimed.

The thought should have terrified me. Instead, it sent another pulse of heat through my already oversensitive body. Something had changed, I realized. Some line had been crossed that couldn’t be uncrossed. It wasn’t just that I’d touched myself while thinking of him—I‘d done that before, to my shame. It was that he had been there with me somehow, sharing the experience, making it real in a way that defied everything I understood about the world.

I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to make sense of it. Shared hallucination? Some kind of psychological break brought on by stress and isolation? But my body knew better. My body recognized what my mind couldn’t accept—that I had just had sex with something supernatural, something that could reach across space and darkness to touch me without touching me.

“What are you?” I whispered to the empty room, to the night, to wherever he was. “What am I becoming?”

No answer came, but I didn’t expect one. I lay back down, pulling the sheet up despite the heat, suddenly feeling exposed and vulnerable. Every shadow in the room seemed to watch me. Every sound might be him approaching. I should have been terrified, should have been planning to leave town tomorrow, to get as far away from whatever this was as possible.

Instead, I found myself wondering when it would happen again. If he had felt what I felt. If he was lying in his own bed, shaking with the aftermath, as confused and frightened and desperately curious as I was.

The forest outside my window seemed to pulse with its own dark life, and I imagined I could feel him out there, a cold star in the summer night, pulling at me with a gravity I couldn’t resist. I had thought returning to Finsterwalde would be safe, boring, a chance to heal in the quiet embrace of my childhood.

Instead, I had found something that threatened to devour me. And the most terrifying part was how much I wanted to let it.

Scene 8

The bell above the café door had become an instrument of torture. Every time it chimed, my body went rigid, the knife in my hand stuttering mid-chop through a tomato. It had been twelve hours since the impossible thing that had happened in my room, and I felt like I was walking around with a neon sign above my head: “Had Supernatural Sex Last Night.”

My skin felt too sensitive, as if I’d been turned inside out. The brush of my apron against my clothes, the whisper of air from the ceiling fan, even the familiar weight of my hair in its bun—everything sent shivers through me. I’d already nicked my finger twice and dropped a full container of chickpeas, earning concerned looks from Petra.

“Are you feeling alright?” she’d asked. “You seem... jumpy.”

Jumpy. If only she knew. I was electric, buzzing with an energy that felt foreign and intimate all at once. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in my bed, feeling those invisible hands, that presence that had—

The bell chimed again.

This time, my whole body knew before I even looked up. The air in the café shifted, became denser, charged with the same electricity that had been running through me all morning. I turned, and there he was.

Konstantin stood in the doorway like he was afraid to fully enter, one hand still on the door handle. He wore his usual black—jeans and a faded t-shirt—but everything about him seemed sharper today, more defined. Or maybe that was just my new awareness, this supernatural sense that let me feel his presence like pressure against my skin.

Our eyes met across the café, and I nearly dropped the knife.

He knew. I could see it in the way his jaw tight

ened, in the careful way he stepped inside and let the door close behind him. He knew what had happened last night, had felt it maybe, had been part of it in that impossible way. The knowledge hung between us like a live wire, sparking and dangerous.

“Hi,” I managed, my voice coming out breathy and strange.

He nodded, his eyes darting away from mine to study the menu board with an intensity it didn’t deserve. I watched him swallow, the movement drawing my attention to his throat, and immediately thought of mouths and skin and—stop it.

Petra emerged from the back room, all business. “What can we get for you?”

“Just...” His voice was rougher than usual, like he’d been silent too long. “Water. Please.”

“Still or sparkling?”

“Still.”

The mundane exchange felt surreal. Here we were, pretending to be normal people in a normal café, when last night we had somehow shared something that defied every law of physics I’d ever learned. I forced myself to keep chopping vegetables, but my hands shook slightly, sending carrots rolling across the cutting board.

He moved to a table in the corner, the one furthest from the counter but with a clear view of where I worked. I felt his gaze like a physical touch as I arranged cucumbers in the display, as I refilled the hummus container, as I did all the ordinary things that suddenly felt like performance art.

The energy between us was almost visible. I wondered if the other customers could sense it—the elderly couple sharing a salad, the teenager absorbed in her phone. Could they feel the way the air seemed to vibrate when he looked at me? Could they smell the ozone-before-a-storm scent that followed him?

I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed a glass of water—hands only trembling slightly—and carried it to his table. Up close, I could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his fingers drummed against his thigh in an unconscious rhythm.

“Your water,” I said unnecessarily.

“Thank you.” He looked up at me then, and the full force of his gaze nearly knocked me backward. His eyes weren‘t just grey—they were storm clouds, shifting and deep and hungry. So hungry.

“Casilda,” he said, and my name in his mouth was like a confession. “I need to—I’m sorry about—“

“Don’t.” The word came out sharper than I intended. I couldn’t bear to hear him apologize for last night, to turn it into something shameful or wrong. “Please.”

He fell silent, but his eyes said everything. The want in them was so naked, so intense, that I felt it echo in my own body. My pulse quickened, my breath shortened, and I was suddenly terrifyingly aware that we were in public, that Petra was watching, that I was supposed to be working.

“I should go,” he said, but didn’t move.

“You just got here.”

“I know.” His hand moved toward mine on the table, stopped inches away. The space between our skin felt charged, crackling. “But being near you is... difficult.”

Difficult. Such a small word for what I could feel rolling off him in waves—desire and desperation and something darker, more dangerous. Now that I’d felt him, really felt him in that impossible way, I could read his body like a book. The tension in his jaw wasn’t just attraction; it was the effort of holding himself back. The careful distance he maintained wasn’t coldness; it was protection.

He wanted me. Wanted me with an intensity that should have been frightening but instead sent heat pooling low in my belly. And he was terrified of that want, of what it might make him do.

“I feel it too,” I whispered, the confession slipping out before I could stop it.

His eyes widened, pupils dilating until they nearly swallowed the grey. For a moment, the mask slipped entirely, and I saw him—not the controlled maintenance worker, but something raw and hungry and barely leashed.

“You should stay away from me.” The words seemed torn from him. “I’m not—I can’t—“

“I know.” And I did know, somehow. Knew that he was dangerous, that what had happened last night was just the beginning of something that could consume us both. “But I can’t seem to.”

We stared at each other for a long moment, the café fading away until it felt like we were the only two people in the world. I could feel his hunger like my own, could sense the way his body pulled toward mine even as his mind screamed warnings. The energy between us built and built, until I thought everyone in the café must be able to see it, shimmering like heat waves between us.

“Casilda!” Petra’s voice shattered the moment. “The delivery truck is here.”

I jerked back, suddenly aware of how close I’d leaned toward him, how my body had unconsciously angled itself like a plant toward sun. “I have to—“

“Go.” He pulled back too, that careful control sliding back into place like armor. “I should leave anyway.”

He stood abruptly, the water untouched, and headed for the door. But at the threshold, he paused, looked back. The longing in his eyes was so profound it made my chest ache.

“Be careful,” he said. “Please.”

And then he was gone, leaving me standing there feeling stripped bare and seen in a way that went beyond the physical. My body hummed with awareness, with want, with the terrible knowledge that he felt it all too.

“Earth to Casilda.” Petra appeared at my elbow, eyebrows raised. “That was intense. New boyfriend?”

“No,” I said automatically. “Just someone I met at the pool.”

She gave me a knowing look. “Uh-huh. Well, whoever he is, he’s got it bad. I‘ve never seen anyone look at another person like they wanted to devour them quite so literally.”

If only she knew how literal that might be.

I returned to my station, trying to recapture some semblance of normalcy, but my hands shook as I signed for the delivery. Every nerve ending felt alive, attuned to the frequency Konstantin had left resonating in the air. I caught my reflection in the steel prep surface and barely recognized myself—flushed cheeks, bright eyes, lips I‘d been unconsciously biting.

I looked like a woman who’d been thoroughly kissed, thoroughly wanted. Which was ridiculous, because he hadn’t even touched me. Not physically. But what we’d shared, what we were sharing even now across distance and daylight, was more intimate than any kiss.

The implications terrified me. If I was wrong about his feelings, if this was all some kind of supernatural delusion, I would lose everything—my sanity, my sense of self, any chance of a normal life in this town. But as I replayed the naked hunger in his eyes, the way he’d said my name like a prayer and a curse, I knew I wasn’t wrong.

He wanted me. And whatever he was, whatever we were becoming together, there was no going back now.

The bell chimed as another customer entered, but this time I didn’t flinch. I was already tuned to a different frequency, waiting for the night when he would come to me again—in person or in that impossible way that defied explanation.

The knife moved steadily through vegetables, but my mind was far away, lost in grey eyes and invisible touches and the thrilling, terrifying knowledge that I was falling into something there might be no climbing out of.

Scene 9

After my shift ended, I found myself climbing the stairs to Marika’s third-floor apartment, my legs moving of their own accord while my mind still hummed with the electric aftermath of seeing Konstantin. The stairwell smelled of old cabbage and fresh paint—someone had tried to cover the graffiti again, a futile gesture in a building where rebellion seeped from the walls like moisture.

Marika opened the door before I could knock, as if she’d been waiting. “Finally,” she said, pulling me inside. “I’ve been texting you all day.”

Had she? I fumbled for my phone, finding three missed messages I hadn’t noticed. My attention had been elsewhere, tuned to a different frequency entirely.

Her bedroom was exactly as it always was—a controlled chaos of political posters covering water-stained walls, twelve Mason jars of various ferments bubbling on the windowsill, clothes draped over every surface. The air smelled of kimchi and revolution, of unwashed laundry and the herbal cigarettes she rolled herself. After the antiseptic brightness of the café, it felt like stepping into a cave, dark and close and real.

“Sit,” Marika commanded, shoving a pile of zines off her bed. She perched on her desk chair, fixing me with that direct gaze that had gotten her elected to student council three years running before she dropped out. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” The lie came automatically, even as my body betrayed me—skin still humming, pulse still quick from an encounter that had involved no physical touch at all.

“Bullshit.” She leaned forward, her undercut catching the light from the single bulb overhead. “You look like you’ve been electrocuted. And Petra called me—said some creepy guy came into the café just to stare at you.”

My stomach dropped. “Petra called you?”

“We’re worried, Cas. This guy—Konstantin?” She said his name like it tasted bad. “I’ve been asking around. No one knows anything about him except that he works nights at the pool and lives alone. He just appeared a few months ago, no family, no friends. That’s not normal.”

“Maybe he’s just private.” But even as I defended him, I felt the truth of her words. What did I really know about Konstantin beyond the hunger in his eyes and the impossible way he could reach across space to touch me?

Marika stood abruptly, pacing the small room with agitated energy. “Private? Cas, I saw him leaving the café. The way he looked at you—“ She shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. “It wasn’t human. It was like... like a wolf looking at a rabbit.”

The image should have frightened me. Instead, it sent heat pooling low in my belly, remembering the naked want in his eyes, the way he’d said my name like he was starving for it.

“You don’t understand,” I started, but Marika cut me off.

“No, you don’t understand!” Her voice rose, passionate and afraid. “I’ve seen this before. My cousin in Berlin, she got involved with some guy who seemed mysterious and intense, and it turned out he’d been stalking her for months. Had photos of her, knew her routines—“

“Konstantin’s not like that.” But wasn’t he? How many nights had I felt watched? How had he known exactly when to appear at the café?

“How can you be so sure?” Marika grabbed my shoulders, forcing me to meet her eyes. “Cas, you just got back. You’re vulnerable after everything with Jan, with your grandfather. This guy—he’s taking advantage of that.”

My rational mind knew she was right. Every red flag was there, waving frantically in the wind of his presence. He appeared from nowhere, worked nights, lived alone. He watched me with an intensity that bordered on obsession. He’d somehow reached into my room last night and—

No. I couldn’t tell Marika about that. She’d think I’d lost my mind completely.

“I know it seems strange,” I said carefully, “but there‘s something about him. Something I can’t explain.”

“That’s called manipulation, Casilda.” Her hands tightened on my shoulders. “That’s what predators do. They make you feel special, chosen, like there’s some mystical connection—“

“It‘s not like that!” I pulled away, standing too quickly. The room spun slightly, and I tasted copper and chlorine, as if his presence still lingered on my tongue. “You don’t understand what it feels like.”

“Then explain it to me!” Marika’s eyes blazed with frustration and fear. “Because from where I’m standing, my best friend is falling for some creep who radiates danger, and she can’t even see it.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. How could I explain the pull I felt? The way my body recognized his across a room? The supernatural connection that defied every law of physics and psychology I’d ever learned?

“He smells wrong,” Marika said suddenly, quietly. “I know that sounds crazy, but when he passed me on the street last week, he smelled like... like copper and earth and something else. Something that made my skin crawl.”

Blood. She was smelling blood, though she didn’t know it. The knowledge rose in me with certainty I couldn‘t explain.

“I’ll be careful,” I promised weakly.

“Careful?” Marika laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Cas, you should be running. Pack your stuff, go back to university, get as far away from here as possible.”

“I can’t.”

“Can‘t or won’t?”

I met her gaze steadily. “Both.”

Something shifted in her expression then—a recognition that I was already lost, already choosing him over sense, over safety, over our friendship.

“If you keep seeing him,” she said slowly, “I don’t know if I can keep watching. It hurts too much, seeing you walk into danger with your eyes wide open.”

The ultimatum hung between us like a blade. Choose: the friend who had stood by me for seven years, or the stranger who made me feel alive in ways that terrified and thrilled me in equal measure.

“I understand,” I whispered, and we both knew which choice I was making.

Marika turned away, shoulders rigid with disappointment. “Just... promise me something. If he hurts you, if you realize I was right, you’ll come to me. No judgment, no ‘I told you so.’ Just come back.”

“I promise.”

But we both knew promises were just words, and words dissolved like sugar in the rain of desire. As I left her apartment, I felt our friendship stretching thin, another casualty of whatever was happening between Konstantin and me.

Outside, night was falling, and with it came that familiar sensation—eyes on my skin, presence in the air. My body responded instantly, pulse quickening, breath catching. Somewhere in this town, he was thinking of me, and the thought of that next contact, that next impossible touch, was already drowning out Marika’s warnings.

I was choosing him. Choosing danger and mystery and supernatural connection over safety and sense. And the most frightening part was how little it felt like a choice at all.