About ownership.
About loyalty.
She opened another folder:Communications Log.
A timeline of burner-phone messages, scheduled weeks ahead. Voicemails. GPS-spoofed photos. Alibis created in digital shadow. Technology doesn’t create monsters. It just makes them efficient.
Everyone expects chaos from a killer. Predictability is far more effective. So I built patterns and routines anyone in a uniform would recognize, then twisted them just enough to look like something the island itself had done.
She even wrote messages to herself—perfectly timed, perfectly panicked—to sell the illusion that she was a victim along with the rest of them. If they didn’t know where to look, they’d keep spinning in circles until they grew dizzy and collapsed.
Fear is contagious. Shared fear is currency. Comfort ruins purpose.
She laughed quietly, the sound soft.
Mary had been the easiest. Grief made her porous. Anger made her blind. Harmony didn’t need to push hard—just enough to guide suspicion, enough to let Mary’s personal darkness come to the surface.
She’s a murderer, too. I respect her for finishing what grief started. The world told her not to break. She broke anyway. We understand each other. We’re better for it. Mary had almosttaken the fall. That had never been the plan. Luckily, things turned out the way they were supposed to. Now, I can continue my friendship with Mary. I think she’ll play a key role in my next adventure.
Harmony refilled her wine.
Torie, though . . . Torie had been a masterpiece.
Torie. Poor, beautiful, broken Torie. I never laid a hand on her. I simply whispered when no one was listening. A single word here, a suggestion there. A forged message from Tosh’s number. A photograph where she’d find it. A diary entry rewritten to look like someone else’s handwriting. A phone call she was meant to hear. The mind breaks easily when it’s already cracked. You only have to tap the fault line.
Torie collapsed exactly as Harmony knew she would.
Harmony pressed play on the small recorder. Torie’s voice filled the room—trembling at first, then laughing, then screaming. Harmony closed her eyes, letting the sound ripple inside her. The silence afterward was always the reward.
Torie wanted to be remembered. She didn’t know how. I gave it to her. Broken minds often tell the truth sideways. Torie was the only one who ever came close to naming what I really am. But madness steals credibility long before it steals sanity.
Harmony scrolled through her final notes.
The hardest part was making it look human.
People demand motive. They need a culprit whose madness makes sense. So Harmony gave them one. She gave them a pattern painted on walls. She gave them notes left in trembling handwriting. She gave them a confession crafted through implication, chaos, and expectation.
They believed because theywantedto believe.
Torie in a psych ward.
Mary absolved.
Cass trembling.
Zach tormented.
Tosh forever questioning his own failures.
They all live in my story now. Eternal. Exactly as I planned.
Harmony saved her documents under a new name.Catalina Whispers—Book One. The title made her smile.
She stood, stretching sore muscles. The hem of her silk robe whispered against her thighs. The house hummed softly with the sound of her laptop. The waves outside inhaled and exhaled like a giant creature sleeping.
Harmony returned to her chair.
They’ll never know. They’ll move on, heal, rebuild. And when they do, maybe I’ll start again. Maybe another island. Maybe an entirely new story. It might be smaller. It might be larger. It might be closer to home.
