Deputy Ciscel — Watching.
That last one gave her chills. She hadn’t yet decided if that made her safer . . . or the opposite.
Every story had a narrator. But who, she wondered, was telling the truth? And when the truth finally surfaced, how would the people handle it? How would the story be told?
That was the answer she was searching for—and the one she feared she might never get.
Chapter Eight
The Taste of Fear
I’ve come back to the beach tonight. The tide has smoothed everything away—the footprints, the blood, even the memory of a woman who’d been silenced forever. But I don’t want to forget. The island erases its sins because it craves new stories.
It erases almost everything else.
A single footprint sits higher on the sand, untouched by the tide. Not mine. Not Lisa’s. A clean, deliberate step. Someone else returned to the scene before I did—stood here long enough for the sand to remember their weight. The island wasn’t the only thing retracing my path.
I stand where she fell and wait for the sickness to come again.
It doesn’t.
The air is crisp, the sand reset, the ocean whispering like a promise instead of a witness.
But the feeling of eyes on my back lingers.
Not guilt.
Not paranoia.
Observation.
Someone else is learning the rhythm of the tide, studying the angles, the way the body lay when I left it. Not correcting my work—just . . . noticing, cataloging. A student, not a judge.
The salty wind touches my face, and the world sharpens. I remember the way her pulse fluttered beneath my fingers . . . right beneath the left side of her throat.
There’s a moment, just before it happens, when everything clears. Sound folds inward. Breath slows. That’s the taste of it—not blood, not death, but a precise stillness. The instant when I decide.
I walk the line where the tide reaches and retreats, feeling it whisper against my feet, daring me to step in. Far off, the wind sighs through the cliffs—it knows what I’ve done, and it approves. I don’t wash away the blood anymore; I admire the pattern before the waves erase it.
There’s something pure about the moment before death.
The silence.
The hesitation.
The breath caught between a heartbeat and a choice.
That’s the moment the world tilts—when everything a person has ever been becomes possible.
When everything they’ve feared becomes irrelevant.
The fear used to be a wall.
Now I see it as a door. Once you walk through, it’s hard to remember why you were afraid of the threshold.
I used to think monsters were made of rage.
Now I know they’re carved from quiet.
