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“Fuck you,” I spit.

He tilts his head, proud of himself and talks finally, “There she is.” That voice… It makes me want to throw up. “This is not very polite of you.”

“You fucking coward…” I whisper.

His smile deepens as he reaches toward my face. I spit on him immediately after. And it only makes his grin widens. “Still angry,” he murmurs and my skin crawls. “You always were.”

I hate the tenderness in his voice more than anything.

“Who the fuck are you?”

He watches me for a long moment, his face still tilted toward me, as though he is studying a dead object.

“You should know.”

“I’ve never seen you before,” I reply quickly, confused. My head is still pounding and I can’t barely focus on anything but the rage.

His expression changes to something satisfied.

“No,” he says. “You’ve seen me, you simply never knew what you were looking at.”

He takes his time moving back closer, and every instinct in me screams to move away, even if I can’t. I press myself against the cold surface behind me.

“You know what I find fascinating about you, Mireya?” he asks. “You spent years believing you were afraid of the wrong things.” I stare at him and he continues, “You were always looking for monsters in the most obvious places. Strangers who watched you too long, men who tried to seduce you, men in dark alleys.”

My chest tightens but I don’t know why. I don’t know what memory he has touched. I just know that I’m twelve years old again, then fifteen, then twenty, standing in rooms searching for him, hearing voices that sounded like him.

“Stop.”

He smiles. “You remember, don’t you?”

“Stop fucking talking.”

“You remember my voice.”

I shake my head, but the memories keep moving faster than I can push them away. He watches every change in my face and I want to stab him.

“I said, stop!”

Something almost amused flickers across his face. “You sound just like your mother.”

Everything inside me stills. The room is silent, my heartbeat is the only thing I can feel. He takes another step forward to me and then the realization hits me. I know. I know who’s in front of me. His voice, his scent. This is the man who took my mother from me, the same man I’ve spent years imagining. My monster is also the chain poet.

The patterns, the photographs, the bodies, everything swirls in my head.

“No…”

His smile widens. “You wanted to know what he looked like, why he chose them…” he says. My hands shake, and I stare at him, unable to breathe. “You wanted to know why your mother was one of them.”

I shake my head, but memories are already coming apart inside me, the locked doors I built in my mind giving away.

His footsteps in my bedroom, my mother’s tears, that poor girl we found with Damien…

“You were always him,” I whisper.

He smiles again. “And you were always so clever.”

My eyes burn, “You killed me.”