If you’re just starting this serial, scroll to the bottom to the introduction and Episode 1. Thanks for reading.

“What did you do?” The letter said it all. I reached into my pocket. The envelope was folded in half and half again, but I smoothed it out on my pants, staring at the letters scrawled on the front in black pen: With love, Red.

It wasn’t his tenderness I’d felt that first night. His warmth, his passion, his affection. I wasn’t sure it was in his DNA. He was a different animal. Teeth and claws. So different than Red. He ripped out your throat. She slipped between your ribs like the night and plucked out your heart. Both watched you bleed, picking their teeth with your tears.

Somewhere behind me an inferno consumes a building, flames licking the sky where they’ll find four bodies rendered into little more than ash and bone. A proper funeral and more than they deserved.

Futures are for fools. There is no happily ever after in this fairy tale, I tell him. There is only hope, and he will do well without that burden.

His eyes fixed on me, but he saw nothing. His grip faltered, and his hand slipped out of mine and fell lifeless on the concrete.

“Kill. Him.” She swallowed, wretched. A stream of black blood oozed out of her mouth. “Before he kills you.” She spat the last words out, as if she’d been gathering herself for that one message.

This one won’t go in the cage. I will wear its pelt as a trophy, just as I did that night when Father died. My first kill with the Kalash as it gnawed on Father’s broken body. It lay in the snow for hours before we dragged it inside. We had meat for weeks after that night.

Screams. The room shifts, flips, swims, nausea bubbling up. I feel the wave wash over me, every nerve ending singing as my belly convulses. I blink. More screams, the room shuddering, spinning. The darkness shifts, bars of light fill my vision. Shapes moving around me, like fireflies blinking in and out of existence. I swallow down the bile and the world shakes apart.

The glamor of the Gallery was forgotten as if it never existed. A dream perhaps, left behind from the few moments after we passed through his great iron doors, as if I was passing through into a castle of some great king? Back there, all splendor and pomp, a menagerie of grandeur meant to impress. But was it just a lie, a sleight of hand meant to fill a girl’s empty heart?

He never even looked around. Not a care in the world, even with that piece of ass on his arm. That spoke volumes.

When I look up, all I see is Red. Her name rings in my ear, like honey from her lips. I drop the device to the floor. Let it ring. The сука will wait. She will do anything for me now.