Page 202 of Shhh…It’s A Killer Story

My pulse stumbled. Not another… It wasn't part of the gnome. It was card stock. As if Gerald kept it. For me.

A diesel engine screamed into the clearing so hard gravel sprayed against the porch posts. Doors slammed. Boots hit the ground. Fast. Purposeful. Mason and Derek reached the porch in seconds. Neither of them spoke immediately. They didn't have to. One look inside the cottage said enough.

Flour. Cold coffee. Chair. Broken door. Broken Gerald. Max pacing.

Mason looked at me.

"What happened?"

I didn't answer. I couldn't.

My heartbeat had become the only sound I could hear, loud enough to drown out Derek's questions.

Carefully, almost mechanically, I slid another shard of Gerald's shattered ceramic body aside with the tip of my pen. A painted sleeve. A tiny green boot. Half a smiling face. Each piece revealed another fraction of the concrete beneath it until something stark white emerged from underneath the broken base.

Not paper. Cardstock. Heavy. Expensive. I eased the final shard away. The card lay perfectly square with the edge of the porch, centred with impossible precision, as though whoever had left it had measured the angle before setting it down.

I slid the card free using the pen, careful not to touch it. Mason stepped closer. Derek moved in beside him. None of us spoke. The three of us leaned over the card together.

One sentence. Typed. Clean. Clinical. No signature, explanation, emotion. Just words. For several long seconds nobody breathed. The mountain seemed to fall silent around the cottage. Even Max stopped whining.

Mason and Derek exhaled first. Both saying at the same time…

"Fuck."

Words haven’t escaped my own mouth. My eyes stayed locked on the card. A cold weight settled somewhere behind my ribs.

"I should've fucking known..."

The words left me before I even realised I'd spoken them.

Somewhere… we'd already met the person who left this card. We just hadn't realised they were standing close enough to hear us speak.

Seraphina

The world didn't fade to black. It shattered into white.

Something hard crashed into the side of my skull with enough force to turn every bone inside my head into ringing glass. For one impossible heartbeat, I genuinely wondered if someone had dropped the moon on me.

How inconsiderate. Pain arrived a second later. Not the polite sort. The violent sort. The kind that burst behind my eyes until silver stars sprayed across my vision like someone had taken a shotgun to the night sky. The chair skidded across the concrete. Rope tore deeper into my wrists. Something warm rolled down the side of my face.

Blood.

Wonderful.

"...You know..."

I whispered through a mouth that suddenly felt full of pennies.

"Hitting someone who's tied to a chair is statistically unimpressive."

CRACK.

The pistol smashed into my cheek. My head snapped sideways. Something inside my mouth split open. Copper flooded across my tongue.

"WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?"

The warehouse swallowed the words, throwing them back in ugly echoes.