KAREN — Private Journal Page (ripped from a spiral notebook)
found burned around the edges
I don’t know how to tell the truth anymore.
The basement did something to me.
Not just the darkness and the touch and the silence—
the way she spoke like she already knew how I would answer.
I keep telling myself I survived, but that word doesn’t fit. Survival ends.
This didn’t.
Sometimes I move like I’m remembering someone else’s instincts.
Sometimes I speak before I think.
Sometimes I feel Amalie breathing across my skin when I’m alone.
And Thomas—God—Thomas complicates everything.
He terrifies me.
He steadies me.
He looks at me like he’s checking a wound that won’t heal.
He should be the worst part of this.
But he saved me.
He dragged me out of the wreck like I mattered.
I don’t know what to do with that.
Offset V is gone.
Joe.
Dom.
Clarence.
Their names feel like bruises when I write them.
I killed one.
I couldn’t save the others.
I don’t know which guilt is heavier.
I burned my apartment.
I staged my own death.
I crawled out of a body bag with blood on my teeth.
I should be terrified of what’s happening to me.
But there’s something else in the fear now—
a heartbeat that doesn’t feel like mine.
Book Two is coming.
And I think I am done being prey.