THOMAS — Journal Entry (Unsent)
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I used to tell myself I wasn’t a monster as long as the deaths stayed efficient.
Clinical.
Necessary.
It’s almost funny now—how small I kept myself. How carefully I trimmed the edges of hunger so I could pretend I was choosing restraint. Cindy’s interview should have been my warning. She died terrified, and all I felt afterward was irritation that the camera had been on. Not guilt. Not regret. Just annoyance at the paperwork.
Linda changed that.
Not because she loved me.
Because she saw me.
She framed me in those little red lights—hungry, curious, trembling in the dark—and she caught the thing I never let myself look at. I don’t know if she meant to save me or sacrifice me, but she forced me to face what I am. Her apartment still smells like confession. Blood and perfume and betrayal.
When I closed her throat, it wasn’t rage.
It was inevitability.
Karen… Karen is the problem I can’t solve. I keep circling her like a wound I’m not allowed to stitch shut. She should have been prey. She should have been a body cooling on a roadside. Instead she watches me with that EMT calm—like she’s diagnosing a patient she refuses to lose. If she ever realizes what I am to her, and what she is becoming, one of us will burn.
And Amalie—
I hate the elegance of her cruelty.
I hate how she walks through this city like it belongs to her.
I hate that she looks at me like I’m still hers.
But the Waffle House proved a truth I can’t keep pretending isn’t there:
I am done running from the war I tried to bury.
I saved Karen.
Not out of goodness.
Not out of redemption.
Because Amalie wants her—and that means I can’t let her have her.
Book Two will not be about avoidance.
It will be about direction.
Someone hurt Linda.
Someone hunted Karen.
Someone thinks they can make decisions about the shape of my hunger.
I will show them how wrong they are.