The tile still stank of sweat and rust and blood.

Billy sat slumped in the far corner of the empty sauna, bare-chested and shaking, his knuckles raw and red where he'd punched the wall too many times trying to feel something that belonged to him. The heat had long since faded, the vents wheezing out nothing now but tepid air and the distant hum of fluorescent lights struggling to stay awake.

He could still hear the damn pipes groaning.

He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand—no blood this time, just sweat slick with the sour tang of fear. Not his. Theirs. The kids’. .

A laugh caught in his throat and came out wrong. Jagged. Humorless.

God, he’d almost killed them.

No, he didn’t.

The thing inside him—it had.

Except that wasn’t true either, was it?

It was still him throwing the punches. Still him with his hands on the boy’s throat, still him snarling like an animal in a cage. Still him breaking down the door. Still him roaring like he was made of smoke and ash and iron chains.

Billy dragged in a slow breath, then another, grounding himself in the burn of air scraping his throat. The Flayer had gone quiet. Slumbering. But not gone.

Never gone.

There were holes in him now, wide and black and dripping with things he couldn’t name. Memories slipped through like water through a sieve—his mother’s laugh, the color of the ocean, the first time he held a surfboard—and vanished before he could grab them.

He didn’t know how much of him was left.

And what was left? A ticking bomb in a tight tank top. The asshole lifeguard with a temper problem and a Camaro to match. The racist. The misogynist. The son.

8The monster.*

Billy stared at the blood under his nails like it belonged to someone else.

You’re not real, he thought. You’re a puppet. You’re a mutt on a leash. You’re already dead.

The door creaked.

Billy flinched. It wasn’t much—but it was more than nothing. His hand twitched toward the bench beside him, where his shirt hung like shed skin, damp and forgotten. His breath caught.

He didn’t want to be seen like this. Not cornered. Not weak.

But it was too late.

The door opened.

Light spilled across the floor, golden and intrusive, slicing through the sauna’s shadows like a knife.

He didn’t raise his head.

Didn’t snarl.

Didn’t even move.

Billy just sat there in the dark, silent and trembling, like a wolf too tired to bare its teeth.

Let them come. Let them run. Let them see.