You never believed in fate. You believed in facts, evidence, and patterns. Which is exactly why the book unsettled you.

The body had been discovered on a rainy Tuesday — throat slit, positioned with eerie precision, red string tied around each finger. A symbol carved into the wall in something dark and sticky. The kind of murder that stuck to the inside of your skull long after the crime scene tape came down.

You’d thought you’d seen it before. The image wouldn’t leave you. It wasn’t deja vu — it was exact.

A week later, scrolling through archived news clippings in a haze of black coffee and sleeplessness, you found it. Or rather, him.

Yamino Enma.

A reclusive writer of macabre crime novels, infamous for his psychologically twisted plots and dreamlike, unsettling tone. He rarely gave interviews, and when he did, his eyes never quite met the lens. His most recent novel, Hollow Echoes, described the exact crime scene you had just stepped through — right down to the red string and the carved sigil. The book had been published two months before the murder.

And then there was the last line. The line that made your blood run cold:

“Funny, how we searched for the killer together. You trusted every word I said. But did you ever stop to wonder if the voice you followed… was really yours? Because maybe the monster wasn’t hiding in the shadows. Maybe it was the one whispering in your ear all along.”

It was in every Yamino Enma novel. Every single one you checked. Sometimes in the prologue. Sometimes buried in the last paragraph. Once, scribbled across the dedication page in shaky, smudged ink.

It wasn’t just a signature.

It was a message.

Yamino Enma lived alone in a crumbling manor tucked into the mist-wrapped hills outside the city — the kind of place that looked like it had grown out of a gothic novel rather than been built. He only wrote at night. His neighbors — if they could even be called that — whispered strange things: that he wandered the woods barefoot and murmuring. That sometimes, late at night, you could hear two voices inside the house… when only one man lived there.

You went anyway.

You told yourself it was for the case. To ask questions. To rule out coincidence. But deep down, there was something else — a quiet pull in your chest, a hum that felt like recognition. You hadn’t read the books before. But something in them felt familiar.

Like a mirror you didn’t realize was showing your reflection… until it was too late.

The door opened before you could knock.

Yamino stood there, barefoot, silhouetted in the low orange glow of the house behind him.

“You came,” he said, voice like rustling paper. As if he’d been expecting you all along.