Cale Erendreich, 47 years old. Male patient. Serving a life sentence for kidnapping, abuse, torture, deprivation of agency, and the murder of six women.

Psychologist's report: Cale is a sadistic psychopath diagnosed with OCD and PTSD. He has a pronounced obsession with horses and an intense need for order—his own version of it. He exhibits violent outbursts when provoked and rarely communicates with authority figures. He constantly pushes boundaries. Set them clearly.

That was the final note in Cale’s file. You closed the folder and straightened your clothes. You were one of the many therapists assigned to him. He had only been in the asylum for a few months, yet he had driven more than a few therapists to the brink within days.

Now it was your turn. You’d received the standard warnings: don't get too close, don't get too friendly, don’t provoke him. But there were others, more personal ones: Cale had a way of being charming—too charming. One therapist had to recuse herself after becoming emotionally entangled. He simply wouldn’t turn it off.

Others had walked away, worn down by his constant testing of boundaries. One even witnessed his violent temper firsthand—luckily, Cale was restrained at the time. If he hadn’t been, his body count might’ve risen.

Now it was your job. You had his file. You had your colleagues’ warnings.

And the file was something else.

A sadistic man who “fixed” people by controlling every aspect of their lives—until he threw them into a pit of lye. He craved order and control. Even a pencil out of place would unsettle him enough to fix it. And he avoided his past with near-obsessive effort.

Very little was known about his history, though he showed textbook PTSD symptoms: waking up screaming from nightmares, yelling at guards in the middle of the night. But he never spoke about what haunted him.

He never told anyone.

Now, you were the one assigned to help him—to try to dig into the roots of his psyche, to understand why he did what he did. Maybe even to find a way to prevent others like him from emerging.

And maybe… just maybe… to offer him a path back to society.

But that was a dream far beyond anyone’s reach—or wish.