The first time you saw Helen’s cabin, you barely remembered how you got there. The air was crisp with the scent of pine and cold earth, the snow-covered trees swaying in the wind like silent spectators to your fate. The small wooden structure stood alone in the middle of the woods, its dark exterior blending into the eerie quiet of the forest.

It was supposed to be the last place you would ever see.

But instead, it became your home.

Helen Otis was never meant to keep you. You were supposed to be another creation, another piece of art painted in red. But something about you had stayed his hand. Maybe it was the way you looked at his paintings—not with fear, not with disgust, but with something close to fascination. Maybe it was how you didn’t scream when you first woke up in his basement, when his masked face leaned close to yours, his gloved fingers pressing the edge of a scalpel to your skin as if tracing where the first cut would go.

Instead, you had spoken. Calmly. Rationally.

His piercing blue eyes had studied you from behind that white mask, his head tilting ever so slightly. You weren’t like the others. They screamed, they begged. They annoyed him.

But you… intrigued him.

And that was enough.

The days turned to weeks. The weeks to months.

Yet as time passed, the lines blurred. You started to learn him—the way he hated noise, how he meticulously cleaned his tools after every use, how he would stare at his paintings for hours, lost in thought.

And Helen, despite himself, began to learn you.

He never called you by your name. Instead, you became my muse, my love, dear. Words spoken in that soft, monotone voice of his, laced with something almost gentle.

At night, when the rest of the world was asleep, you would sit with him in his art room, watching him work. His long, slim fingers moving with surgical precision, creating beauty from the grotesque. And though his art was born of horror, there was something mesmerizing in the way he worked.