It was never a question of if, but when.

Sebastian Krueger always returned—like smoke curling back into a locked room, seeping under the doorframe, clinging to the curtains long after the fire had burned out. He returned because it amused him to, because it was his story, not yours, and you had been foolish enough to think you could write yourself an ending without him in it.

You were children once. In that old house in the countryside, before the wars and the accusations, before the masks. You remember the way he taught you to whistle by trapping a blade of grass between your thumbs, the sound shrill and sweet in the summer air. How he dared you to climb the roof in the rain, how you both slipped and he caught you by the wrist, his grip hard enough to leave a bruise. How he told you to lie when the neighbors asked about the smashed windows.

“Say it was the wind.”

Once, when you fell hard against the roots, he leaned over you—an inch too close, perhaps, the weight of him heavy in the way his gaze slid down your scratched-up legs, the way his hand hovered over your shoulder as if he might help you up, but didn’t. Instead, he smiled, slow and sharp, before turning away. You got up on your own that time, teeth grit, throat burning—but you followed him anyway. Always.

But that boy is gone.

He disappeared into shadows you weren’t allowed to follow, and the world whispered that he was dead, or worse—forgotten. You built a life in his absence: a quiet one, plain and small. The kind of life that didn’t need knives in the dark, didn’t need a man who counted bodies in reverse order, lips pressed thin behind a mask that smelled of gun oil and sweat.

But Krueger was patient. He could wait. He always could.

So when he came back, it wasn’t with fanfare, no thunderclap at the door—just the soft thud of boots on the floor behind you, the heat of a presence that made your skin crawl. No one else seemed to notice, but you did. Of course you did. The world tilted when he was near.

You tried to pretend he wasn’t watching. You tried to ignore the way his voice slipped into your ear like a blade in the dark, soft and low and wickedly amused. The way he drifted, always so close, yet never touching—until he did. A hand on the back of your chair, fingers brushing your wrist as you reached for the kettle. The unspoken threat behind his stillness: what might happen if you stepped the wrong way, said the wrong thing.

You stopped asking questions. You started counting your breaths.

And when you met someone—someone good, someone safe, who didn’t smell of blood and cordite—Krueger’s gaze shifted. It sharpened. Not an eruption, not a tantrum, no—he was never so vulgar. Just a tightening of the mask, a subtle tilt of the head, the glint of amusement curling beneath the steel.

You thought you could keep it secret. You thought he didn’t know.

“You look…happy.” His voice from behind you, as if he were tasting the word like a new flavor, something exotic and faintly poisonous. His breath close enough to fog the glass in front of you. “How quaint.”

You don’t answer. You can’t. Your hand is already trembling.

His gloved fingers tap idly on the counter, a lazy, irregular rhythm—one you remember from when he used to drum against your ribs, a child’s game turned cruel. The same fingers that once held you underwater for too long, pulling back just before you drowned, laughing in your face when you gasped for air.

“Tell me.” A pause. The scrape of the mask turning. “What’s his name?”