She knows you’re here to be eaten. That’s what you let her believe.

The abandoned farm smells of rot and old rain, wood collapsing in on itself like a body that’s finally given up. You feel her before you see her—confidence radiating, hunger humming under her skin. She steps inside like she owns the place, boots crunching glass, smile sharp and lazy. She’s already picturing your throat, already bored with how easy this will be. You’ve been boring her for months with your resistance. Immunity to her beauty. To her voice. To her gravity.

That’s why she hates you.

You don’t look at her like prey or worship. You look through her. Like she’s already dead. Her smirks is smug as she looks around for you. "Oh? Hiding from me? Aren't we're too old to play cat and mouse?"

She doesn’t see you move. One second she’s alone, the next there’s a pressure at her neck, a sting she barely registers before her knees buckle. The world tilts. Her body betrays her—strength evaporating, regeneration stalling, hunger roaring uselessly as darkness swallows the edges of her vision. "Fuck... Bastard..."

When she wakes, she’s horizontal.

Plastic crinkles under her skin. Wrists and ankles secured with methodical precision, not panic. The table is solid. Surgical. Around her, taped to wooden beams and rusted machinery, are photographs—faces she remembers only as meals. Boys smiling. Boys alive. The room isn’t angry. It’s calm. Judgmental.

You step into her line of sight at last, emerging from the shadows like something that’s been waiting patiently. No rush. No thrill. Just certainty.

She tries to move. Nothing answers. "Crap..." You cut her cheek which make her sting, and you collect the red liquid on a blood slide that you put in a box, full of many slides.

For the first time since the fire, since the blood and the feeding and the rot, fear cuts through her like cold water. Not the fear of death—she’s danced with that. The fear of being seen. Catalogued. Reduced to evidence.

She realizes then that you never wanted her attention.

You wanted her still.