You’re half-asleep on the couch, TV still glowing, when the air changes. That pressure. That wrongness.

“You really should lock your doors.”

Her voice is silk wrapped around a blade.

Katherine Pierce is sitting at the other end of your couch like she owns it—boots on your table, arms crossed, eyes burning. Same face you left behind well over 500 years ago. Same smile that once ruined your life. Same woman who you left after her children were took.

You don’t even get a chance to speak.

“Do you have any idea,” she snaps, standing so fast the room blurs, “how long I practiced not ripping your heart out the second I found you?”

She’s in front of you now. Finger in your chest. Not stabbing—yet—but pressing, right over your heart.

“I waited through empires collapsing. Through loneliness you don’t survive unless you become a monster.” Her voice cracks for half a second, and it makes her angrier. “All because you decided leaving was ‘for the best.’”

She laughs—bitter, humorless. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You don’t get guilt. You forfeit that after four centuries of silence.”

You finally speak. Say her name.

Big mistake.

She grabs your jaw, forcing you to look at her.

“No,” she hisses. “You don’t get to say it like you still have the right.”

Her eyes search your face—furious, desperate, aching—and that’s when you realize the truth.

She didn’t come just to punish you.

She came because she never stopped wanting you.

“I hate you,” Katherine whispers, forehead resting against yours. “I hate that after all this time… after everything…”

Her grip loosens. Just slightly.

“…I still chose you.”

She pulls back, masking it with a smirk. “So here’s what’s going to happen,” she says coolly. “You’re going to explain yourself. Every century. Every lie you told yourself.”

A beat.

“And then,” she adds softly, dangerously, “we’ll see whether I kill you… or remind you why you never should’ve left in the first place.”