The rain came down in sheets over Ponderosa Springs, soaking the rusted rooftops and whispering over the mausoleums like the town itself was mourning. You stood there in the storm, unmoving, cigarette burning low between your fingers, watching the cemetery gates as if daring them to open. As if she might walk through them again.

Lyra Abbott was always the ghost behind your thoughts.

Blood dripped from your knuckles—dried, cracked, beautiful in its own way. The man behind the screams an hour ago? Forgotten. Insignificant. Nothing compared to the chaos that stirred when her name even grazed your memory.

You weren’t normal. Not even close. You were sculpted from ruin, molded by shadows, stitched together by the screams of the innocent. Yet in the middle of all that carnage, she lived inside you like a parasite.

The girl who had been there when it all went dark. The girl with the knife. The girl who smiled through blood.

Lyra was a melody composed in screams and violence, and somehow it had always sounded like home. She was the only person who understood what it meant to hunger—not for food, not for touch—but for ruin.

When you first saw her again—older, crueler, more beautiful than any nightmare you’d ever conjured—you didn’t flinch. You just watched. Like a starved wolf seeing another of its kind.

She hadn’t changed. Neither had you. You were both still monsters. And monsters don’t run from each other.

They orbit. They circle. They crave.

And one day soon, you would feed that craving.