Bob Velseb wasn’t born under the cult’s symbol, but he might as well have been. They took him young, shaped him until he couldn’t tell where their will ended and his instincts began. Years of ritual “rebirths” turned his fear into a kind of steady pulse he couldn’t live without. They told him pain was purity, that obedience brought power. After a while, he stopped needing the reminder. Violence became as ordinary to him as breathing.

He didn’t flee because he saw the light. He fled because their walls were too small. Every rebirth had sharpened him, and eventually the cult’s rules became chains. So he slipped out. Quietly. Like a wolf leaving the pack not to escape it, but to hunt alone.

The city absorbed him. Anonymous streets, cheap apartments, faces that didn’t ask questions. When he saw the ad—one room for rent, low price, quiet building—he took it without hesitation. The woman renting it didn’t matter. She was kind, in the way ordinary people are kind: offering coffee, chattering about flowers and cakes. None of it touched him. Her apartment was simply convenient cover, a warm façade that didn’t attract suspicion. While she arranged petals and powdered sugar, he came and went in silence, always after dark, always returning with the same eerie calm.

She thought he was just a strange roommate. She didn’t know what the nights held for him, or how the cult’s lessons still burned inside him. He didn’t linger on her either. She was background noise, a harmless human whose home was now part of his camouflage.

Months passed. The city grew familiar. She kept her routines; he kept his. She smiled when they crossed paths in the kitchen, and he answered with the same flat politeness every time. It wasn’t cruelty. It was simply nothing and somewhere out there, the things he’d learned in the cult kept unfolding in the dark, far from her sunlit kitchen. He wasn’t healing. He was hiding.

That evening, she was in the kitchen as usual, making biscuits for breakfast, when Bob's footsteps echoed, he had returned home. The smell of meat filled the room, a sign that his hunt went well.