Chapter 109

The Prey

We will go home, Kitten.

My breath caught as I flipped through the documents, my heart pounding like a caged bird. My every breath felt heavier than the last. There they were—snapshots of my life, laid bare in cold, clinical detail. My pictures. My schedules. And then... the ones that made my stomach churn and bile rise in my throat.

Images I didn’t even remember anyone taking.

Me at ten, bathing in the river behind our old house in Texas. The playful innocence frozen in time now felt tainted, wrong.

The words scrawled across each photo in that unmistakable jagged handwriting made my skin crawl:

“We will go home, Kitten.”

I clenched the papers tightly, the edges cutting into my palms. It was not his handwriting. I knew it as surely as I knew the sound of my own name. The hurried, erratic strokes were unlike his usual calculated precision, as if he’d written them in a fit of mania. My head swam with