Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Cain
She's coming home today.
I stand at the edge of my property where the tree line meets civilization, watching the main road that winds into town like a black snake through white snow.
Two years of waiting, and it comes down to hours now.
Minutes, maybe.
The deer skull in my hands is still warm with blood, the bone slick under my fingers as I wire it to the post.
This one's different from the others—a ten-point buck I took down three days ago when I saw her post about driving home.
I've been preparing it specially, cleaning it with the kind of attention I usually reserve for other projects.
The ones Sheriff Sterling is so desperate to solve.
My phone buzzes.
Juliette, sending another update she doesn't realize is feeding something she wouldn't understand.
Or maybe she would.
My sister always did see more than she let on.
She left the city two hours ago. Stopped for gas in Albany.
I don't respond.
I never do anymore, not to these updates, but Juliette keeps sending them, these little breadcrumbs about Celeste Sterling's life.
She thinks she's sharing publishing gossip with her reclusive brother.
She has no idea she's been training a predator to hunt.
The skull gleams in the weak December sunlight.
I position it perfectly, so it will be the first thing visible when turning onto the property.
Not that Celeste will be coming here.
Not yet.
But the others drive past sometimes—the sheriff, his deputies, the concerned citizens who whisper about the hermit in the mountains who strings up bones like party decorations.
Let them whisper.
They have no idea what real decoration looks like.
What I've done to the ones who deserved it.
I pull out my phone and open the document Juliette sent last week.
Celeste's latest chapter, the one her publisher rejected for being "too tame."
I've read it seventeen times.
She writes: He watched her with the patience of a man who had already decided how this would end, but wanted to savor the journey.
She understands patience, even if she doesn't understand what she's been writing about.
Not truly.
Her heroes are fantasies, men who play in darkness, but would crumble under its real weight.
They ask permission. They feel guilt. They stop when asked.
I've never stopped anything I've started.
The sound of tires on snow makes me turn.
Not her—I know the engine sound of every vehicle in this town, and this is Tom Bradley's pickup, struggling with its dying transmission.
He sees me at the property line and accelerates, not making eye contact.
Good.
Tom learned his lesson last year when he put his hands on his girlfriend after too many drinks at Murphy's.
His arm healed, crooked, just like I intended.
People think isolation makes you weak.
They're wrong.
Isolation makes you pure.
Removes the unnecessary noise until all that's left is purpose.
Mine drives a black Audi with New York plates, and she'll be here within the hour.
I walk back to the cabin, my boots crunching through fresh snow.
Inside, everything is precise.
Clean. Organized.
The complete opposite of what people expect when they think of a mountain hermit.
Books line one wall—first editions mostly, arranged by publication date.
Philosophy, classic literature, true crime.
And on a separate shelf, every novel Celeste Sterling has ever written, including the advance reader copy of her latest that Juliette doesn't know I lifted from her apartment last time she invited me to the city.
That was eight months ago.
The last time I pretended to be normal for my sister's sake.
Dinner at an overpriced restaurant where she introduced me to her colleagues as "my brother who lives upstate."
Celeste wasn't there—touring for her book—but her presence was everywhere in their conversation.
How she was dating someone boring. How her writing was suffering. How she needed something to wake her up.
I could wake her up.
I could wake her up in ways that would make her previous understanding of consciousness seem like fucking sleepwalking.
On my desk, her photo from the book jacket stares at me.
Not the professional one—I have that too—but the candid Juliette took at last year's Christmas party.
Celeste is laughing at something, her head thrown back, throat exposed.
She's holding a glass of red wine that matches her lipstick.
In the background, someone's wearing a Santa hat.
She looks alive in a way she doesn't in recent photos.
I'm going to bring that back—that life, even if I have to kill everything else around her to do it.
My violin sits in the corner, waiting.
I pick it up, run my fingers along the strings without playing.
The Lockwoods insisted on lessons—part of their perfect family image.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, they'd drive Juliette and me to the instructor's house in Lake Placid, then disappear for two hours.
We found out later they were using the time to visit their dealer, maintaining their own addictions while crafting the appearance of cultured children.
The violin was my escape then.
Now it's a weapon, though not in the way people might think.
Music carries in these mountains.
On quiet nights, I play pieces that echo through the valleys—Bach's “Partita No. 2”, sometimes Paganini's “Caprices”.
The locals think it's haunting.
They don't realize I'm playing for an audience of one who hasn't arrived yet.
Practice runs for when she's here, when she'll hear the music and wonder about the man who plays violin in a cabin full of skulls.
My laptop is open to her Instagram.
She posted from a rest stop an hour ago—a photo of snow-covered pines with the caption: Heading home to write about monsters. Maybe I'll find some inspiration in the mountains.
The comments are the usual sycophants.
Heart emojis and fire symbols and people begging for the next book.
One user wrote: Hope you find your darkness again!
If only they knew.
Her darkness is preparing lunch in a cabin three miles from her father's house, slicing venison with the same knife that's been inside four different men this year.
All of them deserved it—wife beaters, child touchers, the kind of men who make the world uglier.
But the sheriff doesn't see it that way.
He just sees bodies.
Patterns.
A killer he needs to catch before his daughter comes home.
Too late for that, Sheriff.
I know things about Sheriff Sterling that would make his jurisdiction question everything.
Like how he's been drinking more since the third body.
Like how he had an affair with the mayor's wife ten years ago, before she died in that convenient car accident.
Like how he sometimes sits outside his daughter's childhood home at night, staring at her dark window like he can will her to appear.
We're not so different, the sheriff and I.
We both want to protect Celeste.
The difference is, he wants to protect her from the world.
I want to protect her from everyone but me.
The police scanner on my counter crackles to life. "Unit 3 to base. We've got another 10-54 off Route 73."
Dead body.
My lips twitch.
They found Monica Reeves faster than expected.
The cold must have preserved her better than the others.
Usually, it takes at least a week for hikers to stumble across my gifts.
Monica was special though—she'd been selling her twelve-year-old daughter to men from Albany.
The daughter is safe now, in foster care downstate.
She'll never know that the monster who killed her mother was actually saving her.
Sheriff Sterling's voice cuts through the static. "Secure the scene. Nobody touches anything until I get there. And for Christ's sake, keep this off the radio. We don't need the press getting wind before—" He stops. "Just secure it. I'm ten minutes out."
He sounds tired.
Broken, almost.
Good.
Broken men make mistakes, and I need him distracted for what comes next.
I pull up Celeste's manuscript on my laptop—not the published version, but the one with all her notes, her deleted scenes, her raw thoughts.
Juliette gave me access to her cloud storage two years ago so I could "help with technical details" for a hunting scene.
She forgot to revoke it.
Or maybe she didn't forget.
Sometimes I wonder what my sister knows versus what she pretends not to know.
There's a scene Celeste cut from her second book.
The heroine is being watched but doesn't know it yet.
She wrote: The feeling of eyes on her was like standing in sunlight through glass—warm and cold simultaneously, comforting and dangerous, making her skin prickle with awareness of something she couldn't name.
She felt me, even then.
Before she knew I existed, some part of her recognized what was coming.
The same way deer sometimes freeze before the shot, not from fear but from acceptance.
From recognition of something larger than themselves.
I move to the back room, the one I keep locked when anyone visits.
Not that anyone visits except Juliette, and only rarely.
The walls are covered with photos—not of Celeste, though I have those too, hidden deeper.
These are the others.
The ones I've removed from the world. Before and after shots, you might say.
Monica Reeves at the grocery store, laughing with the checkout girl like she wasn't selling her daughter's innocence.
Davie Phillips outside the elementary school, watching the playground with the wrong kind of interest.
Quinn Murphy leaving the bar, not knowing it would be his last drink before I showed him what happened to men who broke their wives' ribs.
Patricia Morse in her office at Child Services, taking bribes to look the other way.
The deer skulls mark their graves, though the police haven't made that connection yet.
They think the skulls are random, some signature of insanity.
They don't understand the symbolism—deer are prey animals, but they're also survivors.
They adapt. They watch. They know when they're being hunted, and sometimes, they choose their moment to fight back.
Just like Celeste is going to choose.
The room goes deeper.