Chapter 3 - Poppy
The light changes so gradually that I almost miss the moment night becomes morning. One minute the windows are black mirrors reflecting my own haunted face, and the next they're filled with gray—that colorless pre-dawn gray that makes everything look like a photograph drained of life.
I'm still on the couch. I've been here for hours, knees pulled to my chest, eyes fixed on the door. Waiting for something. A knock. A key in the lock. The sound of footsteps that don't belong.
Nothing came.
Part of me expected him to follow. To finish what he started—or what I interrupted. Every creak of the old building made my heart seize. Every car that passed on the street below sent me spiraling into fresh terror.
But the night passed in silence, and now it's morning, and I'm still alive, and I don't know what that means.
My body aches from sitting in the same position for so long. My eyes burn. My mouth tastes sour and stale. I should shower. Eat something. Pretend to be a person who had a normal night, who slept in her bed, who didn't witness a murder twelve hours ago.
Instead, I get up and walk to the door.
I'm not sure why. To check the lock again—I've checked it a hundred times. To look through the peephole at the empty hallway. Or maybe just because I can't sit still anymore, can't keep waiting for something that may or may not come.
I undo the deadbolt. The chain. The flimsy lock that wouldn't stop anyone determined to get in.
I open the door.
And there it is.
A single black dahlia, placed precisely in the center of my doormat. The petals are dark and perfect, the stem cut at an angle I recognize. My angle. My technique.
It's one of mine.
I stand there for a long moment, staring at it. The hallway is empty. The building is quiet, that early-morning stillness before the rest of the world wakes up. There's no sign of who left it or when. It's just sitting there, innocent and impossible, a flower on a doorstep.
He was here.
While I sat in the dark, terrified, jumping at shadows—he was here. Climbing the stairs to my floor. Walking down my hallway. Standing exactly where I'm standing now, looking at my door, knowing I was on the other side.
He could have knocked. Could have broken in. Could have done anything he wanted.
Instead, he left a flower.
I should call the police. This is evidence—proof that he knows where I live, proof that he's stalking me, proof that I'm not safe. I should take a picture, preserve the scene, do all the things they tell you to do on crime shows.
I pick up the dahlia.
I don't know why. My hand moves before my brain can stop it, and then it's in my fingers, the stem cool and damp, the petals brushing against my skin.
It smells like my workroom. Like the hours I spent preparing for the gala, carefully selecting each bloom, arranging and rearranging until everything was perfect.
He took this from my work. He kept it. He brought it here.
Why?
I step back inside and close the door. Lock it. Chain it. Stand there with the dahlia in my hand, breathing too fast, trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense.
A gift. That's what this is. A gift from a murderer.
I should throw it away. Burn it. Stuff it in the garbage and pretend it never existed.
I fill a glass with water and put the dahlia in it. Set it on my kitchen table, where the morning light catches the dark petals and makes them gleam like silk.
I sit down across from it and wait for the shaking to stop.
It doesn't stop.
The morning crawls by in fragments. I try to eat—toast, half a banana—but everything tastes like cardboard and fear.
I try to work, pulling out supplies for an arrangement I'm supposed to deliver next week, but my hands won't cooperate.
I cut a stem too short, then another. Ruin a rose by gripping it too hard, crushing the petals.
I give up and sit at my laptop instead, typing his name into the search bar.
Gabriel Ambrose.
The results are endless. Charity galas, society pages, business journals, philanthropic foundations.
His face appears over and over—that sharp jaw, those dark eyes, that smile that looks so warm in photographs.
He's shaking hands with politicians, cutting ribbons at hospital openings, accepting awards for his contributions to arts education.
Ambrose Foundation donates $10 million to children's literacy program.
Gabriel Ambrose named Philanthropist of the Year by Metropolitan Charity Council.
The Ambrose brothers: Inside the family reshaping the city's cultural landscape.
I scroll through article after article, looking for something—anything—that hints at what I saw last night. A scandal buried in the business section. A rumor whispered in a gossip column. Some crack in the perfect facade.
There's nothing.
He's untouchable. A saint. The kind of man people admire and envy and aspire to be.
And I watched him kill someone.
The cognitive dissonance makes me dizzy.
I close the laptop and press my palms against my eyes, trying to reconcile the man in the photographs with the man in the study.
The blood on his hands. The peace on his face.
The way he looked at me without fear or panic, just that strange, curious interest.
Like I was something he wanted to examine more closely.
My phone buzzes. A text from Bea, my closest friend since college. Coffee later? I need to vent about my boss.
I stare at the message for a long time. Bea doesn't know about the gala. Doesn't know about any of it. She thinks I spent last night arranging flowers for rich people, which is technically true. She has no idea that my life cracked open twelve hours ago and nothing will ever be the same.
Can't today, I type back. Not feeling great. Rain check?
Her response comes immediately. Uh oh. Gala hangover? Did you at least meet a hot billionaire?
I almost laugh. The sound that comes out is closer to a sob.
Something like that, I reply. I'll call you soon.
I put the phone face-down on the table and try not to think about how easily the lies come. How natural it feels to hide this, to carry it alone, to protect a secret that isn't even mine.
Or maybe it is mine now. Maybe the moment I didn't call the police, I made it mine.
Around noon, my mother calls.
I almost don't answer. Linda has a sixth sense for when something's wrong—she always has. When I was a child and tried to hide a scraped knee or a bad grade, she'd know before I even opened my mouth. Something in my face, she said. Something in the way I held my shoulders.
If I answer, she'll hear it in my voice. She'll push. She'll worry. And I can't explain this to her—can't find words for what I saw, what I'm feeling, what I'm doing sitting at my kitchen table staring at a flower left by a killer.
But if I don't answer, she'll worry more. She'll call back, again and again, until I pick up. She might even come over.
I answer.
"Hi, Mom."
"Sweetheart. How did it go? I've been thinking about you all night."
Her voice is warm but tight. I can hear the anxiety underneath, that constant hum of worry that's been part of her for as long as I can remember.
"It went fine," I say. "The arrangements looked great. The client seemed happy."
"And the people? The Ambroses?"
Something about the way she says the name makes me pause. There's weight in it. History.
"I didn't really interact with them. I was just there to do the flowers."
"But you saw them? The brothers?"
"From a distance. Why?"
A pause. Too long to be casual.
"No reason. I just... I wanted to make sure everything was okay. That no one bothered you."
"Bothered me how?"
"I don't know. Forget I said anything. I'm just being a worried mother."
She laughs, but it sounds forced. I've heard that laugh before—when I asked about my father, when I asked why we moved so much when I was young, when I pushed too hard against the locked doors of her past.
"Mom. Is there something you're not telling me?"
"Of course not, sweetheart. I'm just glad you're home safe. You sound tired. Did you sleep?"
"Not much."
"You should rest. Take care of yourself. And Poppy?"
"Yeah?"
"If anything strange happens... if anyone contacts you about the gala, or asks questions, or seems interested in you... You'll tell me, won't you? Right away?"
The dahlia sits on my table, dark petals gleaming in the light.
"Sure, Mom. I'll tell you."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
I hang up and sit there for a long time, turning her words over in my mind. If anyone seems interested in you. Like she expected this. Like she's been waiting for something to find me.
But that's paranoid. My mother's anxiety has always been formless, generalized—a fear of everything and nothing. It has nothing to do with Gabriel Ambrose or the Serpent Brotherhood or whatever I stumbled into last night.
It can't.
The afternoon fades toward evening. I haven't left the apartment. Haven't showered. Haven't done anything except sit and scroll and stare at the flower on my table, willing it to make sense.
I should get rid of it. Every time I look at it, I think about his hands—those same hands that arranged this stem, that touched these petals, that wrapped around a man's throat and squeezed until the life was gone.
I don't get rid of it.
Instead, I find myself wandering through my apartment, restless and untethered. I can't sit still. Can't focus. Can't exist in my own skin without feeling like something is crawling underneath.
I end up in my workroom—the second bedroom I converted into a studio, filled with supplies and half-finished projects and sketches pinned to every surface. This is usually where I feel most myself, surrounded by flowers and wire and ribbon, my hands busy with creation.
Now it feels like a crime scene. Every bloom reminds me of the gala. Every dark petal echoes the dahlias I arranged in that ballroom, under the eyes of masked strangers.
Under his eyes.
I move to my desk, shuffling through papers without purpose, just needing to do something. Invoices, receipts, notes for upcoming projects. My sketchbook, lying open to a half-finished study of roses.
I flip through the pages idly, not really seeing them. Flowers, flowers, more flowers. A sketch of my mother's face that I never finished. A series of hands from a figure drawing class I took years ago.
And then I stop.
There's a page missing.
The edges are ragged—torn, not cut. I run my finger along the remnants, trying to remember what was there. I flip forward, flip back, searching for context.
The page before is a sketch of the estate's ballroom, drawn from memory after my visit last week. The sweeping staircase, the iron chandeliers, the way the light fell through those tall windows.
The page after is a study of dahlia petals. Close-up, detailed, focused on the way the colors darken toward the center.
And in between—nothing. A gap. A wound.
I close my eyes and try to remember. What did I draw that night, after I came home from the estate?
I was restless, unsettled by the strange atmosphere of the place.
I poured a glass of wine and sat at this desk and let my hand move without thinking, the way I always do when I need to process something I can't name.
A serpent.
I drew a serpent, coiled around a dahlia. The image surfaces in my memory like something rising from deep water. The serpent's mouth was open—not to strike, but to speak. To whisper something to the flower cradled in its coils.
I drew it because I couldn't stop thinking about those serpent motifs everywhere in the estate. Because something about the place felt predatory, watchful.
Because I felt, even then, like something was circling me.
The page is gone. Torn out. Taken.
But I didn't take it. I would never tear a page from my own sketchbook—the ragged edge would drive me mad. I'm meticulous about these things, have been since art school.
Which means someone else was here. In my apartment. Going through my things.
Before the gala.
The realization hits me like ice water. I stand up so fast my chair scrapes against the floor, my heart pounding, my breath coming in short gasps.
He was here. Not just last night, leaving the dahlia. Before. Days ago, maybe. While I slept, or while I was out buying flowers, or while I sat in this very room working on arrangements for his family's party.
He stood where I'm standing. Touched what I'm touching. Looked through my sketches and found the serpent I drew and took it. Took a piece of me.
I spin around, scanning the room with new eyes. What else did he touch? What else did he take? I yank open drawers, rifle through papers, check shelves and boxes, and all the places where I keep pieces of my life.
Nothing else seems missing. But how would I know? How would I ever know what he's taken, what he's seen, what he knows about me now?
He's been watching me.
The thought is a physical sensation—a hand around my throat, a weight on my chest. He didn't just notice me at the gala. He noticed me before. He was already interested, already circling, already planning.
The witnessing wasn't an accident. It was an introduction.
I sink onto the floor of my workroom, back against the desk, knees pulled to my chest. The position is familiar—I sat like this all night, waiting for something to come.
Now I understand what I was waiting for.
Not a knock at the door. Not a confrontation.
Just the slow, sickening realization that I was never safe at all. That the monster was already inside the walls before I ever knew to be afraid.
On the kitchen table, visible through the doorway, the black dahlia waits.
I see you, it seems to say. I've been seeing you all along.