By the time the final girl left, the counseling room felt haunted — not by ghosts, but by stories Elias couldn’t un-hear.

  The walls were too beige.

  The air too still.

  The faint lavender scent now cloying, smothering, wrong.

  Seraphine’s chair sat empty across from him — neat, untouched, giving no sign that something seismic had passed through the space moments earlier.

  He leaned back and let silence wrap around him.

  Her voice threaded through the quiet like a needle through skin.

  Dying is the easy way out.

  Men like him do not deserve something easy.

  Most students—most humans—spoke in bruise tones: pain, denial, shaking edges.

  Seraphine spoke like a scalpel.

  Elias ran a thumb along the margin of his notebook, eyes drifting over his writing.

  He’d scribbled details from every survivor.

  Fear. Shame. Avoidance. Trauma.

  Then, under Seraphine’s name:

  Composed

  Angry

  Too calm

  Knows more?

  He tapped the pen once, twice, then dropped it.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  He didn’t like the story that line was building.

  His training told him there was a pattern forming — not around the professor, but around the shadows trailing behind his victims.

  A fourth body?

  A fourth “suicide”?

  A fourth lipstick print?

  Maybe.

  His conscience shoved back hard.

  Let the girls breathe.

  Let them hold their relief.

  Don’t rip open wounds that have finally scabbed over.

  Morality and logic wrestled in his skull until his temples throbbed.

  He pushed himself to his feet, legs feeling heavier than they should.

  “Sergeant, finish collecting the statements,” he muttered into the hallway. “File them. I’m clocking out.”

  The sergeant frowned.

  “Sir, we closing this?”

  Elias paused just long enough to feel honesty sting.

  “No,” he said.

  Then amended, softly, “Not officially. But I’m not pulling anyone deeper into this. Not yet.”

  The sergeant nodded, accepting what he thought was resolution.

  Elias knew it was an armistice — temporary, fragile.

  He walked down the hallway like a man shedding armor piece by piece, though everything inside him still buzzed like live wire.

  Outside, the sky glowed late afternoon gold, jacaranda petals drifting like purple confetti across the campus lawn.

  He took a breath — the first one that didn’t scrape on the way out.

  Then he stopped mid-step.

  Seraphine sat alone on a stone bench beneath the jacaranda, a book open on her lap as petals collected at her feet like offerings.

  She looked peaceful.

  Too peaceful.

  A girl untouched by the ugliness he’d been wading through all day.

  He might have walked past her — chalked it up to coincidence — if she hadn’t lifted her head at the exact moment his eyes landed on her.

  Their gazes caught.

  Held.

  Her eyes didn’t flicker with recognition or embarrassment or fear.

  No flustering.

  No nervous tugging at her sleeves.

  Just that same unsettling stillness.

  Silence stretched between them like a taut wire.

  Elias was the first to look away.

  He hated that.

  He forced his feet to move, jaw tightening as he broke the connection and headed for his car.

  She was just a student.

  Just another name on a class list.

  Just one of dozens harmed by a man he’d underestimated.

  That’s what he told himself.

  He gripped his keys until they dug into his palm, climbed into his car, and shut the door harder than necessary.

  But the air felt wrong.

  Heavy.

  Charged with something unspoken.

  As he turned the ignition, a thought surfaced — unwelcome and stubborn.

  It didn’t feel like Seraphine was recovering from trauma.

  It felt like she was calculating something.

  Watching.

  Waiting.

  The kind of stillness predators had right before they moved.

  The last flicker before he drove off was not of paperwork or procedures, but of her calm face under falling petals — looking out at the world like she was deciding what to burn next… and who deserved to burn with it.