Third person POV
The abandoned house was quiet now. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that felt like a trap in itself. No birds. No wind. Just the long, ragged breaths of people who had narrowly outrun death.
Scarlett’s shirt still bore Elias’s blood, a grotesque stain over her ribs, dried now, darkened, crusted. The weight of his last scream still echoed in her ears, an image she couldn’t shake no matter how much she tried not to blink. She stood inside the shadow of the crumbling house’s doorway, unmoving, eyes stretched wide as though still waiting to believe what had happened was real.
He was dead. And even if he was a monster, a watcher, a manipulator, Scarlett had wanted justice, not an execution.
She could still hear the way the bullet tore through his skull. And the silence that fol
