The alley was narrow and poorly lit, rain misting the air just enough to blur the world at its edges. Each step I took echoed off the brick walls, amplified by the damp. My coat clung to my skin, heavy with cold. I told myself I was tired. That was why my shoulders were tense, why my breathing came shallow and sharp.

Then the hairs on the back of my neck lifted.

My stomach tightened. My pulse thudded loud enough to drown out the rain.

I had always been considered strange.

The quiet girl. The one people spoke around instead of to. I learned early how to make myself small, how to blend into the corners of rooms, into crowds, into silence. Being overlooked became a kind of camouflage. It was easier that way. Safer.

My therapist called it alexithymia. Emotional blindness.

An inability to identify or describe my own feelings.

I nodded when she explained it, scribbling notes I never reread. Labels were comforting. They gave shape to things I couldn’t quite grasp.

Like this feeling.

Someone was behind me.

This was fear, wasn’t it?

A natural response to being followed.

I didn’t look back. Looking back made things real. Instead, I walked faster, careful not to run, not to draw attention. Not to look like a lunatic. My footsteps splashed against the pavement, uneven now. Behind me, another set followed, deliberate and unhurried.

So close.

The morning’s headlines surfaced uninvited.

Serial killer on the rise.
Third body discovered.
Mutilated beyond recognition.

They always said the same things. That it was random. Senseless. A single moment of violence.

A single moment.

That’s all it takes.

Blood rushed through my ears. The world narrowed, tunnelled, until there was only the alley, the rain, and the sound of footsteps closing in. I turned sharply down a side passage, my breath hitching as my fingers curled around the object in my pocket, the only thing that ever seemed to steady me.

The footsteps followed.

A low chuckle slipped through the rain.

I stopped short.

Brick wall. Dead end.

I was cornered. Alone.

I turned slowly, heart pounding, ready to beg or scream or freeze, whatever normal people did in moments like this. A man stood a few feet away, rain slicking his hair to his forehead. His eyes were small, calculating, crawling over me with a familiarity that made my skin prickle.

I knew that look.

I knew what he wanted.

A single moment.

Everything became very clear.

I stood over his mutilated corpse, rain darkening his clothes until they clung to him like a second skin. His mouth hung open, slack with surprise, as though he’d tried to speak and failed. One eye stared up at the colourless sky; the other had already begun to cloud, blinking uselessly against the rain.

I had been careful.

The first cut was always the most important, deep enough to silence, precise enough to avoid the mess that came from hesitation. I didn’t rush it. There was no need. Once he realised what was happening, it was already too late. They always realised too late.

I adjusted his coat where it had twisted beneath him, smoothing the fabric flat. The blade had done its work cleanly, opening him exactly where I intended. Blood pooled beneath his ribs, thinned by the rain, slipping into the cracks of the pavement like it had somewhere else to be.

His hands were still curled, fingers stiffening around nothing. I wondered briefly what he’d reached for, me, perhaps, or the weapon he never got the chance to use. I nudged one arm aside with my foot, checking. Empty.

My grip tightened around the knife, not from shock, but from a feeling far more intense. My pulse hummed beneath my skin. The rain traced warm paths down my wrists, washing his blood from the blade in thin red ribbons.

A single moment. This was my fourth now.

And only then did it occur to me.

Oh.

It hadn’t been fear tightening my chest in the alley.

It was excitement.

I still get the two mixed up.