Chapter 4: Ghosts and Shadows
It began with a letter.
No name. No return address. Just four words scrawled in a familiar, delicate script:
"You are not alone."
Dorian stared at the paper for a long time, heart still, mind racing. Only one person ever wrote to him like that.
Evelyn.
The girl from his childhood. Soft-spoken. Kind. Always hovering at the edge of his world like sunlight trying to reach a dying flower. He had ignored her warmth, dismissed her confessions of love. And then, like everything else in his life—she vanished.
He thought she'd left.
But now… she was back.
Still, he couldn't afford distractions. His second target awaited: Madame Isolde, the elegant socialite who had lured his mother into her deadly circle of "friends" and left her broken and isolated.
Madame Isolde lived in luxury, fed on secrets and scandals. Dorian knew the whispers, the hidden affairs, the stolen fortunes.
And he turned them all into knives.
He began spreading her secrets, turning her closest allies against her. Photos found their way to husbands. Letters surfaced. One by one, her followers slipped through her fingers like sand.
Within weeks, she was alone.
Desperate.
And just when she was about to fall, Dorian visited her too. Dressed in black, flowers in hand.
"For you," he said with a smile, "to mourn the empire you built on other people's pain."
She screamed at him. He didn't flinch.
He only walked away, her cries echoing behind him like a lullaby.
But that night, Evelyn appeared.
He found her waiting in the garden, by the twisted remains of the old willow tree where they used to play.
"I saw what you did," she said, eyes deep with sorrow. "You're not the same."
"I'm exactly what this world made me," Dorian replied coldly.
"You were never meant to become this," she whispered. "You were meant to survive. Not become the monster they wanted you to be."
His mask cracked—just slightly.
"I'm not a monster," he said. "I just stopped pretending to be a saint."
She stepped closer. "You think this will bring them back? You think revenge will ever feel like love?"
His silence was his answer.
But as she turned to leave, she looked back once and said, "I still see the boy you were. When you're ready to find him again… I'll be waiting."
And then she was gone—like a ghost returning to the past.
Dorian stood in the silence, torn between two worlds: the storm he had become and the boy who once looked for stars.
One was easier to live with.
The other… he wasn't sure he remembered how.