Aya
The blade of my camping knife didn't sink into his chest. It didn't find his heart. Instead, it scraped against his ribs as Kaito twisted his body with the unnatural agility of someone who spent his life studying how muscle and bone moved.
He didn't grunt. He didn't cry out. He simply grabbed my wrist and squeezed until I heard a sickening pop. The knife clattered onto the wooden porch of the shrine.
"Poor, clumsy Aya," Kaito whispered. He was so close now that the smell of his expensive cologne mixed with the metallic scent of Haruki's blood. "You were never meant for violence. You were meant to be the canvas, not the artist."
He threw me backward. I hit the sliding paper doors of the shrine, crashing through the rotted wood and falling into the dark, dusty interior. I landed hard on the tatami mats, the air leaving my lungs in a sharp wheeze.
Outside, the sirens were getting louder. Wail. Wail. Wail. They were coming up the mountain road. But I realized, with a sinking horror, that they were still at least five minutes away. In five minutes, a man who knew the exact location of every major artery in the human body could finish his work and vanish into the shadows of the forest.
Kaito stepped through the broken door, the scalpel held between his fingers like a pen. The light from the grey sky behind him made him look like a silhouette of a demon.
"Did you know," he began, his voice echoing in the hollow space of the shrine, "that the human heart can continue to beat for several minutes even after it's been removed from the body? It's a stubborn muscle. It doesn't want to give up. Sakura's was like that. It fought me."
I scrambled backward on my elbows, my breath coming in jagged gasps. "Why her? Why my family?"
Kaito stopped. He looked around the dusty shrine, at the faded photos of my ancestors hanging on the walls. "It wasn't personal, Aya. Not at first. I needed a subject. Someone pure. Someone whose absence would create a beautiful, lingering void. And then I met you at the funeral. I saw how you looked at her casket. I realized then that the art wasn't finished. The void wasn't complete until it swallowed the person who remembered her most."
He lunged.
I rolled to the side, my hand brushing against something heavy and metallic on the altar. It was a heavy brass incense burner. I grabbed it and swung blindly.
Clang.
The burner hit the side of his head. Kaito stumbled, his glasses flying off and shattering against the floor. For the first time, I saw him bleed. A thin trickle of red ran down his temple, staining his perfect black turtleneck.
"You... you broke the symmetry," he hissed. His voice lost its calm, melodic tone. It became a guttural rasp.
He didn't come at me with the scalpel this time. He tackled me, his weight pinning me to the floor. His hands wrapped around my throat. He wasn't acting like a surgeon anymore. He was acting like the monster Haruki had described.
"If you want to be with her so badly," he growled, "I'll send you there now. No art. No perfection. Just the end."
My vision started to blur. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. My hands clawed at his face, my nails digging into the skin he had so carefully reshaped to look like Kaito Mori. I felt a flap of skin tear—the edge of a surgical scar near his ear.
The sirens were right outside now. The clearing was filled with the blue and red flashes of police lights.
"Police! Drop the weapon! Hands in the air!"
Kaito didn't let go. He seemed possessed by a singular, frantic need to extinguish my life before they reached us.
Then, a shadow appeared in the broken doorway.
It wasn't a police officer.
It was Detective Ishii.
He looked older than he had on the phone. His face was etched with a decade of guilt and exhaustion. In his hand, he held a heavy service revolver.
"Let her go, Haru," Ishii said.
Kaito froze. His grip on my throat loosened just enough for me to suck in a frantic breath of air. He turned his head slightly toward the door. "Haru? You haven't called me that in a long time, Sensei."
My heart nearly stopped. Sensei?
"I should have finished it ten years ago," Ishii said, his voice trembling. "I saw what you were. I saw what you did to that girl. But I loved your father. I thought I could hide your sins. I thought if I gave you a new identity—if I let you become Kaito—you would stop."
I looked from Ishii to the man pinning me down. The world tilted. Ishii hadn't been trying to protect me. He had been protecting him. The messages, the warnings... they weren't to save me. They were Ishii's last desperate attempt to keep his secret from being discovered.
"You created me," the man formerly known as Haruki said, a distorted smile spreading across his face. "You gave me the hospital. You gave me the life. You are the architect of this masterpiece, Ishii-san."
"No more," Ishii whispered.
Bang.
The gunshot inside the small wooden shrine was deafening. Kaito's body jerked. He slumped over me, his head falling onto my shoulder. I felt a warm, wet heat spreading across my blouse.
I pushed his heavy body off me. He rolled onto his back, his eyes staring up at the rotted ceiling. He was still smiling.
Ishii dropped the gun. He fell to his knees, burying his face in his hands. "I'm sorry, Aya. I'm so sorry."
I stood up, my legs shaking like jelly. I walked past the crying detective, past the body of the man who had haunted my family for a decade. I walked out into the cold, damp air of Mitso.
The police were swarming the clearing. Officers were running toward the shrine, their shouts echoing through the trees. I saw the cooler box lying in the ferns where it had fallen.
I walked over to it. One of the officers tried to stop me, but I pushed past him. I knelt in the dirt and opened the lid.
Inside, among the melting ice packs, was the glass jar.
I picked it up. The heart inside didn't look like a monster's trophy. It just looked small. Sad.
"It's okay now, Sakura," I whispered.
I looked up at the forest. The sun was finally breaking through the grey clouds, casting long, golden fingers of light through the cedar trees. For the first time in ten years, the air in Mitso didn't feel heavy. The shadows didn't feel like they were reaching for me.
But as the paramedics approached me, as they wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and tried to take the jar from my hands, I saw something that made my blood run cold one last time.
On the ground, near the edge of the woods where Haruki had been shot, there was a trail of blood.
A trail of blood that led away from the clearing.
Haruki was gone.
And in the distance, hidden in the thickest part of the forest, I saw a flash of yellow. A yellow raincoat.
Haruki Sato—the real one, the scarred one—was still out there. And he had seen everything. He had seen the police. He had seen Ishii. And he had seen me.
I realized then that the story wasn't over. Kaito Mori—the impostor—was dead. But the "Gentleman" had many faces. And some of them were still walking.
As they led me toward the ambulance, I looked back at the shrine. Ishii was being led away in handcuffs. The "perfection" had been shattered.
But as I sat in the back of the ambulance, a nurse handed me my phone. It had been recovered from the shrine floor.
There was one new notification.
An email. From an encrypted address.
"You did well today, Aya. But a heart in a jar is just a piece of meat. The real secret is still buried under the oak tree. See you soon."
I leaned my head against the cold metal of the ambulance door and closed my eyes.
Freida McFadden was right. Everyone has secrets. And some secrets are so deep, you have to dig up the whole world to find them.
The journey to Mitso was over. But the nightmare was just beginning.
I gripped the half-heart necklace around my neck until the edges cut into my palm. I wasn't the hunter anymore. And I wasn't the prey.
I was the only one left alive who knew the truth. And in this world, that's the most dangerous thing you can be.