The last person Erin expected to run into on a rainy business trip was Bella Mercer.

At first, she almost didn’t recognize her.

They had gone to school together years ago—back when Bella had been the strange, awkward girl nobody wanted near their lunch table. Erin remembered braces, frizzy hair, thick glasses, and the kind of eager, humiliating devotion teenage girls can smell and punish from across a classroom. Bella had followed her around for a whole semester once, always offering to carry books, buy snacks, do favors no one had asked for.

Erin had not been kind to her.

She wasn’t proud of that now.

Still, the woman standing under the dim awning outside the train station looked so changed that Erin stared a moment before she placed her.

Bella was still not conventionally beautiful. If anything, age had made her features harsher. But she had learned something more useful than beauty.

She had learned how to look directly at people and make them uncomfortable.

“Erin?” Bella said, smiling as if they were old friends.

Erin laughed in surprise, then—because politeness is often just guilt in a good coat—embraced her lightly.

They talked for a while under the dripping awning. Erin explained that she was in town for work, only overnight, and hadn’t booked a hotel yet.

Bella insisted at once.

“You’re staying with me.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s one night.”

Erin hesitated. Expense reports at her company were always a pain, and Bella was insistent in a way that made refusal feel rude.

So in the end, she agreed.

As they walked through the wet streets, Bella kept complimenting her.

“Your skin is still incredible.”

Erin laughed uneasily.

“And your eyes. God, I remember your eyes. They’re even prettier now.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“I’m not.” Bella turned to look at her, deadly serious. “People would kill for eyes like yours.”

Erin smiled the way women smile when they are not sure whether they are being flattered or appraised.

Somewhere beneath the warmth of being admired was the discomfort of being examined too closely.

But she ignored it.

People ignore a lot when they want to believe they are safe.

⸻

Bella lived in an old apartment building on a narrow side street, the kind of prewar structure that had once tried to look elegant and had since surrendered to dampness, peeling paint, and neglect.

The front hall smelled of iron pipes, mold, and old wallpaper.

A lot of the units looked empty.

“Charming,” Erin said lightly.

Bella laughed. “It’s not much from the outside, but inside it’s clean.”

Erin hoped that was true. She was already regretting not booking a hotel.

Still, once they got upstairs and Bella unlocked the door, the apartment was better than expected. Small, yes. Dim, yes. But tidy. Neat in a way that suggested control rather than comfort.

Erin put her overnight bag down and told herself to relax.

Then she saw the cat.

It came padding out of the inner room with obscene calm—a fat black thing with slick fur and yellow eyes, licking at its mouth as if it had just finished eating.

There was something dark and wet at the corners of its jaws.

Blood, Erin thought instantly.

Or jam, or gravy, or something harmless.

Still, she felt her stomach tighten.

“Bella… your cat?”

Bella bent and scooped it up like a child. “Found him outside. Isn’t he beautiful?”

The cat stared at Erin over Bella’s arm, unblinking.

Beautiful was not the word she would have chosen.

Its body was too round, its head too broad, and there was something disturbingly human in the way it watched.

Bella brought her tea.

Erin took a sip and nearly spat it back into the cup. It tasted bitter beneath the sugar, medicinal somehow.

“Herbal,” Bella said. “Good for stress.”

Erin forced a smile and swallowed.

Maybe Bella really had changed.

Maybe this was adulthood—learning to sit politely in ugly rooms with people from your past and pretend nothing ever happened.

Bella sat across from her and said, “Do you want to see my collection?”

That made Erin perk up. “Collection? What kind?”

Bella’s smile was odd. Too still.

“Oh, the same sort of thing I used to collect,” she said. “Come see.”

Erin remembered celebrity magazines, clipped photos, endless scrapbooks. It felt harmless enough. Nostalgic, even.

So she followed Bella into the bedroom.

And stopped dead in the doorway.

There were women on the floor.

Three of them.

Bound at the wrists and ankles. Mouths gagged. Faces gaunt, eyes sunken and wild with the particular terror of people who have gone past screaming and into waiting.

One of them made a muffled, frantic sound through the gag the moment she saw Erin.

Another only stared, too exhausted even for that.

For one blank second Erin’s mind refused to understand what her eyes were showing her.

Then Bella said cheerfully, almost proudly:

“I collect people.”

Erin looked at her.

Bella pointed at the nearest woman. “She has the most perfect mouth.”

Another. “Her skin is beautiful. Such a waste on her.”

Another. “That one has a lovely nose.”

She said it all with the calm practical tone of someone discussing produce at a market.

Erin stepped backward so quickly the teacup slipped from her hand and shattered against the floor.

Tea spread in a dark stain across the boards.

Bella turned toward her with a look that was almost playful.

“Erin,” she said, “guess what I want from you.”

Erin opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue felt thick.

The room tilted.

The tea.

Of course.

She took one step, maybe two, and her legs simply folded beneath her.

Bella watched her sink to the floor with visible satisfaction.

“I was wondering how long it would take.”

Erin tried to crawl.

Couldn’t.

Her hands felt disconnected. Her heartbeat was loud and far away.

Bella crouched beside her and produced a clear plastic pouch from somewhere behind her back.

Inside it were several small black objects, shriveled and glossy like dried fruit.

Bella shook the bag gently.

“Eyeballs don’t keep well,” she said almost conversationally. “Freezing only does so much. Sometimes it’s better to leave things where they belong until you’re ready to use them.”

Erin made a sound that might have been a scream in another body.

Bella laughed softly.

Then she tied Erin the way she had tied the others—carefully, almost tenderly. Rope around the wrists, then elbows, ankles, knees. A wad of cloth forced between her teeth and tied behind her head.

Erin’s tears came hot and useless.

As Bella worked, Erin’s gaze drifted under the bed.

Bones.

A scatter of pale, clean bones lay in the shadow there.

The black cat crouched among them contentedly, chewing on something small.

Its eyes glowed in the dark like coins in deep water.

“I need a surgeon,” Bella murmured to herself as she stood. “The stitching has to be done properly this time.”

She left the room, and from somewhere in the apartment Erin heard her making a phone call.

A name floated back to her through the open doorway.

“Doctor Leigh… yes. Right away.”

Hope, absurd and fragile, lit up inside Erin.

Someone else was coming.

Someone normal.

Someone who would see this and call the police.

Someone who would stop it.

She lay there in a haze of drugged terror, listening to the apartment clock tick and the cat’s teeth worrying quietly at whatever it had found under the bed.

At last, the doorbell rang.

Footsteps.

Voices.

A woman entered the apartment wearing a white coat and a surgical mask, carrying a metal case.

Erin let out a desperate muffled cry.

From the bedroom doorway, the woman glanced in.

Just one quick look.

But she saw everything.

She saw Erin.

She saw the others.

And, to Erin’s astonishment, she gave the slightest nod.

A signal.

Hold on.

Erin nearly sobbed with relief.

Doctor Leigh opened the case on the dining table and began laying out instruments one by one.

Scalpel.

Forceps.

Syringes.

Thread.

Steel gleamed under the yellow overhead bulb.

Bella hovered beside her, practically vibrating.

“You can help me, right?” she said. “You can make me beautiful. You can fix it this time. Then nobody will laugh. Nobody will look away.”

Doctor Leigh sounded impatient. “Let me examine the specimens first.”

Bella, thrilled, led her into the bedroom.

From where Erin lay on the floor, she saw only fragments: the hem of the white coat, Bella’s bare feet, the glint of steel in one lifted hand.

Then, in one clean motion, Doctor Leigh drew the scalpel across Bella’s throat from behind.

Bella made no sound.

She dropped instantly, hands clawing at the ruin in her neck, eyes bulging in astonishment more than pain. Blood surged across the floorboards in a dark sheet.

She looked almost offended.

As if betrayal, to her, was a rudeness worse than death.

Then she was still.

Blood crept slowly toward Erin’s cheek.

For a few seconds the whole room seemed to hold its breath.

Then Doctor Leigh stepped over Bella’s body, removed the mask, and crouched in front of Erin.

She was younger than Erin had expected. Calm-faced. Sharp-eyed. Not a doctor at all, not in any ordinary sense.

She untied the gag first.

Erin sucked in a shaking breath. “Police,” she gasped. “Call the police—”

“In a moment,” the woman said. “First, I need to ask you something.”

Erin stared at her.

The woman glanced down at Bella’s corpse, then at the other bound women, then back at Erin.

“Did she ever tell you why she started collecting people?”

“No.”

“She used to be one of my patients,” the woman said. “Years ago.”

Patients, Erin thought dimly. So maybe she really was a doctor.

But there was something in the way she said it that made the word feel strange.

“She came to me convinced her face was wrong,” the woman continued. “Not ugly. Wrong. She said every beautiful woman she saw had stolen something from her. Eyes. Lips. Skin. She thought beauty was a finite thing, and that she’d been born empty.”

The black cat slipped soundlessly from under the bed and rubbed against the dead woman’s ankle.

Doctor Leigh watched it with open disgust.

“I should have had her committed,” she said. “Instead I told myself she was only broken in ways I couldn’t treat.”

She stood and went to free the other women.

One of them had already died.

Another was barely conscious.

The third began sobbing the moment the ropes came loose.

By the time sirens arrived, the apartment smelled of blood, tea, cat fur, and something older underneath, something sealed in the walls.

The police found drawers full of trophies.

Hair braided into bundles.

Teeth wrapped in tissue.

Labeled jars in the refrigerator.

Photographs.

Sketches.

Notes.

The remains of women no one had known how to keep looking for.

And in the freezer, packed carefully in frost-clouded plastic, they found parts Bella had never learned to use.

When the detectives asked Erin later whether Bella had seemed insane from the beginning, she didn’t know how to answer.

Because the truth was worse.

Bella had seemed lonely.

Eager.

Grateful.

The way dangerous people often do when they need you to come inside.

⸻

Months later, Erin still woke at night with the taste of drugged tea in her mouth.

She moved apartments. Changed jobs. Cut her hair. Started leaving lights on when she slept.

It helped, a little.

What didn’t help was the cat.

The police never found it.

Now and then, walking home after dark, she would notice a black shape sitting at the far end of an alley or on a fence under a streetlamp. Too fat. Too still. Yellow eyes fixed on her.

Watching.

Once, in the reflection of a shop window, she thought she saw Bella standing just behind her shoulder—throat open, smiling faintly, as if waiting to see whether Erin had learned anything at all.

When Erin turned, there was no one there.

Only the cat.

It sat at the mouth of the alley with something round and pale between its teeth.

Then it slipped into the dark.