They always underestimated her.
Men, especially. Officers in pressed uniforms with clipped voices. Neighbors with kind smiles and quick gossip. Friends who laughed about the darkness she wrote into her novels as if it belonged only to fiction, not flesh.
Even him.
The detective with his quiet eyes, his unreadable face.
Rhea watched them all through the same lens with which she wrote her stories: patiently, calculatingly, without ever blinking long enough to miss their mistakes.
People believed what they wanted to believe. A woman who lived in tidy apartments filled with books, who spoke softly, who smiled politely, couldn't possibly know the weight of blood on her hands. Couldn't possibly be capable of cruelty.
Let them think it.
Let them gather their whispers like breadcrumbs, leading themselves in circles.
---
Her thoughts often returned to that night - not with fear, not with regret, but with a calm sort of satisfaction.
How easy it had been, once the planning was complete.
How fragile he had seemed in the end, paralyzed, forced to watch his life bleed slowly out of him while terror did the rest.
How ironic, really. For a man who had once thought himself untouchable.
She had written a hundred deaths in her books. She had dissected them on the page with cool, precise language. But this one...
This wasn't fiction.
This was her revenge.
No jury. No confession. No public trial where people would ask if she'd been provoked.
Only silence.
Only his eyes watching hers until they closed for good.
---
But even in her satisfaction, she wasn't blind.
She knew that writing murder and committing it weren't the same thing.
There were flaws.
Small ones.
A timeline left just uneven enough to draw attention. A scuff half-cleaned. A fingerprint she couldn't erase. Tiny, almost invisible threads that didn't fit with the story she'd crafted.
Most wouldn't see them. Most wouldn't question.
But him?
Detective Aaran?
She had felt it - the way his gaze lingered. Not suspicion. Curiosity. The quiet calculation of someone who understood the difference between innocence and performance. Between coincidence and design.
She wondered if he recognized himself in her.
---
Still, she wouldn't falter.
She would play the part they expected of her.
The quiet woman. The misunderstood writer. The harmless figure sitting politely across from detectives too quick to underestimate her.
No trembling hands. No restless glances.
Nothing but calm.
Because she understood the truth: suspicion without evidence was useless. Curiosity without proof meant nothing.
She didn't need to fool everyone. Only most of them. Enough of them. Long enough.
And him?
Detective Aaran?
She would let him watch her. Let him think he was reading her. Let him believe he could see beneath her skin.
After all, wasn't that part of the game?
Letting him follow the trail until it led exactly where she wanted.
Letting him think he was the one unraveling her when in truth... she was writing him, too.
---
She folded her hands neatly in her lap. Smiled softly when someone knocked on her door again. Played her role with care.
Because the ending hadn't been written yet.
And when it came, it would belong to her alone.