"We are all born innocent. It is choice, not circumstance, that makes us monsters."
— Jean-Paul Sartre
The water ran black for a long time.
It wasn't blood anymore — just memory diluted.
And yet… the stain refused to leave my hands.
I watched the mirror fog over until my reflection vanished.
For a brief, merciful moment, I ceased to exist.
When I stepped back into the living room, I froze.
Lilith was there, I thought i was hallucinating .
She Seated on my couch as if she belonged to the silence — one leg crossed over the other, eyes glimmering like a cat watching blood dry.
I hadn't told her my address. She'd never been here.
Yet here she was — calm, waiting, inevitable.
"How did you find me?" My voice was almost a whisper.
She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she traced her fingertip along the edge of my coffee table, slow and deliberate.
"People reveal more than they realize," she said finally. "You leave breadcrumbs — in your books, in your silences."
A chill crawled through me.
I thought I had erased every trace of myself.
She looked up then, and the air shifted — gravity bending toward her presence.
"You're trembling," she observed. "Was it your first?"
I didn't reply. My throat was a wound that wouldn't close.
She rose, steps unhurried, until she stood close enough that I could smell the faint scent of smoke and winter rain clinging to her coat. Her voice softened — not with pity, but with knowing.
"You think cleansing yourself makes you pure," she murmured. "But purity is just vanity in disguise."
Her words landed like prophecy.
I wanted to reject them — yet something inside me bowed.
I sank onto the couch, staring at my hands again.
"Do you think I'm evil?" I asked.
The words came out smaller than I intended.
She leaned down, her lips inches from my ear.
"Evil?" she whispered. "No, Kael. Evil is chaos without thought.
You chose to act. That makes you dangerous — and divine."
I closed my eyes.
The guilt pulsed like a fever — and beneath it, a calm so pure it frightened me.
The same calm I felt before the kill.
"A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie," Dostoevsky wrote, "comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him."
Maybe that was me now — a man who mistook sin for self-realization.
When I finally met her gaze again, Lilith's eyes held no judgment.
Only recognition.
And for the first time that night, I understood something terrifying —
I wasn't horrified she found me.
I was relieved.