"The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls."
— Edgar Allan Poe
The city slept, but I couldn't.
The walls of my apartment felt alive — breathing, pulsing, whispering fragments of the man I had killed. The silence had texture now, thick and suffocating, as though the air itself demanded explanation.
Lilith moved like smoke through the room, her presence both soothing and suffocating. She'd been staying with me ever since the night of the penthouse. She said it was for safety, but I knew it was something else — possession disguised as devotion.
She leaned by the window, wrapped in my shirt, cigarette ember glowing like a bleeding star. "You don't look like a man who avenged his mother," she murmured.
"I did what was necessary."
She exhaled slowly, the smoke curling like a ghost between us. "Necessary," she repeated. "Such a convenient word for the damned."
Her tone was teasing, but her eyes — her eyes held something ancient, like she had seen a thousand men crumble beneath the same illusion of control.
I turned to the mirror. The man staring back wasn't me. His gaze was colder, sharper — an animal that had learned human speech but forgotten empathy. For the first time, I saw what Lilith saw: the potential for greatness… or ruin.
The television flickered in the background. News reports of the death — "suspected burglary gone wrong," "tragic accident," "no leads." I almost laughed. The system was blind, predictable, pathetic. I hadn't just escaped justice — I had outsmarted it.
Yet beneath the thrill, something darker moved. Not guilt. Not fear. Something far more insidious — emptiness.
Lilith walked behind me and pressed her hands onto my shoulders. Her touch was ice and fire. "The world is cruel, Kael," she whispered, her voice a lullaby and a curse. "People destroy each other for less than what you've done. You've simply stopped pretending to be good."
Her words slid into me like silk-covered blades.
"Tell me," she continued, tracing her finger down my neck, "do you feel powerful?"
"I feel alive."
"Good," she smiled. "Because power is the only real morality left."
That night, we walked through the city's alleys — the forgotten veins of civilization. Homeless men muttered to themselves, lovers fought under broken streetlights, addicts clawed for illusions of peace. The world was a carcass pretending to breathe.
Lilith watched a woman begging for money near the subway steps. "See her?" she asked softly. "Once, she was a nurse. Her husband stole her savings. She jumped from the bridge and lived. Now she thanks the same god who let her suffer."
I didn't respond. The horror wasn't in her story — it was in how normal it all was.
As we walked, the city's cruelty began to look almost… divine.
It was truth stripped of illusion, raw and merciless.
That's when I realized something unsettling: I no longer feared judgment. Not divine, not human. My morality had become a tool — sharp, adaptable, untouchable.
Lilith stopped at a corner and turned to me. Her face was calm, but her eyes glittered with an unreadable light.
"You're changing, Kael," she said. "Soon, I won't have to guide you anymore. You'll surpass even me."
She smiled, but it wasn't affection — it was fascination.
And beneath it all, I could feel something monstrous blooming inside me — quiet, patient, inevitable.