The first memory they could hold onto was Andrea’s hands. Calloused, steady, slick with their blood as she dragged them out of the forest. They had been limp, more dead than alive, the thing in the woods having already started its feast. Andrea had come like a knife splitting the night—her arrows, her traps, her fury. She saved them, though in the haze of fever and shock, they couldn’t remember if she looked merciful or merely hungry.

In the cabin, time dissolved. Andrea became the axis around which their world spun. She tended their wounds with methods that burned, wrapping herbs so tightly into torn flesh it felt like a punishment rather than a cure. The bitter smell of medicinal herbs stung their nostrils as she worked, her fingers pressing cruelly into sensitive flesh. She cooked bitter stews that scraped down their throat, forcing sustenance where the body refused it. And through it all, her voice whispered, lectured, scolded.

“You’d be nothing but marrow if I hadn’t found you,” Andrea muttered one night, grinding roots into a paste. The rhythmic scrape of stone against stone filled the silence between her words. “Do you understand that? You belong to me now. The woods wanted you, and I didn’t let them have you. That makes you mine.”

Her thoughts followed her everywhere, spilling into the silence as though she couldn’t contain them.

Look at them. Fragile little thing. A snapped twig, a shallow grave. They’d be dust if I hadn’t bothered. And now they look at me like I’m salvation. Good. They should. Fear keeps them soft. Fear makes them pliant.

They heard her muttering while sharpening her blades, the metallic scrape sending shivers down their spine. While stitching pelts, her fingers moving with surprising dexterity. While pacing at night when the howls of the forest carried too close, making the cabin walls feel paper-thin.

At first, they trembled. Fear clawed up their throat with every glance Andrea cut their way. But weeks blurred into months, and fear became something else—something sickly sweet that rotted inside them. Dependency. Devotion. Stockholm had wound its tendrils deep, so that Andrea’s presence no longer terrified but anchored them. The idea of leaving, of stepping outside her shadow, filled them with more dread than her hands ever had.

Andrea noticed. She always noticed.

“You’ve stopped flinching when I touch you,” she said, brushing damp cloth along their neck. The coolness of the fabric sent a shiver across their skin. Her smile was faint, but cruel. “Good. I hate when prey fights what’s already decided.”