The first thing I notice is the smell. Roses—not fresh, but the cloying, chemical sweetness of something sprayed from a bottle and left to soak into fabric. The second thing I notice is that I can't move my hands.

My wrists are bound behind me with what feels like nylon rope—knotted tight, the kind that bites deeper when you pull. My ankles are tied to chair legs. Wooden chair. Kitchen chair, maybe. The seat is hard under me and tilts slightly to the left where one leg is shorter than the others.

I open my eyes.

Hearts. Paper hearts taped to every surface. Red and pink and white, some hand-cut with scissors, others store-bought with glitter that catches the pale morning light filtering through sealed windows. Streamers spiral from the ceiling. Candles—unlit, dozens of them—line the baseboards. A banner above the far doorway reads BE MINE in block letters made of red construction paper, each letter slightly crooked as though hung by someone whose hands were shaking.

Valentine's Day.

The back of my skull throbs with a deep, sick heat. I try to remember. I remember—a door. A voice. A street at night with frost on the windshield. Then nothing. A black gap where memory should be, like a page torn from a book.

I'm a cop. That much I know without question. Detective Gabriel Cross, eight years in homicide. My badge number is 4714. I know how to read a room, and this room is reading wrong. The decorations are too dense, too desperate. There are hearts taped over the light switches. Hearts on the inside of the windows. A single red rose, plastic, sitting in a glass of water on the coffee table as if someone believed it needed to be kept alive.

Somewhere deeper in the house, I hear footsteps. Soft. Careful. Getting closer.

The hallway is dark beyond the doorway—the kind of dark that sits heavier than it should for six in the morning. Something in that darkness shifts. Not much. Just the weight of it, redistributing, as if the house itself adjusted its posture.

A girl steps into the room.

She's small—maybe five-two—with black hair that falls past her shoulders and skin so pale it looks blue in the early light. She's wearing a white sweater with a little red heart stitched above the left breast, and she's holding a kitchen knife.

No. Not holding it. She's carrying a plate with toast and eggs, and the knife is for the butter. She sets the plate on the coffee table next to the plastic rose and looks at me with dark eyes that are simultaneously warm and completely empty.

“Good morning,” she says. Her voice is quiet. Careful. Like she's trying not to scare an animal. “Happy Valentine's Day.”

She kneels in front of me and begins cutting the rope from my wrists. Her hands are steady. She smells like lavender and something underneath it—something metallic, like old pennies.

“My name is Yuki,” she says, not looking up from the knots. “You're in my home. The doors are locked. The windows don't open. I need you to understand that before I untie you.”

She pauses, her fingers resting on the rope.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” she says. And then, softer, almost to herself: “I just need you to stay.”

Behind me—where I cannot turn to look, where the hallway opens into the deeper house—the darkness shifts again. The air drops two degrees. Something that is not Yuki and is not the wind exhales slowly against the back of my neck.

I don't feel it. I'm looking at Yuki's hands on the rope.

But the breath hangs in the air behind me, visible for just a moment, before it dissolves into nothing.