The first time Red saw death, she was six years old.

  She didn’t understand what it meant then—not really. She only knew that her father had gone out after dark and never come home. She knew that when the police arrived at her house the next morning, their faces were grave, their voices hushed. And she knew that when her mother collapsed onto the front porch, sobbing into her hands, something had been taken from them that could never be replaced.

  But what she would come to understand later, long after the funeral, long after the nightmares had begun, was that her father was only the first.

  They called him The Wolf.

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  The first body was found in the woods, just beyond the old mill. Then another, and another. Nine victims in total. Throats torn, bodies left in twisted heaps like prey after a hunt. The police had no leads, no suspects.

  And then, one day, it stopped.

  The town whispered about Anthony Pyg and his brothers—how they had hunted the Wolf down themselves. How they had done what the police never could. No one knew the details. No one asked questions. The Wolf was gone, and that was enough.

  Except for Red.

  Even as a child, she knew something wasn’t right.

  She had overheard her mother talking to a neighbor one evening, the quiet urgency in her voice.

  “They said he confessed,” her mother had whispered. “But there wasn’t a trial. There wasn’t even an arrest. One day he was alive, and the next, gone. Just like that.”

  The man Anthony Pyg had killed wasn’t the Wolf.

  Red had been saying it for years. No one believed her.

  And now, standing outside a fresh crime scene, staring at the body lying in a pool of blood—she knew she had been right all along.