Year Nine

THE PANTHER
I've never been prey before. I'm chaos incarnate-reckless, wild, untamed. I don't bow to authority, especially not to the arrogant professor who thinks he can control where I go and who I see. Lavrik watches me like I'm something fragile that needs protecting, inserting himself into my life with infuriating persistence. What I don't know is that someone else is watching too. Every year, another girl like me disappears. Every year, the Feathered Serpent takes another black panther and leaves nothing but a corpse behind. I should be afraid. I should listen when Lavrik tells me to be careful.
But I've never been good at listening. And I'm starting to realize the professor's control isn't about power-it's about desperation. He knows something I don't. He's seen what the killer does to girls like me. The question is: why does he care so much?
THE DETECTIVE
I've been hunting him for eight years. Eight years of victims. Eight years of patterns. Eight years of failure. The Feathered Serpent is patient, methodical, and he never deviates from his ritual-one black jaguar, once a year, always during the university semester. Until Kateri. She's not a jaguar. She's a leopard. She breaks his pattern, and that terrifies me because I know what it means: she's special to him. She reminds him of someone. And when a killer like this fixates, he doesn't stop until he has what he wants. Going undercover as her professor was supposed to be simple surveillance. Keep her safe. Catch the bastard. Move on. But Kateri makes nothing simple. She fights every boundary I set, challenges every rule, pushes back against the control I need to keep her alive. She doesn't know I'm not really a professor. She doesn't know her adoptive mother hired me. She doesn't know that every time she slips away from my watch, my heart stops. And she definitely doesn't know that somewhere between protecting her and wanting to throttle her for being so reckless, I started wanting her for myself.