He survived the fire that was supposed to consume him. Now the people who built it are using him to finish the job. Rabbit has one thing worth protecting: a last resort on Chartres Street, the people inside it, and the woman who has been beside him since before he understood what he was. When the cult that killed his siblings rises again — reorganized, patient, and rebuilt by Aldous Creed, a man who has spent years engineering the conditions to turn Rabbit into exactly what the ritual requires — he makes the only choice that feels available. He will find them. He will take them apart before the winter solstice. Each night, the work gets easier. Each night, something that used to cost him something no longer does. What Rabbit doesn't know is that his systematic destruction of the cult's network isn't dismantling the ritual. It's completing it. Every site he clears feeds the larger design Creed has been building toward a single point. The cult doesn't need to capture him. They just need him to keep doing exactly what he's doing. He is not their enemy. He is their instrument. On the morning of the winter solstice, the power Rabbit has spent months building is no longer pointed at the cult. It is pointed at Sister Blue — the woman who built this life alongside him, the one person who never stopped seeing him clearly. And Rabbit is still waiting to feel something that will tell him to stop. The cult didn't turn him into a weapon. He did that himself, one careful decision at a time. Southern Gothic · Occult Horror · Psychological Suspense