She smiled once.
Just once.
That smile was surgery on his soul. It cut him open and stitched something inhuman inside.
Her name was Aanya.
His name? Aryan.
She didn't know him.
But he knew what her screams sounded like in dreams.
He kept jars—each labeled with the name of someone who touched her.
Inside those jars: teeth, fingernails, tongues.
He called them "love trophies."
He wrote her a poem every night—dipped the ink in blood, plucked from the veins of people who stared at her too long.
His apartment was an altar of her existence—a wall-sized collage of her photos, strands of her hair stolen from salons, half-smoked cigarettes from garbage bins.
And in the center of it all:
A life-sized mannequin, with her skin tone, her perfume sprayed daily, and her eyes.
Real ones.
Stolen from her best friend.
After Aryan slit her from chin to navel.
He thought of it as "a gift."
One night, he visited her apartment while she was out.
He left a dead cat on her pillow. Its mouth was stitched open with a note inside:
"I killed something else for you today. The voice inside me says it's love."
The night she came home with a boyfriend…
Aryan followed them.
He waited.
Then, while they slept, he drilled a hole through the boyfriend's skull.
The sound was… delicious.
He placed the man's beating heart in a box, wrapped it with pink ribbon, and left it on Aanya's doorstep.
Inside, a note:
"Now your heart has space for me."
When police finally caught him, Aryan was wearing a dress made of stitched human skin—Aanya's friends, teachers, lovers.
And a mask.
Her face.
Cut off from her corpse just minutes before they arrived.
They asked him why.
He smiled.
"Because love is messy."
Now he sits in a cell—walls covered in scratch marks shaped like hearts.
He bites his own fingers, screaming her name in blood.
And sometimes…
Sometimes Aanya answers.
From inside his head.