Our history is quite long before we actually got together, and eventually got engaged. I met her at an orphanage. She was this sweet, shy, pretty girl, and I was this dorky, socially awkward clown who tried to make everyone laugh. For me, it was love at first sight.

Making her laugh made my entire day during those times. And seeing her cry would trigger emotions I never quite understood. It made me want to hurt whatever, or whoever was upsetting Winter. Yes, her name was Winter. Mine was Kira. Which was strange because I did not look Japanese at all, yet my birth certificate had Kira written on it.

My birth parents abandoned me when I was 2, I don't remember much about them really, sometimes I can see their very blurry faces, with no expressions. I don't like thinking about them. They left me so they don't deserve to live rent-free in my head.

It was similar to Winter, she too was left at a doorstep of an orphanage, except the difference was, there was no record of her birth, no record of her existence, and she had no name.

So the orphanage gave her one, they called her Winter, because she blessed the orphanage with her presence during the Christmas holidays.

Eventually, though we were separated, I was adopted into one family, while she was into another. I didn't see her for over five years, until one fateful day while walking home from school with some buddies, I spotted her. In the park, kneeling over some flowers. I instantly knew it was her.

I excused myself from my friends and built up the courage to walk up to Winter. I wanted to talk to her. I missed her.

"Hello." I'd said.

She was startled by my sudden appearance behind her, so she jumped, looking at me with horrified eyes. But she didn't look scared, I couldn't quite figure it out back then.

"Hi?" She answered. She couldn't remember me, which was okay. She didn't need to. I could remind her.

"You remember me? Kira?" Her expression softened a little and her eyes grew wide.

"Kira?" "Kira!" She said, jumping up and hugging me.

We spent the entire day in the park, just talking, and catching up. It was nice.

We made plans to meet again the next day, and we did. Summer was coming up, and we spent the entirety of it, together. That's the summer that I found out that I really loved her.

But fate had to separate us again. Her family moved away, and I didn't see her again for another 7 years. But fate and destiny have a strange way of playing with your feelings.

I met her once more in college. We somehow ended up applying to and getting into the same college. It was awesome seeing her again, but it hurt so much seeing her with someone else. She had a boyfriend, Jackson.

That's where all my troubles began. I really, really wanted to be with her. And her boyfriend was such a fucking jackass, that sometimes I just wanted to kill him.

One night, while drunk at a bar, he provoked me.

"I know you have a crush on Winter." He'd said.

My heart was pounding, but I knew it wasn't that feeling of anxiety you get when you're caught in the act, caught doing or saying something embarrassing. No, this was something else. It came from the deepest pits of my conscience. It was anger. It was hate.

"You can't have her." He slurred at me in his drunken state. He was barely standing up on his own two feet.

"She's mine." He added. This was my blowing point. I wasn't really thinking straight. Anger and alcohol clouded my judgment. I do not remember what happened, I blacked out right after I threw the first swing at him. That's my last memory.

I woke up in the hospital the next morning. A cast on my arm and leg. Winter was by my bedside. My bedside. Not that jerk's, but mine.

Later I learned why. We fought. The security threw us outside, but we continued fighting. He got disoriented from taking a punch and walked out into traffic and got hit by a car, he died on impact.

All of my injuries were inflicted by him. Apparently, I was quite the punching bag. I was lucky I wasn't charged with any prison time or manslaughter. In fact, they wrote the entire thing off as an accident. I really thought I was screwed this time. But somehow I came out alive, out of prison. And now I had my dream girl.

She was everything that I could wish for, and we stayed together for 4 years, we moved in together during the 4th, and I proposed to her just at the beginning of last year, 2022.

It was such a magical moment. It was beautiful.

We've been living together ever since, planning our wedding, and it's supposed to be happening at the end of march. We're both so excited to tie the knot. To celebrate our engagement, my surrogate parents gifted us a german shepherd puppy. "Time to learn how to take care of someone else in the house." They teased us. They clearly wanted a grandkid, but a kid wasn't something we had discussed yet.

But we did have that discussion eventually, about half a year ago.

"You know, I always wanted to have a kid." Winter had said. I bobbed my head to one side at looked at her, trying to study her, and figure out what she was thinking.

She looked back at me. Her eyes, too, were full of wonder. Full of endless possibilities.

"Do you smell that?" I tried changing the topic, sniffing around. It really did smell bad, like something was rotting. I wondered where it came from.

"Smell what? Stop trying to change the topic." She scolded me.

"I just.. I never had real parents. And I always told myself that if I had a kid, I would make sure to be the best parent they could ever have." She said after a long moment of silence. I couldn't say I didn't understand her, I even related to her. At some point, my deranged and hurt mind thought the exact same thing. But I soon realized that it was wrong to think that way. I realized that I only wanted a kid just to win a bet against my kid self. Just to prove to myself that I can do better. And I realized that wasn't a good reason to have a kid.

"I don't want to have a kid just so we can prove a point to ourselves," I responded to her. Winter's eyes grew a little wide. I could tell she didn't expect that answer, maybe she expected that I would agree.

"Are you saying you don't want to have a kid with me?" Her expression grew grim, it was like I had just told her that someone died.

"No, I'm saying I don't want to have a kid just to prove some point." And then I added, "I do want to have a kid, just maybe not right now, not so soon."

Her eyes were tearing up now. She was really taking this seriously.

"Winter, listen, I love you. I love you so so much. You are my world. And right now my love doesn't have enough space to fit in a third soul." I attempted to cheer her up. She loved when I told her that I loved her. But instead, she began crying.

"So you're saying that you love the dog more than you'd love our kid? The fucking dog? Really?" She was trying to spit back fire.

I just looked at her, wide-eyed.

"You know, just fuck you!" She screamed at me. I couldn't really understand why she got so violent. Were kids such a touchy subject? Maybe I crossed a line.

"I'm sorry-" I began trying to apologize, but she interrupted me. "Fuck you and fuck your apologies!" She was really crying now. Winter stood up and just left. I didn't try to follow, I just let her be. We didn't really talk for a while after that fight. But we made up eventually, and both agreed to have a child.

One night a couple of weeks ago, we got into a discussion about our roots. About our origins.

"You know it's weird how you have a Japanese name, but you don't look Asian, like at all, it makes me wonder, you know?" She told me while sitting crosslegged on the couch. The dog was laying at my feet.

I really hated thinking about it, because it made me think of my parents. Of who they were. It made me think of them like they were people, and to me, they were simply monsters.

"There's this ancestry test I found online, we send in our DNA samples, and they can tell us what kind of genes we have, where we come from, you know?" Her marine blue eyes were lit up with excitement. She really wanted to do this.

"I don't know Winter, I don't know if I want to know." I really was conflicted with this. I was afraid that maybe somehow I'd be disappointed.

"Come on Kira, It'll be fun!" She had her puppy eyes expression on, the same expression she used on me almost every Saturday to go out for dinner, and it always worked wonders.

I took a deep breath and sighed. "Fine."

She squealed. "You're the best!" Winter placed her head on my shoulder. It made me smile. I was happy that she was happy. That's all that mattered. The dog got up and went into another room after Winter scooted over to me.

This wasn't unusual. For some reason, that dog just didn't like Winter all that much. Maybe because Winter was always the bad cop and I was the good cop. While I gave the dog treats, Winter gave him loud lectures.

"So how do they work?" I asked Winter.

We ordered those tests online the very same night, and thanks to amazon prime, they came the following evening.

We read the instructions and did the tests, and I mailed them out first thing in the morning while going off to work.

Winter was all giddy and excited all week, she was like a kid waiting in line for the ice cream truck. I'll admit, her excitement was rubbing off on me too. And I found myself waiting for the results in anticipation as well.

They came in a couple of days ago. Winter ran into the living room, holding two envelopes in her hand, waving them around like some trophy, with a wide grin on her beautiful face.

'We got them! We finally got them!" She squealed like a little girl at a theme park. She handed me one of the two envelopes, it had my name and our address on it.

"Come on let's open them!" She was all jumpy and giddy, it was really cute.

"Oh it says here that I am 7% french, maybe that's where my flirt comes from." She was reading her results out loud.

"I'm 83% American, 7% Russian, 6% Polish, 3% Korean and 1% German." I just read mine out loud in a sequence.

"Special genes... It says here that I have the Monoamine oxidase A gene, short for MAOA." Winter said thoughtfully.

"What is that?" I asked her while looking at my own special gene section.

"I don't know it doesn't say.." She replied thoughtfully.

"Mine says I don't have any special genes." I was kind of disappointed.

"I didn't even know these came with that, I just thought it told you your ancestry." She said, her eyes still glued on the piece of paper.

I took out my phone. "What was it called again? The M something?"

"MAOA gene." Winter read it out for me. I put it into the search bar.

"It just says some random gibberish about it putting some sort of chemical or something into your body or brain or whatever?" I was honestly not smart enough to understand this. I copied the full name of the gene, Monoamine oxidase A gene, and put it into the search bar. The same thing came up.

I tried searching it up a bunch of other ways to see if anything else would show up, but all it said is that it was some sort of enzyme type of gene. I sighed in defeat.

"Can't find anything special about your special gene, at least not in terms that I can understand," I admitted, feeling defeated.

Winter finally looked up from her piece of paper. She had a smug expression on her face. "I got a special gene and you don't!" She sang in a nursery rhyme type of tone, sticking her tongue out in the end like a five-year-old girl would. I just laughed. "You're so childish sometimes."

She gave me the "Screw you" tongue.

We talked about our ancestry for a while, maybe my parents just liked the name Kira, and that's all there is to it. Thinking of them just left a sour taste in my mouth so I wanted to get this topic over with as soon as possible. But Winter's special gene still held my interest.

After she went to bed I couldn't really sleep. I continued googling about it, going into different forums of people talking about it, of people who have it talking about it. Eventually, I discovered two different names for this special gene. The warrior gene, which sounded kind of cool and mighty, I'd love to think of my fiance as a warrior. But it's also known as the Serial Killer gene. Which made my blood freeze all over.

What the hell did that mean? That sounded terrifying as hell. So I stayed up all night reading about it.

I didn't even notice when Winter walked into the kitchen, yawning and rubbing her eyes. "Didn't find you in bed today, you got up early?" She asked in between yawns.

For some reason, I felt the urge to lie to her. I never had that urge before, but just this one time, I felt like telling her the truth was worse.

"Yeah I got up a little early, the dog woke me." I lied.

Winter nodded and walked over to the coffee machine, turning it on. "Haven't had your morning coffee yet?" My heart dropped. I realized I got caught. I always have a coffee, that is literally the first thing I do in the morning. I was thinking of something to say, anything to get me out of this situation.

She just shrugged. "Want me to brew you one as well then?" Her back was facing me. "Yeah," I muttered out meekly. What the fuck was going on with me, why was I acting so weird? Was I actually scared of her? Scared that she might be a killer? That's simply not possible, she's the sweetest girl I have ever known in my entire life.

Winter placed the hot coffee mug in front of me and I almost jumped, startled out of my thoughts.

"Hey, are you okay? You look a little pale, there are bags under your eyes too." She had a concerned expression. I took a deep breath. This was the Winter that I always knew, the Winter that worried about me and cared about me and loved me.

"Yeah, I'm fine now." I smiled at her, trying to put on the most real smile that I could. But it felt fake on my lips. I've never felt a fake smile before.

She smiled back and nodded. "Good."

I got up from the chair, closing the laptop. "I'll take the dog for the morning walk," I announced and Winter gave me a thumbs up, sipping on her coffee.

I put on a leash on the dog, and we went outside, down to the trail leading up to the park where I saw Winter for the second time in my life. Where we talked for hours on end. It was a sweet memory.

I also remembered her expression when I said hello. She didn't really look scared, she looked like she had been caught doing something, something she didn't want others to know.

I tried to explore that memory, I tried to analyze the memory I had of her expression that day. But it just blanked out whenever I tried harder.

We finally got to the park, flowers were blooming again. I walked over to the exact same spot where I saw her. Trying to recall that memory, to replay it in my head.

There were daisies all around the park, but I remembered this spot specifically because while we were talking, an ant bit me. It itched like hell.

Looking at it now, there's an ant's nest exactly where she would have stood many years ago, in this exact same park.

I continued thinking about it. About what it could mean. I walked back home with the dog. Winter was no longer in the kitchen. I let the dog off the leash, and he walked off, probably trying to find a nice place to sleep in.

I sat back down next to the table. I could see that my laptop was moved. I opened it up. The screen still looked the same, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I took a sigh of relief.

The silent house noises were making everything else louder, like my breathing for example. I could also hear the shower running upstairs.

I wrote a note that I'd be going out and left the house. I just needed to get some fresh air, not including the dog. I got into the car and just drove, I didn't really have any destination in mind, just wherever the wind would take me. And it took me to a police station. I don't know why my instincts drove me here, but I had an inkling to go inside. I had to make sure of something. I had to confirm.

I walked inside the police station and asked to speak about a case, the accident Jackson and I were in, where he walked out into open traffic and died on impact.

"Yes, I can pull up the case files, since it's a cold case, but I'm going to need to see some ID."

I handed the lady my ID card. She looked at it, and then at her screen. "You were one of the people on the scene.." She said thoughtfully. "One of two."

"Two?" I asked her, confused. It was a bar fight, or well I guess just outside of a bar fight, why were there only two witnesses?

"You were too far gone to make a witness statement, and Jackson died during the exchange, so the third present witness made a statement."

"She said you thought, and that Jackson, while trying to throw a punch at you, stumbled over into open traffic while a car was speeding by, and died on impact. It was ruled an accident."

While this does sound similar to what she told me, what she told me made it sound like it was my fault, made it sound like I had done it. I always had to live with that guilt. But to the police, she said that he did that to himself.

This was making no sense. What does Winter gain by lying to either of us?

Unless.. she lied to both of us.. My eyes grew wide.

"Sir, are you okay?" I turned around and began walking away. "Sir?" She asked again, in a more concerned voice. I left the building and got back into my car, my breaths were heavy and rapid.

I needed to get to the bottom of this.

While we lived in a big enough city, there were a couple of missing people cases in our local area. Mainly single men. They were also reported to be abusive. None of their bodies were ever found. There was a pattern, but with no evidence of a crime, no proper investigation besides a missing person's case was launched, and quite frankly nobody cared about men that abused other women.

I tried to set a timeline for the disappearings. I had a suspicion. A really bad one. I was praying I was wrong. I was praying that once I got home and told my fiance about it, we could both just laugh it off.

There were six missing men over the course of a year, the first case happened about a month after we moved in together.

I continued digging, the next was two months later, and the next another two months. There was always a delay of a month to two between each disappearance. Almost every disappearance began with them going out for drinks in local bars, but none of the disappearances shared the same one.

But I found a single anomaly. The third disappearance happened around the time when I was out of town, visiting my adoptive family for the holidays, which was around a week long visit. My fiance stayed behind. It was the only time when I could remember not being in town. We had our fight after I got back. Our fight about the baby.

I remember that strange, god-awful smell in our bedroom. It smelled like rot. She dismissed it. I remember the next day the smell was gone. My heart was pounding. Is she really..?

My phone rang, which startled me. It was Winter. I had to stay calm. I had to sound normal. I needed to know the truth, I needed to know. But not over the phone.

"Hey honey, where are you? You left without saying a word, that's not like you." She sounded worried.

"Oh uh.." My hands were sweating. I never was a good liar.

"I just wanted to get some fresh air," I said.

There was silence on the other end.

"I'll be back home soon," I said.

"Good." I could hear her let out a sigh of relief. "I have some good news for you once you do." Her voice sounded cryptic, and mysterious. I wondered what it could be. I momentarily forgot everything that I had just discovered.

"Okay," I replied.

"I love you." She said.

"I love you too," I said back. But I wasn't sure if I meant it anymore.

I drove home in silence. Lost in thought. I had a million different scenarios running through my head, of how this conversation could start, go, and end. I didn't like a single one of them. I prayed that I was wrong. I didn't believe in god, but for the first time in my life, I begged god for me to be wrong.

I parked in our driveway and headed inside. It was quiet. "I'm in the living room!" I heard my fiance yell out. As soon as I entered the kitchen there was this god-awful smell wafting through the entire house. it smelled like a dead animal. The smell made me gag.

I slowly walked into the living room, my guard up. My wife was sitting on the couch, cross-legged. She looked at me with a warm smile.

"You're back." She whispered, it sounding bittersweet. I never heard her speak that way. I hated that bittersweet voice of hers.

"I am," I replied. Not moving from the doorway.

"Aren't you going to sit?" She asked, leaving a hint of hurt in her question and expression.

I just looked at her. I didn't know how to respond. I was frozen in place, standing in the doorway.

This god-awful smell still invaded my nostrils. I was trying my best not to gag, especially not in front of her, not now.

"What is that smell?" I avoided her question.

"What smell?" She smiled back at me.

I looked at her for a long moment. She looked at me. I couldn't figure out what she was seeing. But her eyes were sad. "I have some good news." She finally said.

"Yeah?" I wondered what she could say right now.

"I'm pregnant."

My ears began ringing. I was frozen in place.

"I'm pregnant." Her voice tumbled around in my head. "I'm pregnant."

"Kira?" She asked.

"Aren't you happy?" She sounded hurt.

"I am," I said under my breath.

"Aren't you going to hug me?"

She stood up then. I couldn't get the smell out of my head. What was this goddamn smell?

"Okay," I said. She walked up to me. I was an entire head taller than she was. She looked up at me. The same bittersweet expression she had on her face as when I walked into the room. And then she put her arms around me. Her head was on my chest. And suddenly the world slowed down.

I forgot all of my worries. I forgot about the smell, I forgot about my concerns. I forgot about her bittersweet expression. All I could think was that I loved her.

"I have some bad news too." She said, and that brought me back to reality. My heart was pounding. My eyes noticed a blotch of red on the back of her grey socks. My eyes grew wide. I began trembling.

Something sharp poked me on my back.

"You won't see your child grow up." She whispered right into my ear.

I felt as if something sharp stabbed me in the back. She kept holding me, her grip grew tighter. I could feel something wet dripping on my hands. I realized it was her tears.

"Why did you have to go and do this? Why couldn't you just ignore it?" She was crying, she was sobbing.

Everything sounded muffled like I was underwater. The stab didn't really hurt anymore, but it felt itchy. I had the urge to try and itch the spot. But my hands were unmoving. They were trembling.

My fiance let go of me, and I collapsed onto my knees. I could see her pained expression through my teary eyes.

I could see her say something to me, but I didn't hear it, I could no longer hear anything but the loud ringing. And all I could smell was that distressing smell.

Then everything went dark.

I awoke sometime later, everything was dark. My entire body was in intense pain. I couldn't really move. It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I realized I was still in the living room.

I used my hands to feel around my body. Everything hurt, but everything was also numb, I couldn't tell what hurt just by the pain alone. I found the knife, still stuck, wedged in my back.

By some miracle, I had survived. I somehow managed to pull out my phone from my pocket and dialed 911. They answered, but I couldn't speak. I had no more strength to speak. Then I blacked out again.

The next time I woke up was in a hospital.

I was alive. Luckily, the knife didn't hit any vitals. And even luckier, my attacker didn't take out the knife. I survived because the knife stayed in my body. It slowed down the rate at which I was bleeding out by exponential amounts. I barely lost any blood. I was lucky, they said.

But I know I wasn't. I know she chose to let me live. She's a serial killer. She's not sloppy enough to make such rookie mistakes, even if it's her fiance she has to silence.

I told the police everything, from what I discovered during the ancestry test, to what I managed to figure out by connecting the dots. They didn't sound convinced about all of my crazy theories, about her being a serial killer, killing all those abusive men. But they did believe that she was the one who stabbed me. And she disappeared right after.

They also found my dog dead in the house. That was where the smell was coming from.

As I write this, I'm still in the hospital, trying to recover.

They haven't been able to find any trace of her yet.

Jackson's case was reopened as a murder investigation, and she's the main suspect. All of the missing men's cases have been reopened too.

A dumb ancestry test turned my life a full 180, I was supposed to be getting married this march. Now I'll be spending that night in therapy. I really wish I had been wrong about this. A part of me wishes that I did ignore it; then we could've both lived happy lives. Raised a happy child.

If you ever do an ancestry test, just pray that none of you have the serial killer gene.