Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions | Updates

A Free Book Giveaway for Readers Who Like Their Fiction Darker

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:54:31 -0400

If your reading taste leans toward mystery, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, paranormal twists, strange worlds, and stories with shadows at the edges, this giveaway is worth exploring.

The Dark Crow Books Extravaganza brings together a wide selection of free books from different authors, all gathered in one place for readers looking for their next obsession.

Not one book.

A whole page of possibilities.

Some stories may lead you into haunted rooms.

Some into dangerous worlds.

Some into secrets that should have stayed buried.

The collection is available for a limited time, so browse it while the page is still open.

Explore the free book giveaway here:

https://books.sandrinebbooks.com/darkcrowbooksextravaganza/9yfxke634n

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The light is on. Someone is home. You probably shouldn't knock.

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:30:42 -0400

The Darkness Watches is a mystery, suspense, thriller, and horror sale — and if your reading list needs something sharper, stranger, or more unsettling, this is worth opening.

Inside: twisted mysteries, gripping thrillers, dark suspense, haunted places, dangerous secrets, and stories that do not let go easily.

Every secret hides a danger. Every danger awakens fear.

Choose your next dark read carefully.

👉 BROWSE THE SALE:

https://books.sandrinebbooks.com/mystery-suspense-thriller-horror-sale/r75d2ptetj

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The hunt is on.

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:45:05 -0400

I’m participating in a limited-time reader discovery event featuring suspense, mystery, thriller, and darker fiction from multiple authors.

These promotions are a great way for readers to discover new voices and for indie authors to reach people who already love the genre.

Browse the page here:

https://books.sandrinebbooks.com/thehuntison/idq4rk32yg

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Listen to Chapter 1 of Father

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Wed, 6 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are some stories that begin quietly.

Father is not one of them.

The first chapter opens with grief, violence, and the kind of nightmare that does not end when the screaming stops. It introduces the dark, unsettling world of The Raver Files, where trauma leaves marks, obsession takes root, and the line between victim and survivor begins to blur.

I’ve created a video reading of Chapter 1 of Father, Book 1 of The Raver Files, and you can now listen to it below.

Embedded Youtube video removed, see original post to watch.

Father is a dark psychological thriller about violence, grief, obsession, and the damage left behind when evil enters a family and refuses to let go. If you enjoy psychological suspense, crime thrillers, horror-tinged fiction, and stories that explore the darker corners of the human mind, this chapter will give you a first taste of the world David is pulled into.

This reading uses synthetic narration, paired with the actual pages from the book, so you can listen and follow along as the chapter unfolds.

For me, this is another way to let readers step into the story before deciding whether they want to continue. Sometimes a blurb gives you the premise. Sometimes a cover gives you the mood. But a first chapter gives you the voice, the atmosphere, and the first wound.

And Father begins with a wound that refuses to close.

If the reading pulls you in, the full book is available on Kindle Unlimited and Amazon.

Continue reading Father here.

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Recorded Interview – Subject Unknown

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Written for Reedsy Prompt #348, “What Makes Us Human?”, this psychological short story was my exercise in exploring fear, dread, and emotional tension through transcript alone.

***

When I first saw the prompt, I was immediately drawn to the idea of a character questioning his own humanity. While the psychology behind that question interested me, I wanted to challenge myself in the way I might tell it. I did not want to rely on the usual tools of scene-building. I wanted to strip everything back and see whether I could still create fear, tension, and emotional weight using almost nothing but voice.

That is why I chose the transcript format.

From the start, I wanted this story to feel cold on the surface but increasingly unsettling underneath. A transcript can look factual, almost detached, and I liked the idea of using that distance to create discomfort. Instead of describing expressions, movements, or a room in detail, I had to think much more carefully about pauses, interruptions, word choice, repetition, and what each character avoided saying. That became this piece's real challenge.

For me, this story was as much about craft as it was about plot. I wanted to practice expressing fear without leaning on the usual visual description. I wanted to see if calm could become threatening through rhythm and tone. I also wanted to explore whether longing, grief, denial, and terror could still be felt when the reader has only a conversation transcript to guide them. This story became an experiment in restraint: saying less, but trying to make each line carry more.

It also pushed me to think more deeply about voice. The subject needed to sound controlled, precise, and intelligent without becoming theatrical, while Eliot had to shift gradually from professional detachment to visible fear.

This piece is part of my writing journey. I want to keep testing different forms, different emotional registers, and different ways of creating atmosphere. Sometimes that means practicing a specific skill and seeing what it teaches me. This one taught me a great deal about subtext, control, and how much emotion silence can carry.

So while this story began as a response to a Reedsy prompt, it also became something more personal: a way to push my craft, experiment with form, and learn how to make tension live on the page even when almost everything has been stripped away.

Here is the story. I hope the result works.

-------------------

The following transcript was recovered from a digital camera found in the apartment of documentary filmmaker Eliot Vanog, reported missing on October 14.

The identity of the interview subject remains unknown.

***

INTERVIEWER (ELIOT VANOG): Why did you reach out to me specifically?

SUBJECT: Fourteen months ago, at your conference in Chicago on the human capacity for violence, you said something.

INTERVIEWER: What did I say?

SUBJECT: You said, “The word monster is a moral shortcut. It lets us pretend brutality is something inhuman, when in fact it is one of the most human things there is.”

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: You remembered that exactly.

SUBJECT: I remember most things exactly.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about that sentence that unsettled you?

SUBJECT: Unsettled is an interesting word. But no. I don’t think that’s quite right. What disturbed me was not that you were calling me monstrous, but that you were suggesting I might not be.

[Long pause]

SUBJECT: The first time someone called me a monster, I was eight. A car hit a cat on my way home from school. It was still moving. One of its back legs was mangled. The sound was unpleasant.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: I picked up a rock. It was the right size. I used it. The sound was different from the car.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: And the other children screamed.

INTERVIEWER: They called you a monster?

SUBJECT: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: How did you feel?

[Silence]

SUBJECT: Confused. I went home confused.

INTERVIEWER: Because of their reaction?

SUBJECT: The rock felt right in my hand.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean, it felt right?

SUBJECT: The weight. The movement. The sound. Everything felt right.

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: You—you’re describing a kind of satisfaction.

SUBJECT: Satisfaction isn’t quite the word I’d use. It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t pleasure. It was… rightness. Like putting the final piece in a puzzle. The noise stopped, the movement stopped, and everything went quiet. Then the other children started crying. So I went home.

INTERVIEWER: You just—went home?

SUBJECT: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: And what happened when you got home?

SUBJECT: I asked my father.

INTERVIEWER: What did you ask him?

SUBJECT: I explained what happened. The cat. The rock. The children. And asked him if I was a monster.

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: And what did he say?

SUBJECT: He knelt down and put his hands on my shoulders. He told me that I was not a monster. That it took courage to end suffering like that. He said I must have a very big heart.

[Silence]

INTERVIEWER: That’s—I mean, that’s a reasonable interpretation. A child ending an animal’s suffering. That’s not an unreasonable thing for a father to—

SUBJECT: No. It isn’t.

INTERVIEWER: So he was right? What you experienced—that sense of rightness—it was empathy. Expressed differently than most children would express it, but—

SUBJECT: You’re doing the same now.

INTERVIEWER: Doing what?

SUBJECT: What my father did. What people always do when they don’t want to see the truth.

INTERVIEWER: I’m not—I’m trying to understand what you’re telling me.

SUBJECT: I let him believe it. The mercy explanation. I let him hold my shoulders and look at me with that relief in his eyes, and I nodded. I told him I just didn’t want the cat to hurt anymore. I watched his face relax, and I understood something.

INTERVIEWER: What did you understand?

SUBJECT: That I was different. But I could pass. I could pretend, say the right things, act the way they expected. But I knew what I was. I knew the truth, even if they didn’t.

INTERVIEWER: And what is the truth?

SUBJECT: That I enjoyed it. Not the mercy. Not the ending of pain. I enjoyed the weight of the rock and the sound it made, and the way everything stopped because I chose it to stop.

[Pause]

INTERVIEWER: And what came after?

SUBJECT: More animals. For a time. Until they weren’t sufficient.

[Long pause]

INTERVIEWER: When you say insufficient—

SUBJECT: I mean exactly what I said.

INTERVIEWER: So what? You escalated?

SUBJECT: That word implies desperation. A junkie chasing a dose. No. It was more like a craftsman recognizing the limits of his current tools.

INTERVIEWER: How—how many people?

SUBJECT: That isn’t the interesting question.

INTERVIEWER: It seems fairly interesting to me.

SUBJECT: No, I didn’t come here for this.

INTERVIEWER: So what did you come here for?

SUBJECT: I told you. I want to know.

INTERVIEWER: Know what?

SUBJECT: Patience. We are not here yet.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: The first person was a woman named Carla. Names are important. People think the ones who do this sort of thing rarely bother with names. I always bothered.

[Brief pause]

SUBJECT: She delivered pharmaceutical samples to the clinic. Very efficient. Always on time. She smelled like a forest after the rain.

INTERVIEWER: You—you remember the smell.

SUBJECT: I remember everything about her. The way she held her clipboard against her chest like a shield. The small rose at her collarbone. The way she smiled at me. She was genuine.

INTERVIEWER: Then why?

SUBJECT: Because I wanted to.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: And it’s been like this for years. Until I heard you.

INTERVIEWER: In Chicago?

SUBJECT: Your words made me think of someone. A man. He was blind from birth. Completely. He had no conception of color, no memory of light. He knew my footsteps. He would turn toward me before I reached him.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: I stayed with him. At the end. He was very calm. He said he wasn’t afraid. He wanted to hold my hand, and I let him.

[Long silence]

SUBJECT: When it was over, I sat with him for some time. I don’t know how long. And I felt something I hadn’t felt before and hadn’t felt since. An absence. Like a room you’ve grown used to that is suddenly empty of furniture.

[Silence]

INTERVIEWER: That feeling. The absence. That’s—you’re describing grief.

SUBJECT: Is it?

INTERVIEWER: The description is consistent with—

SUBJECT: I’m not asking you to diagnose it.

[Sound of a fist hitting the table]

INTERVIEWER: Please—there’s no need for that. I… I’m just trying to understand.

SUBJECT: I always knew that I was different. You call people like me monsters, sociopaths, less than human. I call it superiority. Freedom.

[Sound of a loud exhale]

SUBJECT: I did cruel things because I wanted to. Because they felt right.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: And for most of my life, I thought that meant I was something other than human. That what I felt with the blind man was an exception. An error. A moment of—

[Short pause]

SUBJECT:—I don’t know. Something I wasn’t supposed to feel.

[Pause]

SUBJECT: I need to know if you truly believe what you said. That I am not a monster. That I am simply human.

INTERVIEWER: I believe that. I stand by what I said.

SUBJECT: No, I want to know if you still believe it now. Sitting here. With me.

INTERVIEWER: I—

SUBJECT: Don’t answer yet.

[Sound of a chair moving]

SUBJECT: There is only one way to know what I am. You understand that.

INTERVIEWER: What are you—

SUBJECT: To know whether I am human or a monster, you have to meet the part of me people fear.

[Sound of footsteps moving toward the camera]

INTERVIEWER: Wait. Wait, please—

SUBJECT: I’m not going to ask you to be calm. You won’t be. That would be dishonest of both of us.

[The sound of something being set down]

INTERVIEWER: [Barely audible] Please.

SUBJECT: I did not come here to be understood by you. I came here because I needed to understand something about myself.

INTERVIEWER: I have a—I have a daughter. She’s—

SUBJECT: I know.

[Silence]

SUBJECT: And you—do you see me as human?

[Recording cuts out]

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Who Have You Been Following? The Psychology of the Dark Protagonist in Thriller Fiction

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why the protagonist of a psychological thriller can be more unsettling than the killer — and what it means when the hero understands violence from the inside.

***

When we pick up a psychological thriller, we go looking for the villain.

It's an instinct. We want to locate the evil — find the person it lives inside, map its edges, understand what we're dealing with. Horror gives us a monster to point at. Crime fiction gives us a perpetrator. Even literary fiction tends to give us someone whose darkness is clearly bounded, contained, legible.

Psychological fiction at its best refuses that comfort entirely.

The most unsettling question it asks has nothing to do with who the villain is. It asks something closer to: who have you been following? And do you know what they're capable of?

The Wrong Question

We've been trained — by genre conventions, by narrative structure, by the basic human need to organize experience into safe and unsafe — to scan the cast of a thriller for the villain. To assign the darkness to a person and watch the story move that person toward consequence.

That training is exactly what psychological fiction exploits.

The genre doesn't just hide the villain from you. The most sophisticated version of it puts you so deeply inside a perspective that you forget to question what you're seeing. You follow a character closely enough to understand their logic, feel their fear, share their assumptions — and then the story shifts, and you realize you have been inside a perspective you didn't fully examine.

That moment of recognition — the sudden awareness that you were closer to the darkness than you thought — is the defining experience of psychological fiction done well.

What Psychological Fiction Actually Does

Psychological thrillers work by weaponizing empathy.

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on fiction and empathy confirms what readers of dark fiction already know intuitively: entering a fictional perspective activates genuine empathic responses. The brain doesn't cleanly separate "this is a character" from "this is a consciousness I am inhabiting." We feel with the people we follow. We build models of their inner world. We start to see what they see.

In most fiction, this mechanism is benign. In psychological thrillers, it's a trap.

CrimeReads notes that the tradition of unreliable and morally ambiguous narrators in psychological fiction has a specific function: it places the reader inside a consciousness that is withholding, distorting, or rationalizing — and the reader only discovers this after they've already invested. After they already understand.

By the time you know what you've been following, you've been following it for a while.

The Protagonist as Lens

In conventional fiction, the protagonist is a stand-in for the reader's moral position. They see what is wrong. They resist it, or try to, or pay the price for failing to. The reader anchors to them because the protagonist represents the orientation toward decency the reader shares.

In psychological fiction, this is frequently a lie.

The morally ambiguous protagonist — a figure studied extensively in narrative psychology research in relation to reader preference for dark fictional characters — operates differently. They are still your lens. You still see through them. But what they see, how they see it, what they find themselves capable of understanding — these are the real content of the story.

The protagonist doesn't have to commit an act. They just have to understand one. Completely. From the inside.

That understanding is where the psychological thriller finds its teeth.

What Empathy Does to the Reader

Here is the problem with following a dark protagonist closely: you start to understand things you didn't choose to understand.

This is the mechanism that distinguishes psychological fiction from horror. Horror presents darkness as external — something that comes for you. Psychological fiction presents darkness as internal — something that was already present, in a person you were already inside, before you knew to be wary.

Greater Good Magazine at UC Berkeley identifies our compulsion to understand evil as one of the most consistent features of human cognition. We search for the logic even when the logic frightens us. Fiction exploits this: give a reader a protagonist with access to dark internal territory, and the reader will follow — because that's what readers do, and because the logic is genuinely interesting, and because by the time it becomes disturbing, they're already in.

The reader who finishes a psychological thriller with a dark protagonist doesn't just know what the character did. They know why. They traced the reasoning. They followed it step by step.

That's a different kind of reading experience than watching a villain from outside. It leaves something behind.

The Architecture of Ambiguity

The best psychological thrillers don't simply make the villain hard to find. They make the concept of "villain" start to break down.

ResearchGate's analysis of antihero literature notes that readers drawn to morally ambiguous protagonists are specifically attracted to figures with internal coherence — people whose dark tendencies follow from a logic that holds together, even if the logic leads somewhere troubling.

What these readers are responding to isn't a celebration of darkness. It's the refusal of a false safety.

A story with a clear villain gives you somewhere to put the evil. A story with a morally ambiguous protagonist who understands violence from the inside refuses that placement. The evil doesn't live in one person, contained and bounded. It lives in the gap between what the protagonist is and what they might become. In the capacity they carry. In the question the story keeps open.

That open question is the architecture. The author didn't leave it unresolved because they couldn't answer it. They left it open because that unresolved space is where the real psychological work happens — in the reader, not on the page.

When the Line Between Hunter and Hunted Blurs

The most disturbing version of the dark protagonist is the one who hunts what they carry.

A detective who understands killers too well. An investigator whose empathy for the perpetrator runs deeper than comfort allows. A person who, in the process of tracking violence, discovers that the internal architecture of violence is not entirely foreign to them.

This figure appears across psychological fiction precisely because it names something real about the nature of understanding. To truly comprehend why someone does what they do, you have to be able to hold their logic without immediately rejecting it. You have to follow the reasoning to its conclusion. You have to, for a moment, see the world the way they see it.

Most people can do this. The question psychological fiction poses is: what happens to you when you can do it too easily? What does it mean to understand a killer from the inside, involuntarily, without choosing to?

What does it mean when the understanding comes naturally?

Father and the Question It Refuses to Answer

Father — the first book in The Raver Files series — was built around a question this article won't answer: who is the real villain?

Not because the answer doesn't exist. Because the point of the book is to make you unsure whether it does.

There is a killer in Ashford, South Carolina. There is a pattern to the murders — ritualistic, deliberate, operating with the conviction of something that believes in what it is doing. On the surface, this looks like a villain. It has logic. It has intention. It acts.

But as the story opens up, the framework starts to fracture. What looks like one thing reveals itself to be something more complicated. The categories shift. What the reader thought they understood — who is doing this, and what they are — turns out to be a question with more layers than the first reading suggested.

And then there is David Raver — the protagonist, a fourth-year medical student with a supernatural ability called The Slip. For brief, involuntary moments, David experiences a killer's perspective from the inside. He doesn't just hunt violence. He understands it. He can feel the logic operating from within.

The question Father holds open — the one that runs underneath every chapter — is not whether David will catch the killer. It's whether the line between David and the killer is as clear as either of them believes.

In a book about the psychology of deliberate evil, the most unsettling element is the protagonist.

That's not an accident. That's the architecture.

Father — The Raver Files, Book 1 — is out March 31. Read it for the murders. Stay for the question of who, exactly, you've been following.

Start with The Vigil, free → Or read A Fatal Duet, also free on the site. Dark fiction for readers who don't need the villain handed to them.

sandrinebbooks.com

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One More

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Fri, 6 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This short story was written for Reedsy Prompt #343: Tension, Twists, and Turns with WOW! — a prompt to set a story over the course of just a few seconds or minutes.

***

The pain doesn’t come. It detonates.

Every nerve ending I own catches fire at once, and I’m arching off the bed as if possessed by something unholy. Like something inside me is trying to leave its own skin. The sound that comes out of me isn’t a scream. It’s older than that. It’s the sound of a body that has finally given up.

“Sarah, can you hear me?” Dr. Hodgins asks somewhere in the blur of blue scrubs and fluorescent haze. “Sarah, you’re almost there. One more.”

One more.
One more!
Are you fucking kidding me?

I almost laugh. I almost split apart laughing because he doesn’t understand. There is no more. I have given every single thing this body contains. I have endured until my vision went white. Until I tasted copper. Until my hands shook so badly Alex had to pry them from the bed rail. I have been hollowed out. Scraped clean. I am a burning, shaking corpse. My legs are trembling like they belong to someone else. Someone I used to be before this purgatory.

I have nothing left.

I know it the way I know my own name. The way I knew, at seven years old, which footsteps on the stairs meant hide and which meant dinner. There is nothing left inside me to give.

“I can’t.”

It comes out quiet. A whisper swallowed by the beeping monitors and the rushing in my own ears. “I can’t. Please, stop it. I can’t do it anymore.”

The room tilts. The ceiling tiles blur into a smear of white. I can’t feel my fingers anymore. I can’t feel anything except this immense crushing pressure that has replaced my center. And all I can think is: I’m done. I can’t. I won’t.

“Sarah. Hey. Look at me, baby.”

Alex.

His hand finds my face. His palm is cool and steady against my jaw, and I want to bite it. I want to sink my teeth into the meat of his thumb because his voice is so goddamn even. So measured. Like he’s walking me through a differential diagnosis instead of watching me come apart.

“You can, I know you can do this. One more and—”

Shut up.

The thought is so violent it nearly makes it past my teeth.

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

But he leans closer. Close enough that his forehead nearly touches mine. Close enough that I can smell the coffee on his breath, the antiseptic on his collar, the faint trace of the soap he used this morning when the world was still whole and I was still a person who believed she could do this.

“I love you,” he says.

It’s not “you’ve got this, baby.” It’s not the voice he uses when he’s coaching me through a panic attack or talking me down from the edge of some catastrophic thought spiral at 3 a.m.

He says it like a promise. Like a vow renewed in blood and sweat. Like he’s gripping the rim of my entire world with both hands so it doesn’t cave inward and swallow me whole.

I love you.

And something inside me turns.

Not softens, no. Turns. Like a key in a lock. Like a blade finding its angle.

The anger doesn’t leave. It doesn’t dissolve. It catches. It ignites. Because he’s crying. Alex is crying. He never cries.

Not since his mother’s funeral. Not since the night he told me about the kid he lost in the OR, the six-year-old with the brain bleed, the one whose name he still can’t say out loud.
He’s crying, and his hand is shaking against my jaw. And I realize—he’s terrified too. He’s not the surgeon right now. He’s not the man with steady hands and a plan. He’s just Alex. Just a man watching the woman he loves burn alive, and he can’t fix it.

I will not end here on this table.

“I can see it,” Dr. Hodgins says. “I can see the—”

Oh God.

Oh God.

The room goes silent. Or maybe my mind does. Suddenly, the pain doesn’t matter. The exhaustion doesn’t matter. It’s real. It’s happening right now. Right this second. And I am not ready. I am so catastrophically not ready.

Because what if I’m her?

I can see it. The future. The terrible one.

I see it. As clear as a photograph burned into the back of my eyelids. Me, standing in a kitchen that looks nothing like hers but smells the same—stale and sharp with resentment.
I see myself turning away from a cry. I see myself with her mask, the one that said you are not worth the effort of emotion. Cold. Distant. Wrong in the exact same way she was wrong. Carrying the same poison in my blood like an inheritance I never wanted.

I see myself becoming the thing I’ve spent twelve years running from.

I can’t breathe. My throat closes. My fingers claw at the sheet beneath me. I’m not in the hospital anymore. I’m seven. I’m crouched behind a door. I’m watching the shadow of her feet pass back and forth. Back and forth. Deciding.

I’m choking. I feel her fingers around my windpipe, and I can’t swallow.

Then the pressure shifts.

It shifts, and the world cracks open. And suddenly, my body is doing something I didn’t authorize. Something ancient and unstoppable. So far beyond my control.

My spine bows. My jaw locks. Every muscle I own contracts into a single, impossible point of force.

And I’m not seven anymore.

I am thirty. I am here. I am in this room. I am on this bed. I am alive.

And I see him.

Not this Alex. The first one. Me at eighteen years old, bleeding out on a gurney. My mother’s kitchen knife still in my stomach. And there he was. Younger. Saying something—Stay with me, stay with me. He saved me before he ever loved me.

The monitor beeps. And suddenly I’m not on the gurney anymore. I’m standing in the bathroom. Our bathroom. The tiles cold under my bare feet. The microwave in the kitchen had finished heating the mug of water. And I’m staring at the impossibility turned real.
The antiseptic burns my nostrils and then—it doesn’t. It shifts. Becomes something else. Something sweeter. Hopeful.

Fresh paint.

I’m standing in the doorway of the room at the end of the hall. The one we refused to name. Alex is on his knees with a roller in his hand, streaking up the wall in uneven lines. Grinning.

The room snaps back. Fluorescent. Beeping. Screaming. Me. I’m the one screaming.
The pain peaks into something beyond pain. Beyond language. Beyond anything I have ever felt or feared or survived. It is primal. A tearing. I am coming apart. I am sure of it. I will break. I will shatter into pieces on this bed, and they will have to sweep me into a bag and send me home in fragments.

“Sarah.”

Alex’s hand clamps around mine. Not gentle. Not careful. He grips me like I’m falling off the edge of something, and his fingers are the only thing between me and the black.

“Sarah.”

He says my name like it’s a rope.

I grab it.

I grab it with every year, every scar, every night I slept on the floor, every morning I chose to stay alive out of spite. I grab it with the fingers that traced two thin bars in disbelief. With the palms that pressed against a wall to see if the paint was dry.

I grab it, and I don’t stop.

Not because I can. But because I can’t not. Because my body has become a storm wearing my skin. And it doesn’t care about my permission. It doesn’t care about my fear. About the woman in the kitchen or the shadow of her feet. Or the knife. Or the scars.

Alex’s bones grind. I’m crushing his hand. I know I’m crushing his hand because somewhere far away I hear him make a sound—not pain, not quite—but I can’t stop. I can’t let go. If I let go, I will flow apart. If I let go, there will be nothing holding me to this earth.

And suddenly, I feel it leave me.

The weight. The pressure. The entire universe that has been living inside my body leaves. It slides free in a rush of heat and wet, and I collapse backward like a puppet with its strings cut. My skull hits the pillow. My hands fall open. My legs go slack.

Gone.
It’s all gone. The pain. The fire.

And without it, I am formless. Shapeless.
I don’t know who I am without it.

The silence stretches. A second. Two. Ten. A lifetime compressed into the space between one monitor beep and the next. The room is frozen. Dr. Hodgins is a statue in blue. The nurse beside him has her hands extended, cupped around something I can’t see.

Alex’s grip on my fingers has gone slack. His mouth half-open. His eyes fixed on a point beyond my feet where the world has rearranged itself without my consent.

And then—
A cry.

Thin. Ragged. Furious. The most outraged, indignant, alive sound I have ever heard. It sounds like a declaration. Like a tiny set of lungs screaming, I’m here, I’m here, I exist. It tears through the silence like a fist through paper, and the room lurches back into motion.
Color returns. Sound returns. The beeping. The murmur of nurses. The clatter of instruments on steel trays. All of it rushing in at once.

I turn my head.
It’s involuntary. Like breathing. Like the cry still splitting the air.

And there he is.
Alex.

His face is wrecked. Completely, utterly wrecked. The composure he wears like armor—gone. The clinical detachment he hides behind—gone. Every wall he has ever built has crumbled, and what’s left is just—
Him.

His eyes are wide. Wider than I’ve ever seen them. Wet and shining and fixed on the squirming, furious thing the nurse is lifting into the light. His mouth is open, but nothing comes out. His jaw works once. Twice. Nothing. The man who always has the right phrase, the precise term, the measured response, has no word for this.

And his hand. His hand still in mine. The one I nearly shattered. It’s trembling.

He looks at me.
His eyes find mine, and the world narrows to a single point. To him. To me.

And I see it.
Awe. Unpolished, unmeasured, unprocessed awe.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.

I know that look.

I have never seen it before, but I know it the way I know the sound of rain. The way I know the weight of his arm across my waist at 4 a.m.

It is love so enormous it has broken his face open. Love that has no clinical term. No diagnosis code. No treatment protocol.

He loves me, and he loves the screaming thing they are placing on my chest. And he doesn’t have the engineering to contain it.

I look down.

I look at this warm, slick, impossible small body. No bigger than a loaf of bread. And I feel the cry vibrate through my ribs like it started inside me. Like it’s still mine. My hands come up. Shaking, wrecked, useless. And they curve around this tiny, furious creature. And the moment my palms make contact with skin, I know.

I will never be like her.

***

If you enjoyed this story, you can explore more of my stories here.

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About Sandrine B. | Dark Thriller & Psychological Fiction Author

Sandrine B. - Psychological Thrillers and Sensual Fictions — Thu, 5 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Meet Sandrine B., author of dark psychological thrillers and sensual fiction. Discover what drives her writing, the worlds she builds, and where to start reading.

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Hello, I'm Sandrine B.

A year ago, I started writing.

Not “one day I’ll write” writing. Not “I have an idea” writing. I mean the real kind. The kind where you sit down even when the page feels intimidating, even when you don’t know if anyone will ever read it… But you write anyway.

That decision changed everything.

So, hello. I’m Sandrine B., and this is my blog—my space to share the stories behind the stories, what I’m working on, and what I’m learning as a writer.

Why I started

I’ve always been drawn to the parts of people we don’t usually say out loud.

The hidden motives. The quiet obsessions. The moments where someone crosses a line and convinces themselves it was necessary. The tension between control and desire. The cost of wanting something too much.

For a long time, those things lived in my head as scenes, fragments, images—intense, sometimes unsettling, sometimes strangely beautiful in a dark way.

A few years ago, my inner world cracked open in a way I didn’t expect. Since then, my nights have been crowded with scenes—not history, but atmosphere—the kind of images that arrive when something unspoken insists on being felt.

A year ago, I finally stopped keeping them only in the dark and started putting them on the page.

And I haven’t been able to stop since.

What I write

I write suspense, psychological thrillers, and darker, more sensual fiction. The kind of stories that focus on atmosphere, discomfort, and the logic behind every decision.

I love characters who feel disturbingly real. Not perfect heroes. Not cardboard villains. People who want things, justify things, and make decisions that shift everything.

If you’re a reader who likes stories that linger—stories with tension, secrets, and edges—then you’ll probably feel at home here.

What this blog will be

This won’t be a “perfect writer’s life” blog.

I’m not interested in pretending it’s easy or clean.

What I do want is a place where I can:

Share updates on what I’m writing and releasing
Talk about inspiration (and the darker questions I like exploring)
Share behind-the-scenes snippets: craft, process, mood, themes
Post news about free stories, deals, and new launches

Basically: if you’re curious about my work—or if you like following a writer’s journey in real time—you’ll find something here.

If you’re new here…

Start wherever you want. Browse the books. Read a short story. Follow along.

And if you’d like to support my work in the simplest way: follow, subscribe, or check back when you can. Every reader makes a difference—especially in the beginning.

I’m one year into this. Still building. Still learning. Still writing the kinds of stories that don’t let go easily.

Thank you for being here.

— Sandrine B.

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