Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,97

her, the monster underneath the mask didn’t want him. No, that monster needed him.

“No.” He yanked the word out of his very soul. It might as well have been dripping with blood and marrow.

Orion narrowed her eyes, holding his icy stare for a moment. Then she stepped back. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll just find it somewhere else.”

She turned to leave, but his hand darted out to encircle her wrist. It was a violent grip. Painful. The very first time Maddox had ever touched her so forcefully.

Her dark side reveled in it.

“No, you fucking won’t,” he growled at her. A warning more than an order.

She looked down at her wrist, so small, almost birdlike compared to his meaty hand. “Let go of me, Maddox.”

Orion expected the immediate release of her hand. Maddox was the good, honorable man after all. He didn’t hurt women. He’d hear the way she’d made her voice small, vulnerable, and he’d release her.

But he didn’t.

He squeezed tighter. “No, you won’t, Orion.”

She met his eyes. She should’ve been afraid, disgusted at his touch. But she was almost impressed.

He had a little bit of monster in him too. That might prove useful.

She yanked her arm away, forcefully releasing his grip.

And then she turned and walked away.

Eighteen

Two Months Later

Orion had taken great care with the details.

From what she could understand—after her extensive research—it was the details that got people caught. Little things. Rogue hairs, traffic cams. The kind of stuff that through sheer luck, she had not been caught by. It had been months now. The case was all but officially closed. The news coverage had stopped. The world had forgotten about the good doctor. Plenty more murders were happening around the city.

Orion felt safe enough to continue with her planning. She knew that she wouldn’t get lucky again. That was the singular time in her entire life she’d get a break from fate. The rest was up to her.

So, no hairs, DNA, no stupid shit like that.

Then there was the body.

No body, no crime.

And disposing of a body wasn’t easy. It wasn’t meant to be, of course. Kidnapping young girls and keeping them captive for years wasn’t easy either, but these monsters managed it.

She’d started by buying property. A nice little plot of five acres—an old farmhouse with the paint chipping, a big red barn out back that was one stiff breeze from falling over, and thick woods surrounding them both—near the bootheel of Missouri. No neighbors, and it was bought by the shell corporation she’d learned how to create. It had been easy, especially now that she was sort of a whiz on the computer. The property could not trace back to her unless the law enforcement in southern Missouri had some computer hacker extraordinaire. She highly doubted they had the budget for that.

The house was exactly the kind of place where she’d imagined she was all those years. It fit perfectly for her needs. No one to hear the screams. No one to watch her get rid of the bodies. Plenty of land to bury them in. A backhoe stored in the rickety barn to do the digging. It wasn’t hard for her to learn how to use it. With enough time and patience, coupled with the power of the internet, anyone could learn just about anything they pleased.

In an ideal world, she’d stumble upon someone else from The Cell. But seeing the doctor was a one-off thing, just like getting away with his murder. And from what Eric had told her—she did not have any contact with Maddox anymore—they didn’t have any leads on the other men she, Jaclyn, and Shelby had described.

It was disappointing, but it didn’t mean she was going to stop. Killing was a craving. And the state government did most of the work finding victims for her.

Orion was proud of herself.

Finding someone who deserved this wasn’t hard.

Although Orion hated a lot of things about this world reliant on technology and social media, she loved the sex offender registry website. Loved that the government posted their faces and their crimes for all to see.

Well, she didn’t love that there were so many of them that the website needed to exist at all, but she understood it. This was never going to be a world devoid of monsters. But she was going to do her best to make sure there were a few less.

Obviously, Orion would’ve loved to get her revenge on the ones who abused her. Who treated her like an object they