I didn’t have the sufficient amount of rage or disgust in my voice to awaken the fury I knew was hiding there somewhere.
Sure, I was disgusted in this man. Not for his urges, because I knew we all had various violent and sickening urges. You just had to look at the amount of people that bought my books. Millions of people reading about the sickest, most vile, things I could conjure from my own sick and vile mind.
But millions did not act on those urges.
I didn’t let my disgust show because, despite my panic, my fear, something inside of me yearned to know this man. The artist inside of me was hungry for his rotten soul. To feed my own.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I will admit, I don’t feel bad about it. I’m sure I should. But I don’t. They are not wasted. They do not serve the world in any way but being good. But with you, your talent, you serve this world. So, when I read that you had moved into a place where I had made my art, I was flattered. It was another urge that I could not refuse. And I’m glad I didn’t. You were in trouble. You needed inspiration. More than the memory of me could conjure. So, I waited. And you gave me what I needed.”
I took a breath, wondering if Saint might be acting like the hero I knew he wasn’t. But no, that wasn’t my escape route.
“What do you think I need?” I asked.
“Material, fear.” He leaned down to the small carry-on suitcase he’d set on the end of the bed. A long, clean, shiny—and I was guessing, sharp—knife was pulled out of it.
My stomach curdled with the sight of it. As much as I prided myself with my ability to keep a strong stomach in ugly situations, this was different. Even than Jacob. He was sloppy. Stupid. Dangerous, for sure. But not a true foe.
This man was cold. Calculated. Calm. He was almost lucid, in his own unhinged way. As much as I despised everything he was, I respected him. And that made me sick too. That I didn’t instinctively hate this man.
He moved, keeping eye contact, keeping his mask. I didn’t struggle. What difference would it make? He wasn’t going to make a mistake when he had chained me to this bed.
“You need to be truly afraid,” he continued. “Maybe not of me, but of becoming just another victim. Being known as yet another poor girl slain by the Invisible Slasher. No one remembers the victims; everyone remembers the monsters.”
My mouth dried up with the need to vomit because he was right. He said he didn’t know me, but it was terrifying how much a serial killer could read me.
He laid the tip of the knife at the base of my neck. No pressure. No break of the skin.
“This is the exact knife I used on them,” he said.
His voice was no longer even and polite. It was a whisper. Gentle. There was longing in his eyes. A fondness for the past. A hunger for more.
His knuckles turned white on the hilt of the knife.
He wanted to kill me, I saw that much. Even if I wasn’t his ideal victim.
“Can you feel it?” he whispered. “Everything you’ve built, everything you are, draining away to nothing but the details of your death?”
I could. I could feel it. Obviously, it was my overactive imagination. Fear hormones and chemicals kicking in, turning my brain to mush, messing with my perception of reality.
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was, I could feel it.
I could see it. My mangled, bloodied body, nothing more than a pile of flesh. Another corpse. Another crime scene photo to be tucked away in some hard drive of some police database, a case number assigned to it.
Then I saw the headlines.
The press would’ve run with the “The Butcher”—original, I know—nationally by now. Even before they found my body. And if they hadn’t, they surely would be now. He would be a star. The worst serial killer of a generation. Captivating because this generation was obsessed with serial killers more than any that came before it. There would be a Netflix series. Podcasts. There would be books. Movies. A sensation.
I would be the most famous of his victims. Of course I would be. Wasn’t Sharon Tate the most talked about victim of the Manson Murders? But even she wasn’t as talked about as the man himself.
That would be me.
My books might