Two for Joy - Louise Collins

Chapter One

Murder, murder, murder. It was always on Romeo’s mind.

Locked in prison with only his thoughts for company, murder was like an old friend. A friend that when you thought of them, you instantly felt better, lighter, happier before realizing they’d ruined your life.

265 days since he’d last killed someone.

Audrey, grandmother, charity giver, and from what Romeo could remember, good coffee maker. She’d ground the beans while they talked in the kitchen, topic of conversation: Romeo’s traumatic encounter with a taxi driver. For a man that felt little emotion, he knew exactly how to fake it. He forced his voice to shake as he spoke, wiped tears from his eyes, and apologized over and over for being so weak. It wasn’t like him. He should’ve been able to handle himself, but he’d been afraid.

His weak, wounded façade only worked on some of them.

Not Asher Campbell or Tristram Adams.

No.

When they took Romeo home, and spoke about his ordeal with the taxi driver, they cursed, got angry, swore revenge.

Testosterone bubbling, Asher had even suggested getting a baseball bat and “fucking some taxis up.”

Then there had been Georgie Porter, not showing concern, or compassion for the ordeal he’d apparently been through, she just wanted Romeo upstairs in her bedroom, and he obliged.

Something different happened with Audrey, and Romeo didn’t just mean the awkward hug. He had no idea that his game with the monster in his head was about to change forever. What little emotions he did have would start to grow, to consume him, until he turned his back on his biggest desire.

He wanted something more than killing.

He wanted someone to live.

“Hey … ready for your visit?”

It had been 212 days since Chad offered himself as the final victim. Lying down on the mattress in the tattered old farmhouse, he had closed Romeo’s hands around his throat, and asked—no, told—Romeo to kill him.

He couldn’t do it.

He failed his countdown and lost his chance of being free of his killer desire, of satisfying the monster in his head once and for all. Instead he was locked up, desire still drumming beneath the surface, but no chance of an outlet. It was hell, no less than a cold-blooded killer like him deserved.

Romeo got up from his bed, reached up to the ceiling, then spread his arms out to touch either side of his cell. The guard tilted his head and watched him go through his odd stretching routine. Romeo even made sound effects as he did it, like he was some squeaky old tree in the wind.

“Turn around, put your hands through.”

Romeo sighed, turned around, then backed up to the bars. He put his hands through and waited for the cold snap of metal. While he waited, he stared at his tragic cell. A single bunk, unmade. Small bookcase with such riveting titles as the holy bible, and the A-Z medical dictionary. An ancient TV with poor signal that only got reception for two channels, one twenty-four-hour news channel, and the other kid’s cartoons.

Chad would’ve loved it—the thought made him smile.

His clothes mainly consisted of the color orange—jumpsuits, sweatshirts. But there were a few pairs of boxers and socks, too, fortunately not orange. Twenty-three hours a day in the tiny cage, and an hour outside in a slightly bigger cage. Romeo verged on insanity, he was teetering on the edge of going completely mad with boredom, with routine, with hopeless frustration, but one person could pull him back from the edge, and he did so frequently.

Six days, twenty-three hours, and forty-five minutes since he’d last seen Chad.

“Step away from the bars.”

Romeo walked over to his bunk. He’d pinned mementos of his spree to his wall, his favorite front pages of the Canster Times, curtesy of Marc Wilson. He wrote the articles the public were desperate to read. The ones that struck fear into their hearts and turned their stomachs, but every good story needed a happy ending, and Marc wrote that too.

Good triumphed over evil. The police saved the day. The killer fell at the last hurdle, and Chad was labelled The One that got Away.

It was Romeo’s favorite headline accompanied by a relaxed picture of Chad in his detective’s clothes. He kept it by his pillow, fell asleep to it at night and each morning, his eyes found Chad’s on his wall, then skimmed across the words.

The One That Got Away.

When the police burst in, it had looked like it, looked as if Romeo was in the middle of killing number one, and Chad