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Another buzz from the phone. Pull the blanket back. Show me your pussy. I want to watch you come.
What if I pretend the texts are coming from the stranger in the alley? What if I just disconnected from the reality of Aidan all together? I am so so close. I need this.
Another text. It would please me, and that will make your life easier. I’ll see it all anyway soon enough. Show me and win some of my favor.
How good can his night vision cameras even be? It’s not like I’m in broad daylight. The closeness of my orgasm is making my ability to make sound and rational decisions slip away. It’s making it harder to draw a sharp distinction between my fantasy man in the alley and Aidan.
The competing buzz from the toy and my phone just raise the tension higher.
Maddie, show me and come. Now.
The stranger’s demanding intense gaze locks on mine in my imagination. My pleasure builds.
It’s dark, I can pretend I’m invisible. He can’t see me. I’ll just pretend.
In a moment of insanity, I pull back the blankets and finish myself off in full view of the hidden cameras. I feel the flush of heat and shame in my cheeks because no matter how much I may try to fantasize that it’s the stranger from the alley, I know who’s really watching me, and I’ve never shared an intimate moment like this with anyone before. It’s so shameful that the first person to get any of it is my hated stalker.
My hips lurch up one final time, and the moan I’ve tried so hard to contain comes pouring out of me as I ride the hard edge of my orgasm through to the finish line.
Finally I come down from the high of pleasure, the dopamine pinging around in my brain like a pinball. I turn the toy off and lie in the dark as my breathing and heartbeat return to normal. I can’t believe what I’ve just done. I rush to cover myself, but it’s too late for the false veneer of modesty. He saw everything. I can only hope that the view wasn’t as good as it would have been during the day or with the lights on.
My phone buzzes again, and I read just two words on the screen:
Good girl.
Eight
Aidan
An hour ago.
* * *
Tonight I eliminated the eighth name on my list. I’m not sure how I’ve developed this irrational OCD need for order, but it feels important to me to go down the list and handle the names in the same order I wrote them down. There’s something satisfying about picking up that red Sharpie and drawing a line through each name in a row. It restores a sense of order to my life, so I can’t just have red lines haphazardly all over the place.
That would be chaos.
I always put six blanks in the revolver. But this time… well, there was a real bullet mixed in there. The fourth round ended up splattering blood and brains all over the wall of Preston Van Alen’s dining room. It was far more clean-up than I’d prepared for.
I don’t know how it happened. I think it scared me more than him, but he was dead so…
Like the rest of them, he was expecting one of those rounds to be a real bullet. I was the only one surprised by its presence. This is why you only point a gun at something you want to destroy, children. All guns are loaded, even when they’re not, and even when they’re blanks.
There are no blanks in this game.
Brian drilled that lesson hard into my head when he taught me how to kill and not get caught. I had certainly wanted to destroy Van Alen, but not so soon. He got off far too easy for what he did to my mother. I’d planned to spend half the night torturing him, do my ritual, and sleep like a baby until noon tomorrow.
It’s after midnight when I arrive home, and I’m far more on edge than I normally am after a kill. Things feel uncompleted. I didn’t get to hurt him enough. He didn’t beg me for his death like they’re supposed to. I’m so fucking angry at him.
Also, I keep my live rounds and my blanks in very separate places. How did a live round get mixed in? Was it a manufacturing error? How would such an error even happen? Maybe it was a packaging error. Do they make the blanks and the live rounds in the same factory? Like places that warn you they made your food on the same equipment where peanuts are processed?
Or was I somehow more careless than I thought?
I am spiraling now. I need everything to be in order. I need everything to go the way it’s supposed to go. Every detail perfect. Nothing out of place.
I’m not sure right now if I’m thinking about killing the men on my list or marrying Maddie. Both projects have consumed me with a level of compulsive obsession I’ve never known before. Both have me strung tight like a violin string, desperate for everything to go exactly as I planned it.
I need things to say in order.