Page 72 of Craving Venom (The Venomous Beauty Trilogy #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

THE BEAUTY

T he cursor blinks, judging me. Flash, pause. Flash, pause. The sentence I’ve been rewriting for the last twenty minutes is still shit, and no amount of caffeine or Ctrl+Z is fixing it.

I hate that I feel good. That my body has the nerve to throb like it’s asking for a second round when my brain can’t stop screaming about who I fucked.

A convicted felon.

I slam my laptop shut and shove the project aside. Nothing feels important after what I did last night. I’ve blocked everyone, muted the group chat, and ignored my emails. The world can burn for all I care.

My phone buzzes across the table.

I stare at the name.

Fucking perfect timing.

I stare for five more seconds before snatching it up and pressing it to my ear without thinking.

“Meet me at the coffee place across from campus,” comes the familiar rasp. “I want you there in fifteen minutes.”

The line dies before I can argue. Sebastian’s always been like that, more my boss than my cousin.

I drag myself off the chair with a grunt. I slap on lip balm and tug on a hoodie that covers my tits enough to stop them from screaming I just got railed. I’m not even sure it helps.

By the time I reach the coffee shop, the sky’s bruised with clouds and the wind bites. The scent of roasted beans and cinnamon sugar hits me first, the bell above the door throwing out a warning I leave behind.

Sebastian’s already sitting in a corner booth. He’s in civilian clothes, but his posture is too straight and his energy too alert. No matter how hard he tries, Sebastian never blends in.

He looks up from his drink. Nods once. No smile.

I slide in across from him and stretch my fingers around the warm ceramic of the mug waiting for me. He ordered for me. He always does.

“You look like shit.” He taps the lid of his espresso with one knuckle.

“Thanks. You always know how to charm a girl.”

He raises an eyebrow while his eyes scan my face, throat, and wrists. He takes in the hoodie and the faint bruise at the edge of my collarbone that I didn’t bother hiding. His jaw tightens.

“How’s college?” he finally asks, tearing a sugar packet in half.

“Fucked,” I grunt, picking at the corner of my cup. “And not in the fun way.”

His gaze sharpens for a beat, but he doesn’t bite.

“I saw your presentation on kinetic profiling. Clean work. Are you going to let your professor butcher it, or fight back this time?”

“I’m not in the mood to fight anyone today.”

“That’s not like you.”

I look out the window, past the glass, past the students walking with their heads down and earbuds in. I watch a dog pee on the campus gate and wish I could swap places with it. Life seems simpler with a full bladder and zero shame.

“Did you sleep at all?”

I narrow my eyes.

“What do you want, Sebastian? I’m sure you didn’t fly all the way from Virginia just to check if I’m holding it together. Unless the CIA’s gone soft.”

The name alone draws a hush around our booth.

“You need to keep your head down for the next few days.”

“What?”

“The Nighthawk is in Veridian.”

My hand jerks. The edge of the cup tips, and hot coffee sloshes over my wrist and onto the table. I hiss through my teeth and grab a napkin to wipe it.

“You want to be a little more subtle?” Sebastian grunts, pressing another napkin over the mess.

I ignore him. “The Nighthawk? The one from—Jesus—he started in Maine, didn’t he? He’s been carving his way across the country like a one-man horror show?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

I shoot him a look.

“Duh. You’re sitting across from a true crime junkie. The Nighthawk was my Spotify Wrapped top podcast subject last year. Between him and Harlow the skinner, I barely slept.”

He doesn’t laugh. He never does when it’s real.

“Now imagine you’re not listening through headphones. Imagine he’s in your city. Imagine the nightmare you Googled is walking your sidewalks.”

“He’s real?” My voice is quieter now, but only because my lungs have stopped working. “I thought he was some urban legend like Jack the ripper or The Grin Reaper. Half the crime boards say he’s a ghost, the rest say he’s a coordinated hitman group—”

“He’s real.”

“How do you even know he’s here?”

He sighs and pulls a photo from a slim black envelope. Slides it across the table until it’s right in front of me.

I open the envelope with a flick, expecting some blurred security cam still or a blood-smeared note, anything but this.

It’s a sketch.

Just a face.

No. A mask.

Bronze-brown and brutal, shaped like a bird’s beak but all wrong.

It’s too long, too sharp, too human in its anger.

Cracks run down its surface like old scars.

One of them starts above the right brow.

It is splinter-thin at first, almost delicate, then widens like a fault line, tearing past the socket in a cruel arc.

Another slices diagonally from the left temple, cuts across the eye ridge, and halts right where a cheekbone would be.

They don’t look random. They look inflicted.

The hood framing it is darker than night, swallowing edges and stealing shape.

I swallow.

“A kid saw him,” Sebastian reveals. “Down by the service corridor of a hotel downtown.”

“A kid?” My stomach drops. “Is he okay?”

“He’s in protective custody. We’re making sure he forgets the mask before he forgets his multiplication tables.”

The idea of that thing standing in the same city as me, breathing the same air, existing in the same reality… it makes my skin crawl. And the idea that a child looked that mask in the eye and lived?

Unreal.

“Six states. Twenty-two confirmed kills. He’s the guy who burned the senator’s face into a Bible and stuffed it in his chest cavity in Maine.

The one who butchered a lawyer alive in New Hampshire.

He nailed a priest to the altar in his own church in Vermont.

He drowned a therapist in a bathtub filled with his patients’ case files in Massachusetts.

In Connecticut, he carved open a judge and used his ribcage to frame the scales of justice on the courtroom floor.

And in Rhode Island, he strung up a surgeon by his own intestines over the entrance of his hospital.

” I trace a finger along the photo’s edge. “And he just let the kid go?”

“He’s a psychopath,” Sebastian counters. “Some of his kills were… surgical. Others? Ripped open. He doesn’t follow a pattern.”

“He doesn’t follow a pattern, but he let a child live?”

Sebastian’s jaw flexes as frustration twists through him in a rare show he doesn’t usually let slip

“You think maybe…” I glance at the photo again. The mask stares up at me like it knows. “Maybe he’s not psychopath. Maybe he’s just a Misunderstood Psychopath .”

He actually snorts. “Faith.”

I raise an eyebrow. “I’m serious. The way you described it? That’s not a lack of pattern. That’s someone choosing when to be precise. He wants to be messy sometimes. He chooses it.”

“Okay, and that’s better… how ?”

“It means he’s not out of control. It means he knows exactly what he’s doing. That kid? He made a conscious decision to let him walk. That’s not psychosis. That’s restraint.”

Sebastian huffs. “You’re building empathy for a man who slit a congressman’s throat with a pizza slicer. And him letting the kid go means nothing. Maybe he wasn’t in the mood to skin anyone under four feet tall.”

“I’m building context,” I snap. “You call him a psychopath like it’s a diagnosis. You don’t know what’s driving him. For all you know, every person he’s gutted deserved it.”

He gives me a look like I’ve grown two heads, but I don’t back down.

“There’s a difference between being a monster and being someone who’s been driven to act like one. The way he killed that judge? That was personal. That was theater. That was rage with purpose.”

“You sound like you’ve been reading Reddit threads again.”

“I sound like I’m using my brain,” I bite back. “You ever consider maybe your agency can’t catch him because you’re too busy trying to box him into a clinical diagnosis that doesn’t fit?”

“CIA’s working on it.” Sebastian levels a look at me. “We’ve got analysts, tech, pattern tracking, psychological profiling from people with actual degrees. No offense, but I’m not taking behavioral strategy tips from r/crimejunkiesgonewild.”

I roll my eyes so hard I almost see my own regrets.

“Fine. But don’t come crying to me when he guts another douchebag and leaves a coded message in their colon.”

“That better not be an actual subreddit.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“Anyway.” Sebastian sets his now-empty cup aside, “I didn’t come here for you to teach me how to do my job.”

He rubs the bridge of his nose like I’m the migraine he can’t file paperwork against.

“I came here to tell you to stay in your dorm. Or stay where there are people. Don’t walk alone, don’t wander off campus, and if anyone follows you, call me directly.”

I nod like I’m listening, but my brain is tuned out.

I already know what’s coming next. The lecture wrapped in concern. The rules disguised as love. Sebastian’s got this way of pretending he’s briefing a colleague when really, he’s trying not to show his hands are shaking.

Ever since my parents found me in that basement—

I press my nails into my thigh, sharp enough to ground me.

Ever since that , he’s been… different. Smothering. Overattentive. The way his eyes scan every room before I walk in, the way he memorizes exits like we might need one any second. He’s never said it, never needed to.

But I know.

He blames himself for what happened. For not getting there sooner. For the two days I spent locked in a space that was suffocating me.

He’s never forgiven himself for it.

And I’ve never told him it’s okay.

Because it’s not.