Page 22 of From Hell

Lie on my bed at night, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, feeling nothing, thinking nothing—just enduring bone-numbing emptiness. It took weeks, maybe months, to scrape a living one day at a time, keeping the pain at bay by hunting the next monster. And the next. It’s the only thing that keeps me breathing.

If my life is worth anything, killing men who deserve to die is all I have. So what if I close my eyes and see their dead corpses staring back at me in the depths of the night? I’ll get over it.

My killer did.

“Have you made up your mind what to do yet?” Nola puts directly to Sage, just like she did me earlier.

“Not yet,” Sage says, sipping her tea slowly. Sage’s fiancé is a psycho through and through. He killed her sister, but there wasn’t enough evidence, and now her parents expect her to take her sister’s place and marry him. Unlike myself and Nola, Sage comes from a wealthy family and does what they tell her…most of the time.

Nola’s one eye blazes, and she opens her mouth to say something, but Sage beats her to it. “What about your monster? Any luck with finding him yet?”

Nola’s monster is a ghost. That’s all she’ll tell us when we ask. “Nothing new,” she quips. “We’re here to discuss Laine’s latest letter anyway.”

I reach into my cardigan pocket and pull out the last letter the Ripper left for me. It’s been nearly a year since I found the letter he left on my mother’s doorstep, and now this one showed up two days ago, on mine. Sage takes and opens it carefully, smoothing out the creases before reading it, exclaiming, “Oh, how creepy,” before passing it to Nola.

She reads through it, eyebrows raised, hissing through her teeth. “You motherfucker.”

Sage looks at me. “That’s it? No name signed.”

“Nope. He never does.”

Nola hands it back, and I slip it into my pocket so I don’t have to look at it again.

I know what it says.

“I dream about you often. How we never got to finish what we started. A little birdie told me you’re back. I’m enjoying our little game.

Watching you bloom, baptized in red.

Soon, little bird.

Oh, so very soon.”

“And there was nothing on your doorbell camera?” Nola adds.

I shake my head. The video footage showed no one coming or going, but there was a time skip a few hours before I arrived.

Sage takes another sip of her tea. “This one feels different. He writes it like he’s watching you.”

Nola shoots her a look. “Scare her even more, why don’t you?”

“No, it’s fine.” Squashing the terror clawing like ice in my stomach, I consider it for a second. “She’s right. He talks of games and being baptized in red.”

Sage cocks her head. “Could he be the same person who was there that night?”

I stare at her. I didn’t think about that. My heart thuds loudly in my chest. Couldhehave been watching me this whole time?My killer.“You said someone was following you,” Sage adds.

Nola finishes her bite of cookie, a frown easing onto her forehead. “Wait. What? Someone has been following you?”

When I answer, “No,” she looks at Sage, and our soft-hearted friend immediately crumbles under Nola’s intense stare. “Lainey, you did say you saw a figure in the dark.”

Nola turns on me. “Please tell me that no one saw you kill that son of a bitch?”

I blink at her, chest suddenly tight. My mind flashes back to the black shape under the trees. When Sage called me that evening, I told her about it, freaking out. Now I’m regretting it. Nola will misconstrue the events. “IthoughtI saw something, but it was probably just my mind playing tricks,” I say as calmly as I can manage.

Nola eyes me like I’m an outright liar. I hate lying to my friends, but if I’ve fucked up, I’ll clean my mess up. There’s no point in worrying them.

“You checked, right, and there was no one there?” Sage agrees, clearing her throat, realizing she may have made a mistake telling Nola.