Page 1 of Little Author

T he smell of her was all wrong for a corpse.

Not that I’d ever buried one, but I’d ‘written’ plenty into the dirt. The scenes were often filled with people gasping, women choking, and throats full of mud and regret. My readers devoured every kill and every page. But they didn’t understand what I really fed them: obsession, rot, and…him.

Roux Patel.

My readers thought he was just fiction. They thought that my character ‘Rue’ was mine.

But he wasn’t.

The truth was that I had met him years ago, not formally, of course. There were no ‘hey how-ya-doings’ or any pleasantries, really. There was just glass between us and the knowledge that we were both dangerous in our own ways.

I had a freelance gig shadowing a therapist who counseled inmates serving life sentences. It was easy money with no liability.

I told them I was there for research for my university, but when I forged papers and greased their hands, they knew it was all a lie. I would never admit to anyone why I couldn’t tell the truth or that I’d picked this assignment specifically to see him.

I didn’t tell them I rearranged my schedule to sit outside his sessions. I didn’t tell them I watched the way he tilted his head when he listened to the therapist, like he was a wolf simply pretending to give a damn.

It was in the way the guards stiffened when he stood, the way his lips barely moved when he spoke. It was like he didn’t waste words on the living, only saved them for those he killed.

His eyes haunted my mind every second of every day. They were crystal blue…no, they were pure ice. But they weren’t cold, just empty. As if his soul had been snuffed out long ago like a candle, and no one had bothered to tell him.

His tattoos painted a thousand stories on his skin, and I imagined them every time I saw just an inch more of him beneath the harsh gray jumpsuit.

I would find out what his stories were, one way or another .

For now, I created them in my mind or wrote them down on paper. Creating those fantasies had become…hmmmm.

He had a platinum buzzcut the first time I saw him, and it was the kind of shaved-down perfection that made him look almost clinical. No, actually, he looked more surgical, like he was some kind of scalpel dressed in prison gray.

I would go home and moan his name, while I touched myself to the thought of those eyes watching me.

Imagining what it would feel like to be studied the way he studied the people he wanted to ruin, or what it would feel like to know he’d already decided where to bury my body before he kissed me… I couldn’t get enough.

It’s sick. I know it’s sick.

But I wrote it anyway.

Wrote him anyway.

I built the very bones of my main character, Rue, from the past and bloody present of Roux Patel. Yes, I made him larger, colder, and stronger, but I took my filth and dressed it in literary brilliance.

Now, it was called art.

Readers ate it up, critics praised my insight into the ‘psychosexual predator.’ They didn’t know I was just fucking him on the page.

It was my fantasy until it wasn’t…

I told myself it was just my imagination, that I was safe.

But now my TV blared about a death near my apartment, and I felt anything but safe. I stared at the news report, my mouth open, heart thudding so damn hard it hurt.

“This death is nearly a replica of The Maestro. We can’t confirm a copycat is out there, but rest assured, the police of our beautiful London city are at the scene, and are going to get to the bottom of this heinous murder.”

The screen shifted to footage of a crime scene. There were flashing lights, a limp shoe hanging from a woman’s foot in a public fountain, and a daisy tattoo just visible on her ankle.

I dropped to the floor.

This scene…this exact scene.

I wrote it, but not in my published books.

Hell, not even in a draft.

It was in my private notes and something I scribbled during a 2:00 AM spiral when I couldn’t stop thinking about the sound her neck would make when it shattered beneath his fingertips.

I thought I was being dramatic by guessing. I thought, given her connection to one of his earlier victims.

I didn’t know I was right.

I didn’t know I was writing his future.

He didn’t know about me. Not yet. He didn’t know someone had been shadowing him for years, writing him into books, bedrooms, and nightmares.

But if he ever picked up a copy…

If he ever read a single page…

If he ever felt how hungry I had been for him…he’d come for me.

And maybe, somewhere deep down, I wanted that to happen.

I couldn’t stand the thought of some lowlife trying to copy his work. It was probably awfully done, and the moron would be found within a week.

It had been a while since I had gone to the prison, but maybe it would be worth it to see his face.

Would he find it amusing? Someone copying him?

Would he be angry?

Or would he care at all?

Maybe…it was orchestrated by him. I couldn’t shake my thoughts.

I had to know.

I didn’t even think about how I would find out. I didn’t think about anything, really.

I just got in the car, without putting on makeup, and had zero thought about the random coat I grabbed. I just snagged my keys, my phone, and put the car in drive. The humming under my skin was like chasing a high I couldn’t forget.

You are being thorough. This is just for inspiration.

Or so I told myself. But the truth was darker.

The need to know what I got right was intense, but knowing what it felt like to stand where she’d died and to feel how close I had been to his mind without even knowing it…was screaming inside my head.

I wanted to dissect the scene and identify what the copycat had overlooked. Recreate the kill the way the real Roux Patel would have meant for it to be.

The police tape was still up when I got there, but the scene had gone cold.

The press had left, which meant the detectives were off chasing the wrong fucking clue. The fountain now bubbled behind the caution lines, innocent, wet, and stupid like it hadn’t cradled a corpse less than twenty-four hours ago.

I ducked under the tape and stepped onto the slick stone path, heart pounding. It was just like I wrote it. The same narrow bend of the alley, the same goddamn puddle stretching beneath the wrought-iron bench.

This kill didn’t feel like some amateur just screwing around for their hero.

This felt familiar.

The cops hadn’t seen it…the path of his work.

But I did.

I could tell by the way the evidence markers were placed, completely scattered and desperate. It was like they didn’t see the pattern, his ritual. In fact, they missed the rhythm of his movements, but I didn’t.

I crouched near the edge of the fountain where the girl’s body had been found, my breath fogging the air. I could still smell the copper tang of old blood, diluted now, but still there. I pressed my hand to the stone of the well. It was cold and smooth.

She would’ve been alive, willingly with him.

She hadn’t died by the blood-stained area on the ground as they’d marked it.

“She died here in the fountain.”

I could see it in my mind like a slideshow, flipping scene after scene, putting the puzzle together with a neat and bloody red bow.

Nothing was out of place. There was no sign of scraped nails, bashing footprints, or hair yanked out. But what really struck me as odd was that there was no blood spilled by the gallons.

The space was too still and silent, like him.

I stood, turned, and traced the path with my eyes.

“Right there.”

The small petals on the stone path, seemingly fallen from the tree blossoms overhead. I knew better. It wasn’t the same kind of flower. And the ones on the ground were neatly placed and crushed.

I remembered writing that…not because it mattered to the cops, but because it mattered to him.

He stepped on the flowers on purpose. That was his tell.

It was like his little fuck-you to the world’s softness, a break in the facade of fragility in women, or a homage to how broken his first kill was. His mother’s.

I walked the path again, slower, more deliberate. She ran this way. Her heel snapped there. That was why she stumbled. That was why her scream was weaker.

He caught her from behind, wrapped a hand around her jaw, and whispered something ugly in her ear before dragging her back to the fountain, where he slowly crushed her trachea so she couldn’t scream and then broke her neck.

I could hear it. Feel it. I was inside it.

I was inside his mind.

It was exactly like his rituals, down to the finesse and calculated softness of the scene’s presence.

The media loved calling him “The Maestro” because of the orchestrated way he performed his rituals. He was calculating, a puppeteer to chaos, before he was finally caught.

I’d wondered how long it would take for them to figure out how he had gotten away with everything for so long before his cousin Kaycee gave him away. It was almost like he’d wanted to be caught, but that was one part of his mystery I’d never figured out.

And then I saw it…a drain just behind the rubbish bins.

The police had missed it. Water was still draining slowly, the ever-constant rain floating in the grooves of the brick and pavement. It was dragging something dark with it, and I crouched again, stomach flipping.

A button.

It was smooth and black, but it was not from her clothes.

“It’s from a male’s shirt.” I traced the grooves of the button’s structure.

He never had sex with the victims, not unless it was in my books.

I’d written that detail so many times, I could see his body move. He was always unhurried, almost reverent, as he crouched down and spread his victim’s legs wide on the fountain’s ledge. His tongue was wild and wet, searching, yet demanding of what he knew I would allow him to do on the page.

Roux Patel never makes mistakes.

Nothing could tie him to his marks. Not until his name was given up to the M.E.Ts.

The cops hadn’t found this button. It was left here. They would have bagged and tagged it in a heartbeat if they had. But they hadn’t found it.

I had.

I stood there trembling, soaked in cold rain and adrenaline. This wasn’t fiction anymore. It never was.

I had pieced together a murder scene before the forensics team even filed their first report. I had imagined it with terrifying accuracy.

Not because I was gifted, but because I knew him.

Somewhere between the fantasies and the files, I had crossed the line. And now I wasn’t just writing about Roux Patel.

I was tracking him.

This didn’t feel like a copycat. It was all too clean, too ritualistically perfect in every way.

The entire scene bled his name and was covered with his mark.

This couldn’t really be him, though. He was caged like a lion in prison for years, until the day he knew was coming.

The penalty of death was a last resort for them, based solely on public outcry when Roux was arrested.

‘Innocent until proven guilty’ went out the window.

The media wanted to see him fry, so without giving him any kind of due process, they wrote his name down for a life sentence. It was what the people demanded, so everyone turned a blind eye to the fact that it was wrong.

A criminal had to be proven guilty in TV shows, but apparently not in reality.

Did he pay someone to do this?

The woman was connected to his past. It could have been a fuck-you to the system. A sign that even behind bars, he would still haunt the streets.

But this button, it was real, and in my hand.

If Roux knew that he’d left this in the grate when he killed his cousin…he’d come for me.

And maybe if he did…I wouldn’t run.