Page 13 of Little Author

I waited until she left again.

Coat, dress, no bra. The same goddamn alley, and the same soaked thighs. I watched her walk like she had a purpose and knew I’d follow her. It was like she wanted to be stalked.

She was right, such a smart woman, nothing like the robotic staff at the prison.

I’d let forty minutes pass. There was no need to rush. I didn’t need to worry. I already had the rhythm of her locks, the pattern of her windows, and the sticky way her back door frame snagged at the hinge.

She should’ve changed it years ago. Someone could easily get into her home and see all the dirty secrets she hid there.

I sat on the fountain, enjoying the chill of the air and reliving my kill that was now coated in my shadows come.

“Hey. Why are we meeting out here, Roux? I know you’re upset about Rulo and me telling the feds, but you have to understand we didn’t have a choice. Kayla found out and was going to get Rulo in trouble. We got a lot of money from the media after you got locked up.”

I ran my hand down her leg, landing on the daisy tattoo at her ankle. “Oh yeah, Kaycee, I understand completely. It was bound to happen one of these days anyway.”

My cousin was as stupid as they came, and as I stroked the petals from the flower bouquet I gifted her when she arrived, she started getting more chatty.

“So this is what we’re thinking, okay. We got money, and you need to build a new life. We can help you, and then you leave us be, okay?”

I nodded, carefully ripping off the petals one by one and dropping them on the ground.

“So I brought a few grand. It’s in my purse. I was smart, ya know. Thinking ahead and all that, like you taught Aunt Martha and me.”

The mention of my parasite of a mother made me recoil.

Kacey got up from the fountain, walking over to her small handbag that was against the water grate by the dumpsters of the above apartments. I stood up and followed her, watching as my shadow engulfed hers.

No way out now.

“Hey, Kaycee?” I said as she dug her fingers into what was likely a bag with a gun. I never expected there to be money…once a rat, always a rat.

And the only way to deal with a rodent problem was to eliminate them one by one, take them out from the sewers they had crawled out of in the first place, and end the lineage from ever resurfacing.

Her body froze, and I smiled as I felt her fear melt into me like a cologne I had missed for too long. She was open, waiting, and too dumb to act fast enough.

My hand wrapped around her throat, pulling her back into the darkness of the fountain’s alleyway. At first, she tried to fight me, her hands reaching up to claw at me. I dodged her easily, like the slimy snake she was.

“Now, now,” I said as her nail clipped one of my fucking buttons on my coat. “Keep your hands to yourself, asshole.”

“Rulo will know what you did!” She gasped, kicking her feet until one of her heels fell from her foot, showing that tattoo in the moonlight.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Her hero. Rulo.

A washed-up gangster who got off on killing junkyard dogs, and was too pussy to end a human life because they fought back.

“I am sure he and his wife will be happier without you, Kace.”

My cousin went still. The nickname I used as kids made her go rigid. Her pathetic body giving up to the emotional crucifix, her hands stilling, and the tears drenching my forearms.

“Oh, you didn’t get the invite to their ceremony? Guess you really are like Martha, aren’t you? Just a leech on society, only good at opening your legs for scraps. We both know this is a mercy. You know it. And I do. Now, Kaycee...sing for me.”

My cousin was going lax now, perched on the fountain’s edge, her legs falling open.

I let my thoughts twist my mind and smiled at her lolling eyes. She wasn’t dead. Not yet.

It had been so long since I had tasted anything but the prison’s notion of fucking food.

So long since I had truly devoured a woman like I longed to. Her nearing demise made me as hard as the stone fountain under her.

“Poor, little whore. Even in death, I’m the only one deprived enough to taste you. Better make it worth my while so I can let Rulo know what he’s missing…

The whistling of the cops nearby knocked me from my memories, and I left my crime scene, not wanting to get into casual conversation with the London popo.

The annoying hinge squeaked as I slipped inside her apartment like smoke. She was in bed, her eyes closed for the night, until I chose to make that permanent.

The place smelled like a woman’s skin, soft and floral.

Like cheap paper, sweat, and the salt of orgasms no one else had earned.

Her desk was cluttered but meticulous. Her rituals were evident in the organized chaos.

Notes scribbled on notepads, half-eaten fruit, and a knife she probably carried for safety.

“Isn’t that adorable?” I whispered, picking it up and poking my finger with the dull point that wouldn’t cut paper, much less flesh.

I touched her keys, her pillow, and pressed my face to her robe hanging on the chair. I breathed her in like a drug I hadn’t tasted in a decade.

But the real treasure was in the drawer.

Not the top. That shit was for a show for anyone who saw it—the persona she wanted to portray to the world.

The second one. The one under the paper clips, under the bills and forgotten bookmarks.

A stack of cheap notebooks with pages and pages of words.

Handwritten stories.

Not published.

Not seen.

Just for her.

Just for me.

This was the author.

This is my shadow.

She wrote about Rue, again and again, but not the polished version she released for the masses. This was rot, bone, and obsession.

She wrote him licking blood from a knife, whispering into mouths before he filled them with his fingers. She wrote him watching her, always just out of reach, always just inside her head.

She wrote the way I’d dominate a cunt. The blood I spilled and collected with my tongue before finally giving them the mercy of death. She wrote it all.

She wrote him jerking off behind her couch while she cried into her hands, unable to stop from coming to his voice.

She wrote him fucking her shadow.

I nearly came on the spot, reading all the pages of her detailed fantasies.

Not the fake ass snowflake she published, but the real me. The one that was only seen by my chorus line…my victims and my kills.

But no.

Something was missing from these stories.

There was no ending.

I wanted to do it right.

This woman, this author, needed to finish.

She wrote my entire life. My pain, my past lovers, my history. Hell, she wrote my goddamn present.

Now I was going to take her life story apart page by page before burning it all to ash and burying her in the remains of the words she’d written.

I found the flowers next. Cheap, bright. A vase of try-hard white roses was sitting on her bedside table like someone thought they were worthy of her.

They weren’t, clearly.

The card read:

‘Thanks for the drinks. Can we maybe try again? – J.’

I smiled.

Poor bastard. Maybe I’d get lucky, get to watch this loser strike out with my Little Author.

I pulled out my cock, slow, deliberate, and leaned against the wall.

I mirrored her in bed. Her manuscript in one hand, her scent all over my tongue, I stroked myself to the thought of her wet fingers trembling on the keyboard as she wrote this filth, her hand shaking as the ink spread across the pages.

This was a secret to her. The dark fantasies she didn’t want to admit to anyone, and clearly ones that morons like J couldn’t comprehend.

The story was falling into place. The whys of what my sacred killing ground meant to her. She knew I could give her all this. She knew I craved the blood she wanted to spill.

I moaned softly, watching her stir in the darkness on her bed. I imagined how hot she was while she moaned my name into her pillow.

How fucking desperate she felt, not to have me. Never to be able to satisfy those dark, unyielding thoughts of what she knew I could do to her body.

“You needed this, didn’t you, Little Author?” I groaned, stroking my shaft faster, high off her pain of desperation.

“You needed my cock to dick you down and destroy your fucking cunt. You needed to scream and run from me, knowing I would catch you. Knowing I would slam you into that fountain’s walls, pin your legs down to the hard ground, and fucking erase the person you thought you were.”

My stomach tightened, and my voice grew louder.

“You needed to break around my cock like glass, stretch to fit me inside you. You were crying my name, begging me to come to you, come for you. You need me to satisfy that pathetic cunt you can’t stop touching with me on your mind.”

She was moaning in her sleep, my whimpers and groans curating her dreams to fit this fantasy.

“You fucking beg for it, Little Author. Beg to bleed for me. Beg to come for me. Beg to die by me.”

When I came, I aimed for the flowers.

White petals soaked in it. Now they were ruined, stained, and claimed.

She had left me a gift. On her windowsill was a button.

It was the one that had been ripped off during my kill at the fountain.

I hadn’t noticed until I got back to my apartment that I never fished it out of the drain.

By then, it was already crawling with cops.

I should have known they wouldn’t be smart enough to find it.

But she had.

My shadow.

I grabbed her sad, dull little pocket knife and smiled, slicing through the string connecting the buttons of my coat with intention. I pulled off the top one, a blue and faded one, and she would notice the color difference. A secret only she would understand.

I tucked it beneath the come-stained petals and pulled a page out of her notepad, scrawling a quick note to her. Written in her pen:

Blue for how deep you’ll bruise when my hands are on that pale skin of yours,

Little Author.

-R

I was smiling when I walked over to the windowsill and took the black button, draping the petals on the ledge, and stabbing the knife into the note on the soft white flesh of the flowers.