Page 16 of Little Author

I let him come home with me because I didn’t want to be alone.

Not because I liked him. Not because I was drunk enough to pretend I did. But because he smiled when I looked at him and didn’t flinch when I touched his arm.

He was tall, clean, and polite. He said his name was Theo. His hands were soft. Too soft, and he kept asking if I was okay.

That should’ve been my first red flag.

I got him upstairs without making eye contact. Pushed the door open with my hip. Dropped my coat on the floor like it meant something.

I needed something to overwrite the taste of that bar.

Jules.

Her.

That fucking laugh.

And most of all, the strange man at the jukebox that felt weirdly familiar.

I kissed Theo like I was trying to kill a sound in my head. He moaned softly and followed my lead, eager and clueless.

“Oh yeah, Mate, you don’t waste time. I love it.”

I pulled him to the bedroom, shoved him down on the bed, climbed on top of him, and hoped the heat would come.

But it didn’t.

He touched me like I was breakable.

His fingers ghosted down my stomach, careful, respectful, like he was waiting for permission I never gave. His lips pressed against my collarbone like an apology.

“You like that, baby?”

I rolled my hips against him harder, trying to stir something alive in my blood, ignoring his mindless words and begging the Gods for anything at all.

Nothing.

I was dry.

Hell, I was fucking bored.

I was still thinking about the way Jules hadn’t looked at me. About the blonde’s perfume, and that smirk that made my stomach turn.

I couldn’t shake the deep rumble of quiet laughter from the shadowed American man at the jukebox.

I was still thinking about him .

About the weight in my coat pocket. My button, the note, and the silence.

“You’re so beautiful,” Theo whispered as he kissed my throat.

I hated it. I hated how soft his voice was. I hated the way he wanted to make it seem that way.

I grabbed his wrist and guided it lower.

“Don’t talk,” I muttered.

He nodded, tried to be bold, slid his hand between my legs, but it was too damn gentle. Too smooth. I wanted fingers that didn’t ask. That didn’t tremble like they’d never done it before.

I wanted to be taken, not handled like glass.

And I knew it the moment he slipped inside me…

This wasn’t going to work. His rhythm was slow, careful. He kept looking at me, as if I were going to praise him afterward.

I don’t have enough mommy issues for this.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture something else.

Someone else. That voice. The one who asked me what I would change.

He was so different. Shadowed and quiet.

Yet everything about him screamed louder than every obnoxious, annoying drunk in the bar.

I tried to focus on the one who pinned my knife into my window and replaced my button like a claim.

Roux.

Theo moaned again. “You okay?”

I didn’t answer.

And then…

A light flooded the room.

The TV, still on from earlier, blinked alive with a sharp burst of static and the low hum of a breaking news alert.

I opened my eyes, jostled by the sudden change in the atmosphere. It was early morning, and I was too drunk for this.

Theo froze mid-thrust, glancing toward the screen.

What I saw pulled the air from my lungs.

The news banner read:

brEAKING NEWS: DOUBLE HOMICIDE

AT DOWNTOWN BAR

I pushed Theo off me without thinking and scrambled upright, sweat slick on my back, heart racing as I scanned the live news report.

On the screen was the bar. The same bar.

Police tape. Flashing lights. Shaky phone footage of an idiot teen caught at a very wrong time.

My eyes were glued to the screen. Shocked that there was another murder so soon after the girl at the fountain.

This couldn’t be Roux.

He wouldn’t be so hasty with piling up bodies like this.

Would he?

And it said two people, not just one single woman.

I kept watching, ignoring Theo’s gasps and, “Oh fuck. What the hell?”

Then, a blurred, but still visible, image behind the blabbering news reporter appeared on the screen. The anchor’s voice cut in sharply and was sterile.

“Reporting a brutal scene inside the bar. Two victims identified as local resident Jules Weller and his wife Kelli?—”

My ears rang.

Theo sat up, panting. “What the fuck?”

“We have exclusive footage of the crime scene. Beware, what we are about to show you is not for the faint of heart.”

The footage flickered. The blur dissolved.

The bodies were naked, stacked on top of each other…

“No. Fucking. Way.”

Jules was face down, eyes wide open, and the blonde on top of him looked…strange. The paramedics looked like they were struggling to pull them apart.

I frowned and ran to my phone, opening the app to listen to the local bobbies’ radios.

“Unsub at large still. Bodies going to the morgue. They were glued together. The woman didn’t have her tongue. Literally, glued together. We need crime scene cleaners here ASAP. It’s a goddamn blood bath in here. This was personal. Over.”

The woman’s tongue was missing…

Her mouth hung open like a silent scream in the footage, the news still showing the gruesome gaping hole in her mouth. Something had been written in blood across her chest. It was blurred too badly to read.

The camera crews kept getting yelled at by paramedics, but there it was. Jules’s body was truly glued to hers. His palms melted into her thighs, glued, nearly fused in some obscene puppet show of intimacy.

It was…like I said.

They were still together—the leech and her puppet.

Still touching.

Even in death.

The poetic death I spoke aloud.

To him.

Theo made a choked sound. “What kind of sick?—”

I didn’t hear the rest because just under the horror, just under the gore of ripped, peeling skin, I saw it.

It wasn’t blood smeared on the blonde’s chest. It was rose petals. And there was a small object stuck into her skin.

Blue.

The same shade as mine.

I gasped, my eyes wide as I practically rolled off the bed to bolt for my jacket that was still lying on the floor.

The weight pressed against my heart like a brand.

I involuntarily curled my fingers inside the pocket, searching for the replica of what was shown on the screen.

Theo was saying something, calling my name.

But I was already falling backwards into the silence.

It wasn’t there. My button. It was gone.

It was him .

He heard my story, listened to each word…and replicated it down to the line.

Then he marked it with a signature.

Our signature.

He had watched me in the bar.

Watched me write the demise of those who fucked me over.

Made my words a reality.

Crossed the line between fiction and reality.

I should be terrified, repulsed, calling the coppers to track him down and give them my fucked up button story.

But instead.

I smiled.