Page 17 of Little Author

I shouldn’t have gone back.

But the moment the news cut to commercial, I was already pulling my clothes on over my still-slick skin.

Theo was still in my bed, asking questions I didn’t answer.

His voice barely reached me. My head was full of static, full of red, full of that blue button digging into the woman’s skin like a blade.

I left the TV on when I slammed the door.

The streets were bathed in midnight. No sirens anymore. No press vans. Just old blood in the cracks of the concrete, already going dark in the heat.

I stared at the yellow tape for a second. It flapped in the wind like cheap crime scene confetti.

Then I ducked under it.

The door creaked open as if it knew me, but really, it was the broken lock. The entrance he left just for me.

The bar was quiet. Hollow.

I stepped inside and felt it immediately, that presence—the aftertaste of something violent. The silence didn’t feel empty. It felt like it was watching me.

I could smell blood. Sex. Fear. Glue.

And under it all, him.

My boots stuck slightly to the floor. Sticky trails mapped out the crime, faint outlines of bodies, drying handprints smeared on the bar like someone had tried to crawl away.

I didn’t flinch.

Because I knew what I was looking for.

The table in the back. The one we sat at.

The one where Jules had laughed while that blonde parasite curled her fingers around his wrist, like she owned him.

Now the table was stained red.

Chairs overturned. Glass shattered.

And on the surface, scrawled in what had to be blood, were the exact words I’d written in my journal days ago:

“Red. Like the rage you felt.”

I trembled.

I remembered the anger. I remembered how it poured out of me the moment I got home that afternoon. How drunk and stupid I had been to go back out and grab a man like Theo to warm me in the night so I wasn’t alone.

My shame turned into fantasy, and rage spun into punishment. I said those words to purge them from my mind to revel in the fiction of justice…

But he had made it real.

I pressed my hand to the sticky wood, my breath catching.

“Is it how you imagined it, Little Author?”

The voice came from the dark.

Smooth. Sharp. Close.

I didn’t scream because I knew who it was.

Roux stepped out from behind the bar like he’d been there the whole time.

It was him. The man from the jukebox. The one who screamed so loud yet didn’t speak at all.

He wasn’t just familiar. He was him. The real him.

Not some warped media version, or blurry image from glass years ago, or a crack in the door I peeked through. This was the Roux Patel…The Maestro.

He was covered in the crime, dried blood on his shirt, smeared down his arms, the color turned to rust red under the flickering light of the broken bar lights. He wore it like a trophy. His buzzed platinum blonde hair was slick with the color.

His icy eyes locked on mine like a lion sizing up something that had already stopped running, that knew it couldn’t truly get away from the predator.

And maybe that person didn’t truly want to?

“Did I get it right, Elodie? That’s why you came, isn’t it?

” he walked slowly, deliberately, until we were nearly chest to chest. “You needed to recreate the exact moment. Feel the blood on your own skin to understand their screams. You want to feel it like it was your hands. You want to be seen. You want me to see you.”

I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t want to. My body ached in places I hadn’t known it could.

I wanted this.

He was right.

I needed this.

“I didn’t mean?—”

“You did. You can lie to your little blood thirsty fans and call it fiction, but don’t lie to me.

You wanted a dark knight to save you from these love-sick morons.

You spoke those words out loud, knowing I would hear you.

Knowing I would see the need in your eyes.

Knowing I would act. This is your story. I only brought it to life.”

His hand touched my cheek, and I shivered.

His thumb was stained red.

He dragged it across my lower lip.

I could taste the iron.

I could taste them.

I moaned.

It shamed me.

It freed me.

“You knew I’d do it,” he whispered, voice darker now, trembling with restraint. “You begged for it, in your head. In the way you let them humiliate you with a smile. I asked you what you would write. When you watched her touch him. Your words. Your story.”

I let out a shaky breath. My thighs clenched. He spread his arms wide and smirked. “Here it is, Little Author. So tell me.”

“Tell you what?” I whispered, barely able to recognize my own voice.

“Tell me,” he murmured against the skin of my shoulder, exposed by my nightgown falling slowly down with his breath. “Tell me what happens next.”

What happens next?

I should secretly call the police, video the damning evidence still on his body, bask in the victory of breaking him…but my hands wouldn’t move. My eyes wouldn’t leave the reflection of the pools of blood on the table and barstools.

His mouth was caressing my skin, and he was circling me, letting those wicked lips drag along my feverish flesh.

I couldn’t focus.

“What happens next, Elodie?” He repeated, his breath whispered, pants in my ears.

God, he was dangerous, and it was no wonder women didn’t struggle when he…killed them.

What the fuck was I doing?

“You know what I think?” he said, grazing his lips over my own.

I didn’t dare even breathe. “I think you grip my shirt and pull me in. I think you jerk it open so hard the buttons fly off in all different directions. I think you gasp in my mouth, and my hands slip down your legs to see you’re not wearing any panties. ”

I did gasp.

He was…

Reciting my stories. Line by line, he was whispering the sex scenes I wrote. Page after page of depravity and possession.

“I think you stop telling yourself the lies that you don’t want this and finally feel me destroy your body.”

I moaned, his words more true than any written words in my novels. He saw me. Not the fiction I wrote. The truth I was too scared to speak.

I kissed him, and he opened to me. Tongues clashing and his lips claiming mine.

Blood. Teeth. Heat.

It wasn’t a kiss. It was ownership. It was desecration. All the depravity and desperation I had ever written on paper.

He pushed me back onto the table, the one where he ended their lives. The one still slick with their blood. The one where Jules had smiled like I was a joke, while letting that woman run her hands through his hair.

Now it was my altar.

Roux tore my nightgown open, my breasts bouncing free. Buttons popped, fabric ripped. Like my novel, but flipped. The dominance I wrote as myself was shown by him. Like he knew I needed it. Like he could feel I was desperate to be dominated.

He yanked the nightgown up, fingers scraped over my thighs and hips, smearing whatever was still fresh. The scent of copper filled my nose, my mouth, my lungs. I choked on it, whimpered at the delicious pain and bite of his grip on my thighs, before his rough, tattooed hands were in my hair.

I broke the kiss to look at him, finally able to see all of him. His breathing ragged, his body a fucking sculpture that would make gym ads cry. He was beautiful. More than any fucking glass image, or poorly doctored media videos. He was real and here.

His cock was insanely beautiful, but something caught the glint of the light, and I gasped.

Roux laughed every bit like the monster he was when he slammed me down to my knees, and I could see the line of piercings along his shaft.

“What’s the matter, baby? The media didn’t tell you about all my jewelry?”

Damn him. He was even more beautiful than I imagined. I was shocked to see this, but admittedly, I understood why the media wouldn’t have listed his knob jewelry.

“Open up. Taste what you’ve dreamed about for so long.”

I was hesitant, but he pushed my head back, angled my throat, anchoring me by my hair, and slammed his dick and every single piercing into my throat.

He tasted like pure metal, and I wondered how much of that was the jewelry or…blood.

I choked on him more than any man I had ever been with in my life. I couldn’t breathe. He slammed again and again down my windpipe. His face was lit by the early rising sun outside the windows, and every second, I could see the monster I denied.

“F…fuck—” I moaned around his cock, accepting the brutality I craved from him.

“That’s right. Suck me like your life depends on it. Because it just may, Elodie. There are so many ways I can end your little soul right now. Don’t stop. Keep me distracted.”

My eyes widened, but I kept sucking him down my throat, and spit was everywhere. Rolling down my mouth, slathered on my chest and face. Stuck in my hair. I didn’t wear makeup, but if I had, I’d look like a raccoon with how badly tears streamed down my cheeks.

He pulled my hair, yanking my head back and looking at my face.

“Fuuuuck. You look like an angel when you cry. Your pain makes me so fucking hard. I can’t take it. Your innocence, your fear. I am going to break you before I can even play for real.”

“I don’t want this, Roux,” I whispered.

“Good,” he growled, yanking me up, pushing my legs open, shoving me hard onto the blood-soaked table.

He didn’t ease in. There was nothing gentle about this predator.

He split me open on the blood-slick wood, his teeth at my throat, his hands on my hips like he was trying to carve me into something permanent.

I cried out. Not from pain. Not only from the burn. It was so much god damned pleasure.

I felt alive.

This was what I’d been circling. This was the end of pretending I was clean. I wasn’t.

I was his.

I was just like him.

We moved like animals. No rhythm. Just need. Just teeth and nails and blood. His hands on my hips left imprints. His teeth left bites on my skin. My own blood formed from the scrape of the wood against my exposed skin. The smell of iron and sex was strong in our noses.

“You are a killer. This is wrong.” I said between pants.

“Exonerated. Unproved,” he said with a laugh that made his thrusts harder. “But something tells me you know better than them, don’t you?”

I gasped, but he flipped me over, my body thrown against the floor where the bodies had been just hours before. The crusted blood was now wet with sweat. It rolled down his skin like sin come to life.

“I…I…I—don’t know what you mean,” I said, watching his devilish smile grow.

“No?” It was too sweet. Showing the true master behind the beauty.

“How did you know about Mariah? You wrote every piece of my intricate puzzle, Little Author. Every detail before it even happened, according to your little time stamps. So how?”

I stiffened, and the pleasure became brittle, stiff. The pain amped up, and I grimaced.

“I am an author. I just make up stuff and hope it fits.”

I was breathless but now for a new reason.

“Really? You knew who Mariah was, and where I would kill her. How did you guess that?”

He felt too big, too heavy, too suffocating.

“I-I-I just remembered your first cases. I knew she was connected and figured she was a loose end.”

Roux stopped, his body hovering over me like a weight that could smash into me and kill me without a thought.

His eyes scanned my body, and I swallowed, self-consciously feeling every scar and freckle on my body.

“You aren’t lying, are you?”

He asked the question, but it was more like a statement he said to himself, rather than to me.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “No.”

“How do you know my mind so well?”

He looked high off this conversation. Wild, exhilarated by my words.

“I think…we are alike…I-I think our minds are the same. We think alike.” I admitted.

His eyes lit up, and he drove harder into me, stealing my breath and making me scream from the sudden pleasure and pain that chased around my soul, like a drain ready to empty, but fighting to stay on the edge.

He came with a growl against my throat, panting into my skin like he was breathing for the first time.

I followed with a sob.

Not because it hurt anymore, because it didn’t.

It felt too good. Too real.

And for the first time in all this.

I was scared of what that meant.

Scared that my words to him were a truth I didn’t want to admit to anyone, even myself.

“If we think alike, Little Author.” He said, his words barely more than a whimpered groan. He was still hard, flexing inside my pussy, soaking in our orgasms. “Then tell me what I’m thinking now.”

I swallowed hard and smelled the air for the first time.

Tasted the tang of metal in my mouth. Felt the stickiness between my thighs.

I was in my own crime. This was my fault.

“You’re…” I said, slowly letting the reality sink in deeper than the blood in the fabric of my half on clothing. “Debating whether to kill me now…or keep me to play with.”