Page 18 of Little Author

I t was both amazing and dangerous that she could see so clearly into my mind. How linked and connected we truly were. A woman who weaponized her pen bled into ink where I bled for no one. I bathed in the blood of others. I should kill her.

I should end her little story and be done with this chapter in my life. I was free. I couldn’t be so careless of diverting from my rituals or killing so close together. The cops were idiots, but even idiots could catch on to something so blatantly stupid.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand, though,” Elodie said suddenly, and I blinked down at her. She looked perfect. Covered in the blood of my kills, wide light brown eyes, pouty, frightened lips, and her hair so frayed from the hard fucking she craved every night.

“Something stumped you? That’s rare. What don’t you understand? Maybe I will humor you.”

She looked exasperated, but she spoke anyway. This must truly be eating at her.

“How did you do it? How did you manage to get everything about your kills erased? Did you bribe someone? Threaten them? Sleep with someone from the prison to erase your files?”

I smiled widely. There was no reason to lie to her. I wanted to watch her eyes when she put this together.

“None of those,” I said simply.

She waited for a moment and then huffed. “Well? How then?”

I shrugged. “I put it in the hands of the public.”

Now she looked confused and angry. “What does that mean?”

“Before I was caught. Before my bumbling cousin snitched on me to the feds, I made my own little Trojan horse. I knew I was going down, but I only needed time. Time would set me free.”

The gears in her head turned, and I smiled wider. She looked even more beautiful now than when she was panting on the blood-covered ground moments ago.

“A Trojan horse?”

I nodded. “A virus. One that would slowly and quietly erase me from their system. It was designed to replace little by little. Change the truth into fiction. Every time someone watched a news article, searched my name, or watched crime scene footage of my kills.

“Whenever my name was mentioned in the vast online world, another truth from my files was replaced. All those sites full of bad crime junkies, trying to figure out the world’s villains?

They were rewriting my files. Changing them to become inadmissible hearsay bullshit that couldn’t hold me.

Piece by painstakingly slow piece. The truth was replaced with the world’s theories. ”

Her mouth opened, and god, I wanted to lick every inch of those lips again, craved her voice in my ears.

I wanted her to sing for me again.

“You,” I continued. “You were the only one to get it right. But those words. That truth never reached the public. You didn’t use my name. You skirted the truth with a prettier lie. You did it on purpose. You held my truth like your own secret, Little Author.”

Her mouth opened wider, her eyes glassy, all the pieces she missed finally falling into place.

“I…I wrote about you for years. I followed your life and changed it for my stories. I put enough truth inside the pages that it felt real, but…I changed it all from what I knew was the truth, except for my journals.”

“My name alone didn’t matter. The code worked off of other identifiers, what I looked like, my victims, and locations, which you romanticized and had the masses falling in love and bouncing their little brains out to my truth.

You helped rewrite all the theories…my crimes.

You created reasonable doubt and exhumed evidence they thought was solid. ”

I waited for her to say it. The reality that was tangible between us that we both couldn’t deny now.

She didn’t conspire to trap me again. She wasn’t a part of the coup to bring me down.

“I…freed you.”

I couldn’t hold back my grin. My face was cracking from my joy. The truth so beautifully spread open. Spoken in whispered shock by this beautiful woman.

She was my perfect mark. Every detail I ever wanted for my chorus line.

She. Was. Mine.

My rescuer, but also my captor.

She knew too much.

She was dangerous.

So why can’t I wrap my hands around her throat and end this?

“What will you do with your freedom, Roux? If you keep killing, you’ll be caught again eventually. You have to know that.”

I narrowed my eyes. That felt like a threat, but her soft brown eyes showed it was just a truth we both knew.

“Yeah. Perhaps. But I am what I am, Little Author. A tiger can’t change his stripes. He’s born that way. Bred to hunt and survive around those who know what the stripes represent.”

“They’ll kill you.”

I tilted my head. She sounded…concerned.

“My death bothers you? Why? No one to fantasize your little stories for anymore?”

The angry blush coating her skin was fucking delicious, and I got harder.

“No.” She harrumphed. “I will decide the ending of my story no matter what.”

“Hmm,” I said, standing above her pitiful form, and looking down at her body as she kneeled on the ground below me.

“And how exactly do you intend to do that if someone else takes your pen?”

Her eyes were hard—so much bold fear, but strength in their depth.

“Changing the fucking narrative.”

I was too focused on her eyes, where defiance and resilience resided. I didn’t see it, not until the entire shelf of alcohol was pulled down onto me as she rolled away.

The bottles fell, busted, and the glass cracked as I tried to hold them up.

She ran, her body disappearing out of the doors of the bar, a damn smile on her face as she watched for one final second. Watched the glass cut into my skin.

Watched me bleed for her.