Page 7 of Little Author

I woke before the sun.

It was a habit. Prison taught you how to exist in the quiet, before the guards started barking, before the screaming in Cellblock B became white noise. I kept it even now. Didn’t matter if I was free or not. Freedom was just a wider cage with a new warden.

I showered in cold water, shaved with a knife I’d filed down, and dressed in silence.

Wearing a black shirt, a black coat, and boots heavy enough to remind me of their purpose helped me fade into something that resembled normal. Nothing flashy. I didn’t need to be seen…I never had.

Today was supposed to be transactional.

There were names on a page, and those names had mouths that once whispered too loudly. Lawyers and old guards were coming. Even a cousin, I think, offered me up to the wolves because she couldn’t stomach what she knew.

They all thought I’d die behind bars, but they never planned for erased evidence. They never imagined I’d walk out with clean papers and old habits.

I took the subway, and no one looked at me twice.

I liked that…the anonymity of normal. The smell of oil and tired skin fell through the space, and so many people were buried in their screens.

Meaning, there was no one looking up or seeing me.

Good.

My first stop was to pick up a gun left behind a loose brick in an underpass on the A13. I knew it would be there. I left it there eleven years ago. I’d kept the city in my memory like a devout man keeps his verses tucked between teeth and tongue.

The gun was clean. Still oiled, wrapped in the same cloth I left it in.

The second stop was a name scratched into the back of a takeout menu: a man named Rulo.

A snitch who thought he did good by turning me into the Feds, hand in hand with my fucking cousin.

He thought the world would clap for him and his whore.

My cousin was rotting away, leaving zero reason for Rulo to fear anything would catch up to his lying ass.

He wasn’t home.

He’d left town. Probably caught wind that the bad dog was off the leash again.

It didn’t matter.

I wasn’t in a hurry. I would take my time to skin the rat. I’d make him sing like the canary he was, and his wife, Kayla, was the perfect answer.

I left his wife’s head on a dinner plate so he would know I had stopped by to say ‘Hey.’ It was a far cry from the usual delicate approach to a kill, but this was personal for good old Rulo.

It was when I was walking past the corner of the old bookstore, with its chipped green paint and a cracked windowpane shaped like a tear, that I saw it.

My name.

Not my name. Not officially.

But close enough to freeze me mid-step.

It was not like Roux Patel was a common name for babies then or now. My cracked-out mother probably read it wrong off a cigarette pack and saddled me with it then and there.

A book was in the window, six copies, all with blood-red covers. The title was curling like a blade across the center: “The Song of Rue.”

I didn’t move for several seconds. I just stood there, staring through the glass as if it were a mirror, and I saw my ghost for the first time. Even the cheesy model on the front cover resembled my build, with my shaved platinum blonde hair and my eyes.

I stepped inside.

The bell above the door jingled like a child’s laugh.

Fucking annoying.

The clerk was a man with greasy hair and a vape pen. He didn’t look up, just mumbled something that might’ve been ‘welcome,’ and kept scrolling on his phone.

Ah, I may have been behind bars for years, but it was obvious the civilians were true slaves to their own devices.

“We’re outta new shit. Nothing up here.”

I shrugged, and he stopped talking.

Good. I didn’t need conversation. I walked to the display and picked up the top book. The book called to me, the pages knew me. They cracked open easily. Familiar and hungry.

And then I read.

And reading stopped being the word for it.

It wasn’t just prose. It wasn’t just a story. It was a confession, a seduction. A fucking mirror pressed against my skull.

My life. My existence.

Shit that hadn’t hit the media. Dark secrets the cops got wrong.

She wrote…me.

Not my name. Not even my crimes, not exactly, but my mind.

She knew how I thought, how I waited, and how I liked to linger over their beautiful necks and watch their pulse go still. She knew the weight of all the bodies that had gone slack under me. The difference between a scream and a sob. She knew I loved to hear them sing.

She wrote me like she wanted me.

Page thirty-eight, a scene written of a kill behind the shopping center…it mirrored my third victim.

Page ninety-two, the whisper into the ear while my fingers were sinking deep into her cunt was exactly what I said to the girl with the silver nose ring, right before the light left her eyes.

She shouldn’t know this.

No one should, but she did.

I read until my pulse slowed until I could feel my cock thickening against my zipper, not from lust, not exactly, but from recognition.

She saw me.

She sees me.

I flipped to the back cover.

No photo, of fucking course.

Just a name.

Elodie Tullie…

Pretty, pretentious, and soft on the tongue.

I rolled it through my mouth like a prayer.

When I finally got my hands on a computer, I found her website, which was sloppy and wide open. There was also a contact form, a blog, even a goddamn Spotify playlist titled “Writing Moods: Dark Lovers and Heavy Breaths.” I almost laughed.

But the best part?

A tiny page was buried in the archive. Not linked. Not advertised. Just a secret for me to find. “Local authors right in our neck of the woods!”

Under a multitude of unfamiliar names, I saw a familiar one. “Elodie Tullie - author of the Rue Songs series.”

“Oh, Little Author.” I smiled.

You’re right in my playground? I am going to find you. I will figure out how you know all this shit about me, and then I’ll finish your fucking story.

I slipped the book into my coat pocket. I didn’t pay.

I’d already paid the price.

And now…it was her turn.