Page 15

Eight

Aidan

An hour ago.

Tonight I eliminated the eighth name on my list. I’m not sure how I’ve developed this irrational OCD need for order, but it feels important to me to go down the list and handle the names in the same order I wrote them down.

There’s something satisfying about picking up that red Sharpie and drawing a line through each name in a row.

It restores a sense of order to my life, so I can’t just have red lines haphazardly all over the place.

That would be chaos.

I always put six blanks in the revolver. But this time… well, there was a real bullet mixed in there. The fourth round ended up splattering blood and brains all over the wall of Preston Van Alen’s dining room. It was far more clean-up than I’d prepared for.

I don’t know how it happened. I think it scared me more than him, but he was dead so…

Like the rest of them, he was expecting one of those rounds to be a real bullet. I was the only one surprised by its presence. This is why you only point a gun at something you want to destroy, children. All guns are loaded, even when they’re not, and even when they’re blanks.

There are no blanks in this game.

Brian drilled that lesson hard into my head when he taught me how to kill and not get caught.

I had certainly wanted to destroy Van Alen, but not so soon.

He got off far too easy for what he did to my mother.

I’d planned to spend half the night torturing him, do my ritual, and sleep like a baby until noon tomorrow.

It’s after midnight when I arrive home, and I’m far more on edge than I normally am after a kill. Things feel uncompleted. I didn’t get to hurt him enough. He didn’t beg me for his death like they’re supposed to. I’m so fucking angry at him.

Also, I keep my live rounds and my blanks in very separate places.

How did a live round get mixed in? Was it a manufacturing error?

How would such an error even happen? Maybe it was a packaging error.

Do they make the blanks and the live rounds in the same factory?

Like places that warn you they made your food on the same equipment where peanuts are processed?

Or was I somehow more careless than I thought?

I am spiraling now. I need everything to be in order. I need everything to go the way it’s supposed to go. Every detail perfect. Nothing out of place.

I’m not sure right now if I’m thinking about killing the men on my list or marrying Maddie. Both projects have consumed me with a level of compulsive obsession I’ve never known before. Both have me strung tight like a violin string, desperate for everything to go exactly as I planned it.

I need things to say in order.

I go to the basement level, strip off and burn my clothes in the incinerator, and then get in the shower.

I only ever use this shower after a kill.

This time burning evidence and the shower feel physically necessary, more than just a ritual to quiet the what if hamster in my brain.

Some of Van Alen’s blood splattered on my clothes and face and into my hair.

I blinked in shock against the warm blood when it hit me.

I wasn’t prepared for this kill to be so bloody. I need other layers of planning for that. I scrub myself in the shower and my brain starts chanting:

Forgive me father for I have sinned… as I rehearse what I’ll say to Father Rossi in the confession booth. He knows who I am. He’s known me since I was a child. He knows the Stryker reputation. So even though I don’t tell him every gory detail… he knows.

This is all part of the ritual. All part of the order that keeps me from becoming completely unglued. But I feel the edges fraying. I feel angry, unsettled. This doesn’t feel like it normally feels. Why weren’t they all fucking blanks? Why?

“FUCK!”

I had a plan. I had a schedule. I had a routine. And now I’m home far earlier than I’d planned, scrubbing my skin raw in the shower, trying to put it all back together again into something resembling order.

When the water starts to run cold, I get out, dry off, then go into the locked chamber. I put on a new set of clothes and shoes and scan the room, looking for something out of place, but everything looks normal. Could someone else have gotten in here?

Anything can be hacked, but no one with those kinds of skills has access to my house. I have too many cameras, too many guards, too many people who have been loyal to this family since my grandfather was still alive.

I push on one of the stones in the far corner of the room, and another door to a smaller room opens. I boot up the computer and look at the footage from the hidden cameras in the secret room.

I know I’m crazy, okay? I understand this is crazy and irrational.

No one got into that room, and having a second secret room inside the first one and a hidden security set-up inside my second secret room to try to catch someone breaking into the first secret room that requires either an expert level hacker or my finger print and retinal scan…

I get it. I am crazy. Let’s just close the book on that and move on.

The cameras reveal nothing. Like I knew they wouldn’t. And while there is some small chance that someone has been downstairs and seen the locked room, there is exactly zero chance they know I have hidden cameras inside the secret room and a second hidden room.

Other people, normal people, don’t have insane thoughts like this.

I return to the main room and draw a red X through Van Alen’s photo and a line through his name on the list. But I still feel unsettled.

I called a cleaner on the way home to go back over the kill site with a fine-toothed comb to make sure I didn’t miss anything. When there’s a lot of blood I almost always call one of Brian’s cleaners.

It’s almost one in the morning by the time I get to my room.

I still feel so chaotic. I will not call Brian.

The last thing I need is a lecture about how I was sloppy.

I was not sloppy. I don’t know how a live round got into that gun, but I wasn’t sloppy.

And hearing Brian go on and on about it for an hour isn’t going to make me feel better.

Besides, if this is one of the nights he actually can sleep all the way through, and I wake him up, I might end up on his hit list.

I’d like to think Mina would stop him, but who’s to say? She’s almost as sociopathic as he is.

When I get to the master bedroom on the second floor, I lock the door and check the surveillance for Maddie’s house.

I don’t expect there to be anything interesting to see this late at night.

I’m about to check the earlier footage, but then I see movement—a small movement that isn’t just her shifting position in her sleep.

I enlarge the viewing screen. Is she doing what I think she’s doing? Holy shit. She is.

I pull out my cell phone and type a message to her. It’s about time.

I’m not sure at first if she’s going to look at her phone. She’s trying to ignore it. But finally she loses that fight.

When she sees my message she looks around the room as though she thinks I’m literally standing there in some corner shrouded in darkness. She doesn’t reply. She’s still trying to focus on her own pleasure, pleasure she was trying to sneak and take without me. I want to punish her for this.

I text her again. Pull the blanket back. Show me your pussy. I want to watch you come.

She looks more annoyed this time, yet still scandalized by my suggestion. But she’s thinking about it. I can see the war going on inside her.

Give me this one thing, Maddie. Just this one thing to put my night back in order.

My fingers fly over the keys as I rush to send her another message. It would please me, and that will make your life easier. I’ll see it all anyway soon enough. Show me and win some of my favor.

If she knew how crazy I was, she’d rush to comply.

She’d be too scared not to. Now I’m wondering if she’ll actually be safe with me.

What if I have another night like tonight and just snap ?

What if I hurt her beyond repair? What if I kill her?

What if I spent all this time planning and fixating and obsessing and moving all the chess pieces on my board to get her exactly where I wanted her only to end up losing control and killing her in the end?

Which thing would bring more order to my life? Maddie alive, or dead? That’s a question I need to keep far from my mind, but it’s too late, I already thought it. It’s already squirreling around in there.

She seems to be wavering, like she might actually do this, like she might actually obey my order. I send another message. Maddie, show me and come. Now.

I know I sound frantic and insane. If only she knew the actual thoughts I’m battling right now. If she only knew how close to losing my entire mind I am. And for what? One kill that went wrong?

Maybe Brian was right. Maybe I’m not cut out for this line of work.

Maybe I feel too many things. Maybe I get too frantic.

Maybe I need far too much order for this to ever end well, either with my kill list, or with Maddie.

To say nothing of the actual business. I’m lucky the organization practically runs without my involvement most of the time.

I make a few big shows, and flex my power every few months and most problems resolve themselves.

I’ve got underbosses who manage most of it.

I’m just the one who sits back and counts the money.

I’ve only had to directly kill three people for the actual business—so they knew I wasn’t just some stupid punk kid they could easily overthrow.

In the first year there was more danger to me from within my organization than from outside it.

Brian had warned me and prepared me for that.

As much as I hate to admit it, without him, I might not still be here because there were definitely those who wanted me deposed.

They’d called me The Little Prince right to my face.

Two minutes later, men who’d already passed my loyalty tests were removing their bodies and cleaning up the bits and pieces that my bullets had emptied from them.

They’d had every intention of changing the order of succession.

I’m still on high alert, but that situation has settled things for now.

It probably also doesn’t hurt that I sent their heads back on literal platters to others who might have similar ambitions.

I’m jerked harshly out of my spiraling thoughts as Maddie actually does it .

She pulls the blanket back. I’m surprised to find she’s completely naked under the blankets.

Her legs are spread wide, and her hips buck lewdly up against the toy.

Her moan makes all my blood rush to my dick.

I’ll watch this back later and take care of myself, but for now, I don’t want to miss a single second of this happening live.

It’s the first thing she’s ever done for me because I asked.

These cameras are top of the line, but night vision has its limitations.

I can see her but it’s not the same. It’s not full color high definition porn.

I want to tell her to turn the light on so I can really get a good view, but I’m afraid I’ll spook her and she’ll stop.

I’m already pushing her too far. I need her to finish this for me.

I hold my breath as her hips jerk upward one final violent time, as she rides her orgasm out. And then I send one final text for the night. Good Girl .

I close my laptop and lean back against the headboard of the bed. My dick is so hard it’s painful. I take another shower so I can take care of my raging hard on.

As the hot water hits my back for the second time tonight, I should be thinking about the live action amateur porn I just saw—the thing that made me this hard in the first place.

But I’m thinking instead about absolutely everything else as I feverishly jerk my cock.

The details of the wedding and how it all needs to be perfect.

Van Alen’s brains splattering against the wall.

Brandy’s mouth on my cock at The Black Gardens.

My unhinged chaos. Van Alen’s brains splattering against the wall.

Why the fuck was there a live round in that gun?

The horses running out of the barn. The body sinking to the bottom of that lake.

Van Alen’s brains splattering against the wall.

Maddie walking down the aisle toward me in the Dior gown.

Watching her walk to me and her unstoppable fate.

Finally, the sweet taste of victory, winning.

She’s in my world now.

I press one hand against the wall of the shower as I shudder against the pleasure surging through me.

I watch the evidence swirl down the drain.

I turn off the water, grab a towel, get out, and try to pretend that long train of insanely interspersed thoughts while jerking off is totally fucking normal.

I dry off, go back to my room, get in bed and just stare at the wall like the fucking nut job I know I am.

She’s not safe with you. She’ll never be safe with you.

I don’t know whose voice it is in my mind warning me that Maddie can never be safe with someone like me, but I push the thoughts down. She’s mine .