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??The Watcher in the Dark

Dorian

They always looked so confident when they left the courtroom.

As if a verdict made them clean again. As if I didn’t walk them out only to bleed them dry in the end.

Like lambs, smiling at the butcher… Unaware the hands that shook theirs would be the last to ever touch them.

Justice wasn’t blind.

She just waited until the lights went out.

Richard Nance - Human trafficker.

Richard Nance thought the worst was over when the jury came back not guilty. Thought the courtroom absolved him.

It didn’t. It damned him.

Because the moment the gavel fell, he became mine.

I let him bask in his freedom. Watched him celebrate in velvet lounges, drink champagne like it didn’t taste like rot in his throat.

I followed him.

For weeks.

His pattern was a clockwork lullaby, gym, club, penthouse. Girls. Always younger. Always desperate. Always broken afterward.

He liked them pliable. Liked the ones who couldn’t scream anymore.

They found a few, strangled, bitten, dumped in motel bathtubs with hair shaved clean and wrists sliced neat.

But not all.

Some were never found. Just whispers of trauma and a name… Richard.

I tailed him in shadow. A ghost behind his eyes. I hacked his cameras, looped his alarms, sat outside his building in a car that didn’t exist.

Then I slipped inside his life.

Piece by piece.

The night I took him, he was drunk. Laughing. Hands all over a girl with a bruise the shape of his watchband.

I watched him stumble through the back of the club, pants undone, predator’s smile stitched to his face.

That’s when I took him.

He woke hanging upside down in my kill room, no sound but the buzz of flickering lights and the groan of pipes behind walls thick with mildew and regret.

Naked. Shackled by the ankles.

Bleeding already from the hooks I’d buried through his tendons.

I didn’t use blades.

Not for him.

I used pliers.

One by one, I crushed his fingers like overripe fruit. The knuckles shattered like porcelain.

He howled.

I pulled teeth next, bare hands, no anesthetic, just purpose. His molars clattered to the floor like cheap beads.

Tendons snapped like violin strings as I dislocated both shoulders and let his body dangle wrong.

By the time I reached his knees, he was sobbing.

“God, I’m sorry,” he wept. “I didn’t want to kill them.”

I leaned close, breath cold and steady against his ear. “You’re not talking to God, Richard. He left this room long before you walked in.”

I let the shadows in then.

Watched as they peeled his skin in strips, feeding off the scent of guilt soaked into his marrow.

He died begging.

I cut him down after the last pulse. Wrapped his body like he wrapped his victims, plastic, duct tape, no name. Left him in a dumpster behind one of his favorite haunts, where he used to hunt the broken.

But I wasn’t done.

Lying near his body was my signature. A single black obsidian scale, sharp as judgment.

The cops found him two days later.

Folded. Packaged. Anonymous.

Like the girls he used.

Justice, signed, sealed, and delivered.

Madeline Grey – Drowned her infant.

They called her Saint Meredith.

Smiled at the way she rocked the bassinets. But I read the reports. The tiny bodies coded as SIDS. The ventilation tubes she ‘accidentally’ dislodged. The cardiac meds ‘miscalculated’ by decimal points.

Seven dead infants. All ruled natural.

All buried before the first suspicion had breath.

Her baby was just the one who made the news.

I got her off the hook.

Murder of an infant, her own.

They called it postpartum psychosis. Temporary insanity. She played it well. Tears like clockwork. Trauma rehearsed down to the last breath.

The courtroom ate it up like gospel.

I gave them the story they wanted, a mother undone by hormones and tragedy, not a murderer.

And they believed me.

She walked free. Clutching a rosary. Wearing white. Fucking white. Smiling at strangers. Volunteering at bake sales. Acting like she didn’t bathe in infant blood.

I watched.

For seven days.

Through windows. From rooftops. Shadow to shadow.

I memorized her routines, her heartbeat, the way she locked the front door twice out of habit but never thought to check the back.

When I finally entered her house, it didn’t feel like breaking in. It felt like coming home.

She died in the same tub she drowned her baby in.

I zip-tied her wrists behind her back. Duct-taped her mouth. Dragged her into that pristine bathroom, white marble, orchid soap, towels folded like hotel sins.

Her eyes found me in the mirror as I turned on the faucet. Ice water filled porcelain.

She thrashed.

I watched.

“You smiled at their deaths,” I whispered. “Each one. Tiny lungs, barely full of air. You suffocate them with your silence.”

She screamed behind the tape. I shoved her under.

One minute. Her legs kicked, flailing like a dying fish. Two minutes. Her skin turned red, then purple. Three. Her gaze snapped to mine, begging. Four. Her heartbeat slowed.

Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Stillness.

Justice, measured by time. Just like her crimes.

I let her float. A bloated corpse in her sanctified tub.

But the story wasn’t finished.

I slipped a black obsidian scale from my pocket. Sharp. Gleaming. Eternal. I pressed it to her sternum. Let it rest like a seal.

The shadows curled around the walls, humming with satisfaction.

Another soul accounted for. Another verdict corrected.

They never suspected me. Why would they? I was her savior.

Until I became her sentence.

Later, I walked the rooftops like a priest over a graveyard, watching the city rot below me.

That’s when I spotted him.

Kreed.

Acquitted of all charges for murdering several men and women with knowledge about the Veil and opening the Gate.

He was the man I’d been hunting since he slipped through my fingers. Too slow. Too erratic.

A shot rang out and I followed its destination, seeing the moment it burst through some poor, unfortunate soul.

Kreed high tailed it out of there, but me… I stayed behind to watch the scene unfold.

A woman was there.

She’s the kind of woman who turned heads without even trying, beauty wrapped in warmth and fire. Her skin was a rich, radiant brown, smooth as melted brown sugar under sunlight, glowing with a natural sheen that made it impossible not to stare.

Her hair was long, inky black, cascading down her back in waves that danced with every step, stopping just above the curve of her plump, perfect ass.

Her eyes, deep brown, soulful, and soft, held secrets and storms all at once.

Framed by thick lashes, they’re the kind of eyes that saw through bullshit and still found beauty in the wreckage.

Her lips were full and heart-shaped, made for both wicked grins and whispered confessions, lips you could drown in.

Thick in all the right places. She was bold. She was magic. She was unforgettable. Scared. Shocked. Too stunned to move a muscle until she noticed the person she was just talking to was no longer alive.

She screamed before she ran.

Sped off into the night.

Before I registered what was happening, I heard my own feet slap against the wet pavement. She’s fast, but I was faster and had no trouble keeping up.

Moments later, we came upon a dark and drab apartment complex, if it could even be called that.

She disappeared inside. I didn’t follow this time. I just stood there and inhaled her scent. Lilac and sun. She smelled like a ray of life that I’ve been missing out on. Covered in blood that wasn’t hers.

Who the hell was she?

A witness?

A hunter?

Or something else entirely?

I returned to the shadows without a name. Without a face. Only the image of her, blood-streaked, wild-eyed, powerful.

Something told me I’d have to look into her.