Page 10 of The Perfect Illusion (Jessie Hunt #39)

Dallas Henry showed up to the coffee shop just off campus ten minutes early.

He knew should have been nervous but what he felt was closer to anticipation.

This was his first get-together with Hannah Dorsey since their big conversation. That was when he’d suggested that they hold off on any social interaction outside class until she was sure that’s what she really wanted.

They had, of course, chatted on the way out of class several times.

He'd even walked her to her next class on a couple of occasions.

But that was about it. He didn't want to push for fear that it would alienate her.

Despite her casual confidence, it was clear that Hannah was skittish around guys she didn't know that well.

And as Dallas adjusted the napkins on the table where he waited for Hannah, he silently wondered who could blame her? Based on the research he’d done, she been through more in her nineteen years than most people deal with in ten lifetimes.

Her father, a notorious serial killer known as the Ozarks Executioner, drugged and killed her mother when she was a baby.

He returned years later to torture her and murder her adoptive parents.

If not for the famous profiler Jessie Hunt, the man would have killed her too.

Amazingly, that serial killer was Hunt’s father as well, making them half-sisters.

After the incident, Jessie had formally adopted Hannah.

That horrific event would have been enough for most people to deal with, but based on what Dallas has gleaned, not long after that, another serial killer—one who idolized The Ozarks Executioner—kidnapped Hannah and tried to brainwash her into turning against Jessie and killing her.

There was more, including Jessie’s ex-husband attempting to kill both women, as well as Jessie’s fiancé.

Compared to all that, the incident in which a fellow student tried to assault Hannah in a university library seemed comparatively tame.

If Dallas had gone through even a fraction of what Hannah had, he suspected he’d be institutionalized right now.

He’d had his fair share of tragedy, including the death of his father in a car crash six years ago.

But his suffering couldn’t hold a candle to hers.

And if things went as planned, that suffering would continue soon.

"Salted caramel latte for Dallas," the barista called out and he got up to grab it. He'd already been given his drip coffee, but he'd asked Hannah a week ago what her favorite coffee drink was. Now, he hoped to surprise her by having it waiting when she arrived.

It was all part of his plan to make her as comfortable with him as possible, no matter how many baby steps it took. All her emotional callouses served to protect her. And he needed to scrape them away before he could truly put his plan into action.

The things he intended to do to her would be more effective—and more painful—if the actual physical horrors were accompanied by a sense of betrayal at the hands of someone she’d grown to trust. So it was his job to win that trust.

He knew that he'd already made it part of the way there, or she wouldn't be meeting with him at all, much less alone and off-campus.

That meant he'd scrubbed his personal history effectively.

He knew that Hannah was adept at searching the web in ways the average person couldn't. So there couldn't be any record of his dark web activity, especially his participation in several men's rights groups that engaged in conversations some might consider "outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. "

He didn’t however scrub evidence of his troubled early teen years, the stretch soon after he learned that his father had actually committed suicide in a “car accident” after his mother left him for her boss.

He needed some dirt on him. Looking too goody-two-shoes would be suspicious to Hannah.

But his official record could actually work to his advantage.

The image he presented was of a young man, upset over his father’s death, who got into some fights at school leading to detentions and even a brief drug-related suspension.

But after a rough freshman year of high school, he “turned it around” in the middle of his sophomore year, finding the strength to move forward.

At least that’s how it looked to an outsider. Of course what really happened was that he decided he could do more for the cause from the inside than the outside. So he pretended to forgive his whore mother, who had destroyed their family and ultimately his father’s life.

His dad was a decent man undone by a bitch who put her own needs first, no matter who it hurt.

She was what was wrong with women today.

But because she had birthed him, Dallas couldn’t quite bring himself to make her pay.

Other females would take her place on his firing line.

Until justice was done, he’d shoved down those feelings around her and even play-acted at getting along with her beta husband.

He improved his grades and joined clubs far afield from his real interests.

No ROTC or football for him. Instead, he played mixed doubles for the tennis team.

He helped establish the Allies Club, which provided pre-approved high school students—always one guy and one girl—to walk or drive teenage girls home if they felt uncomfortable in a situation.

It made him a little sick inside to actively work against the interests of guys his age who might just want a little action.

But he knew that his cover was more important in the long run.

So he continued on the respectable path.

His grades for the last two and a half years of high school were really good, but because of how he tanked the first year and a half, he ended up at community college in his hometown of Bakersfield.

He hoped that if he excelled there, he could transfer to somewhere with cachet.

He would use the top-tier school as a springboard to gain entry to the levers of power, where he could make a real difference and give men the rightful due they'd been denied for generations.

But that was a distant amorphous goal. He found a more concrete one in the fall of last year. That was when he learned about Mark Haddonfield, who quickly became his hero.

Haddonfield had done some real heavy lifting for the cause by going after Jessie Hunt, the celebrated, self-congratulatory profiler who seemed to delight in bringing good men down.

Haddonfield took on the skank by killing people she’d saved and sullying her reputation for protecting victims. He’d almost taken her out completely at one point, along with her slut sister, who somehow escaped and injured his knee in the process.

After Haddonfield was captured, Dallas was briefly devastated.

But that all changed when the killer’s manifesto appeared online, imploring others to take up his cause and butcher those close to Hunt.

Dallas almost went out that night to answer the call.

But ultimately, he held back, deciding that he needed a longer term plan if he was really going to live up to Haddonfield’s legacy.

So he came up with a strategy. He now knew which school to transfer to: UC Irvine, the one that Hannah Dorsey attended. He had a mission.

But that mission was nearly upended when, a few months later, Haddonfield retracted his manifesto in a video that was made public. In it, he said that no harm should come to Jessie Hunt or her loved ones. Dallas felt betrayed. His hero had gone soft.

But after a long, sleepless night, he came to a realization about what must have really happened.

Haddonfield had been forced to retract the manifesto.

Behind those prison walls, he had likely been tortured too, maybe even subjected to brainwashing.

Hunt was a profiler with expertise in psychology.

She almost certainly led those indoctrination sessions.

With that newfound awareness, Dallas wrote a letter to Haddonfield in prison, telling him that he knew the video was made under duress.

He assured his hero that he wouldn’t let his false repudiation of the manifesto distract him from the mission that Haddonfield hadn’t been able to complete.

He would eliminate the one person that the whore Jessie Hunt cared most about: her little sister.

But that required work. He learned everything he could about Hannah Dorsey.

He studied up on her sordid personal history.

He discovered a gap in her academic record during which she simply disappeared from school for several months, but he had yet to discern what that was about.

He was intrigued to pry open that secret.

His application to UC Irvine was accepted and he declared the same major as one of hers—Psychology—for the spring quarter.

He worked out religiously so that he would look attractive to her.

Even sly girls like Dorsey could be hoodwinked by a sculpted torso, and he intended to keep her in the dark by blinding her with his looks and charm.

That put a lot of pressure on this meet-up. He needed to be slightly flirtatious but not overly so. He needed to make her feel safe with him but not come across as so innocuous as to be boring. He needed to leave her wanting more. It was a delicate balance, one he’d have to walk right now.

Hannah had just wandered in. He caught her eye and waved her over.

She maneuvered around the tightly-packed tables, her eyes darting all around the place.

He could tell she was looking for anyone who might be trouble, as well as exits if he turned out to be that trouble.

When she sat down, she gave him a hesitant smile before scanning the table.

“Two drinks?” she noted, “you’ll never be able to sleep tonight.”

"Oh, actually, the salted caramel latte is for you. I remember you saying it was your favorite coffee drink a while back."

Hannah's smile tightened, and he knew what was coming.

"Thanks Dallas, but I don't accept any kind of beverages that I haven't seen prepared," she said politely but firmly, without any hint of embarrassment. "I can pay you back, or you can chug it yourself."

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll just chalk this up as a valuable learning experience—don’t make assumptions. Check!”

“Good,” she said, apparently relieved at his reaction, “you’re learning.”

"I should have known better anyway," he said.

"That's very smart of you. You know, I co-founded this club in high school that gave free rides to girls in need.

And on more than a few occasions, I was pretty sure the rider wasn't just drunk but had been slipped something.

In one case, we had to take her to the emergency room to get her stomach pumped.

So don't ever feel the need to apologize for keeping yourself safe. "

“I didn’t apologize,” she reminded him.

He could feel himself blowing this and focused on getting things back on the rails. “Touché!” he said quickly. “If you don’t mind though, I’m just going to take a few sips of your drink to prove my integrity. If I keel over, you’ll know to go after the barista.”

That got a chuckle. After he chugged half the drink, she gave him a full-on smile, revealing her pearly whites.

He smiled back as he imagined some future get-together, when those teeth would be bloody. He could hardly wait.