Chapter Eleven – Abby #2
Seconds pass while I wait in the hall with Ezra, although those seconds feel more like minutes.
I can practically hear the beating of my heart in my ears, the adrenaline races so thickly in my system.
I thought I knew what real adrenaline was when I had to hide in that closet, but this? This puts that night to shame.
Eventually we hear Royal’s low voice from the room: “It’s done.”
I don’t wait a second longer; I push into the room, and Ezra is directly behind me. He finds the light switch on the wall and flicks it on, and the moment that light comes on we’re all a little blinded. It takes a good twenty or thirty seconds for me to be able to open my eyes fully and not squint.
The blinds in the room are closed, so we don’t have to worry about anyone peering in through the window. I’m not even sure if the window overlooks the small backyard or if it overlooks the street. Either way, doesn’t matter. We’re about to do what we came here to do.
I turn my attention to the unconscious man on the bed. “Who is he?” I ask. I wasn’t told anything about the victim, or the target, or the asshole. Whatever you want to call him. Even passed out, he looks like a dick, and not the fun kind.
No, this guy looks like someone who would run over your dog and then get mad at you for losing grip on the leash. Someone who’d blame you for everything.
“Mal Stinger,” Ezra says, setting down the bag at the foot of the bed. He pulls out some rope and tosses it over to Royal, who stands on the opposite side of the bed.
“And what did Mal do to get on your Benefactor’s shit list?”
“Mal got a little too handsy,” Royal says.
“If you didn’t watch him do it yourself, how do you know your Benefactor isn’t making you two his personal assassins?” Regardless, that’s what they are, serial killers or not. They’re getting paid to do this, so I’d say the lines are a bit blurry here.
Ezra has moved on to fasten Mal’s left ankle to the foot board.
“We trust the process. It’s how we’ve made it this far.
” Underneath his old hockey mask, he pauses and glances at me, his blues gaze shrouded in shadow.
“If we stalked all of our victims ourselves, we’d probably have been caught by now. ”
Hmm. He’s not wrong. Doing it all themselves would put them more at risk…
and that means there’s even more to this D.D.K.
thing than I thought. Not only do they have someone paying their bills and guiding them on who to kill next, but there has to be another team who goes out and vets people to make sure they fit the code.
I assumed it was someone in law enforcement, but D.D.K. is nation-wide, which means one dirty cop in one precinct wouldn’t be enough.
Nope. There has to be teams all over. This stuff must run deep.
I watch as they finish working in unison to tie Mal up.
It’s funny, watching Mal’s head loll back and forth, like he’s a ragdoll.
I don’t feel bad for viewing him as less than human; it’s how bad men view women every damn day, like we’re less than human.
Like we’re just bodies to be viewed and appreciated, bodies to be used and discarded.
You never know how jaded you can be until your whole life is turned upside-down.
“How do you know if you can trust this Benefactor?” I ask once Mal is fully tied up and Ezra pulls out their saws and their plastic aprons. He hands Royal’s over to him before he fixes the apron to his body. “If you’ve never met him, or her—”
“The Benefactor lost someone important to them a long time ago,” Royal speaks, and I can imagine him frowning behind his mask. “We all have. It’s what brought us together years ago.”
I had the suspicion, of course, knowing what I do and why I do it, and hearing Royal admit that makes me wonder just who he lost, who Ezra lost, and who Hawthorne lost. They’re not family, not related by blood, but losing people important to them made them into a family of sorts.
It’d be kind of romantic, if it didn’t involve the probable rape or death of someone they knew.
I move around the bed, going to stand near Mal’s right arm. I study him and his unconscious figure. I know they say they trust their Benefactor, whoever they are, but it does kill me a little that we’re doing this without any proof.
Mal’s phone sits on his nightstand, charging, and just for kicks, I reach for it. Ezra sees me immediately and asks, “What are you doing?”
“I just want to see something,” I say, and then I hold the phone before Mal’s face. I use my other hand to open his right eye, which is enough to get the camera to recognize his face. “Don’t worry, I have gloves on, and I’m not going to call nine-one-one or anything.”
Ezra and Royal exchange a look, but they don’t say anything else.
Luckily, the gloves don’t stop the screen from recognizing the heat from my fingers.
I go to the camera roll. If he’s a piece of shit, he might have an album or something.
Pictures he keeps for himself. Maybe even a video. Sick people keep sick trophies.
And what would you know? I only need to scroll for a few seconds before I hit the jackpot.
Mal is a very, very bad man. He’s got pictures of girls in bars from afar and what looks like AI-generated images of them naked.
Scrolling even deeper into his camera roll, and I find what looks like a passed-out, barely-legal—if legal at all—girl on top of the same sheets Mal himself now lays on.
Her makeup is smeared, her hair a mess, her limbs every which way. Someone like that’s not conscious.
And Mal? Honestly, the AI-generated shit was enough to piss me off. Like our bodies are meant for consumption, consent or not. But the passed-out girl? Oh, he deserves everything he’s going to get tonight.