Chapter 12
Caleb
Three kills stand out in my memory.
Three kills that remind me exactly what I am.
Three memories that still get me so hard, there's no fucking way I can't jerk off when I think about them.
Case number 5. The twenty-three year old tech billionaire. Venture capital golden boy with a seed-stage portfolio worth nine figures.
Thirty-seven women in six months.
He didn't rape them. Didn't need to. Money bought consent until it didn't, and then his hands were around their throats while he fucked them and they stopped breathing.
I found him in Dubai. Extradited him through channels that don't officially exist.
Chained his hands to his feet—proper hog-tie configuration, stainless steel, no slack. Positioned him so his cock was right there. Close enough to taste if he bent far enough.
"Two hours," I told him. "Suck your own dick for two hours, and I'll consider letting you live."
He cried. Begged. Tried to negotiate.
I waited.
He wrapped his lips around his own cock after fifteen minutes of crying like a baby. Desperation makes men flexible in ways anatomy shouldn't allow. I remember the exact way his spine curved. The groans and whimpers from the strain to keep the tip of his dick in his mouth.
I pull out my cock, it's already thick and pulsing. Can't help it. Just the memory makes my hand wrap around my shaft, pre-come already slicking the head when I swipe my thumb over it.
I jerked off that day too. Pumping my fist up and down my shaft while I watched him work. His technique was terrible—all teeth and panic—but he managed. For thirty-seven minutes he managed.
Then I walked over and sawed through the base of his cock with a hunting knife.
The blood fountained. Poured down his throat as he choked on his own severed dick.
He drowned in himself.
My hand moves faster now, thumb circling the ridge as I remember the sound he made—wet and gurgling and final and shift into the image of the second kill that still makes me hard.
Case number twenty-four. A British woman. Thirty-seven. Opened a boarding school in rural Uganda for "talented young boys."
Talent meant pretty. Meant vulnerable. Meant no one would notice when they disappeared into her private quarters for "special tutoring sessions."
Sixteen confirmed deaths. She killed them after. Afraid of witnesses? Afraid of herself is more likely.
I flew her to Story Island. Told her it was a donor retreat. She believed me because people like her always believe their money makes them untouchable.
The fuck machine was industrial. Pneumatic piston system, variable speed control, custom twelve-inch attachment I had fabricated specifically for her.
I strapped her down spread eagle. Wrists, ankles, waist, throat. Positioned the machine. Turned it on.
Forty-eight hours.
I'm jerking myself hard now, eyes closed, picturing what I saw when I finally shut it off and slit her throat.
There was... nothing left.
Then I picture the crème de la crème of kills.
Case number one. Eighty-three years old. Retired missionary. Respected community elder.
More than a hundred children confirmed. Probably twice that.
Decades of rape and murder hidden behind charitable donations and fucking prayer vigils.
My first kill. The one that started everything.
I built the rack myself. Medieval design, modernized with hydraulic tension controls and digital pressure gauges. Precision engineering for maximum suffering.
I strapped him down and explained exactly what was going to happen.
"Your joints will separate first," I told him. "Shoulders, hips, knees. The ligaments tear before the cartilage fails. You'll hear it before you feel it—wet pops, like knuckles cracking but louder."
He prayed. Actually fucking prayed while I activated the mechanism.
I was right about the sound.
Shoulders went first. Pop-pop—both at once, symmetrical failure at identical tension points.
His hips took longer. Required more pressure. When they finally gave—
I come.
Hard.
My orgasm rips through me as I remember that sound—the wet explosion of his hip joints detonating.
Come spurts over my hand, my stomach, hot and thick as I stroke myself through the aftershocks.
The old man screamed for forty-three minutes before his heart gave out.
I recorded every second.
Still jerk off to it sometimes.
The key code for the door chimes the number sequence. I put my cock away, ignore the sticky come on my hand and shorts, and focus.
Scarletta enters her dark apartment.
She sets her keys and phone on the counter near the door. Doesn't turn on the light. Just stands there for a moment, silhouetted against the window where downtown Idaho Falls glows orange and blue through the glass.
It's almost nine. Late for her. She left around seven. Two hours.
Two hours at a restaurant when she never eats at restaurants. Always takes it home. Always retreats to her apartment like the hermit she is.
Was.
Because tonight she stayed. Tonight she sat in public and let strangers see her. Let them watch her eat. Let them approach her table—I'm guessing here, but it's an educated guess based on the new platinum hair and the way men can't stop staring at her now.
She's still wearing the Iron River Fitness t-shirt. Black, fitted, his logo across her tits. The bike shorts—too short, too tight, hugging her ass in a way that makes me angry and turned on at the same time.
I watch her move through her apartment. She doesn't know I'm here. I'm sitting in the chair she never uses, the expensive one that came with the furnished place. Positioned away from the window, deep in shadow where the streetlight can't reach me.
No cameras in this apartment. I gave her that. Privacy. Space. The illusion of freedom.
Didn't mean I couldn't break in.
She walks to the window and looks out at the city. Her shoulders drop. Relaxed. Happy.
She's happy.
That realization hits like a fist to the solar plexus.
When she left my limo the day I brought her back from Story Island she wasn't happy. She was shattered. Broken. Traumatized by what I'd shown her.
Seven months. Seven months of watching her try to rebuild herself into someone normal. Someone who could survive without the darkness we both crave.
And now she's happy because some tattooed gym rat wants to fuck her?
Did fuck her?
He did. I don't know for sure, but I know.
And now I need details.
Because Scarletta came out of the gym different than when she went in. Flushed. Walking carefully—the kind of careful that means a woman's been fucked hard enough to feel it hours later.
Wearing his clothes.
Like she's his.
Scarletta pulls off the Iron River shirt. Doesn't bother closing the blinds. Just strips it over her head and tosses it on the couch.
No bra underneath. Her tits are perfect. Still perfect. Nipples hardening in the cool air.
I should look away. Should give her this. Privacy. Dignity. The things I claimed I wanted to give her when I said I'd stay away.
I look.
She peels off the bike shorts next. No underwear. I can see the marks on her hips—finger-shaped bruises, already purpling. He grabbed her hard. Held her down.
Marked what's mine.
The rage builds slow. Methodical. The way it always does before I kill someone.
Ryan Adamson doesn't know who he's fucking with. Doesn't know the woman he just claimed belongs to me in ways that go deeper than possession. Deeper than ownership.
Scarletta is the only person alive who's seen me completely. Seen the monster behind the mask, and the mask behind the monster, and every ugly fucking layer in between.
And she ran.
She ran from me and straight into Ryan's waiting arms because she thinks Ryan is safe. Thinks Ryan is normal.
Ryan doesn't torture child traffickers. Doesn't come on corpses or the memory of killing them. Doesn't need darkness the way I need oxygen.
Scarletta walks naked to her bathroom. Closes the door. I hear water running. Shower.
Washing him off. Or maybe not.
Does she likes smelling like his sweat and come?
Every instinct screams at me to walk into that bathroom. To strip. To join her. To fuck her against the tile until she remembers exactly who she belongs to.
But I don't.
I wait.
Because she is mistaken if she thinks this is over.
It's not over.
It will never be over.
Scarletta Mae Desmond is mine.
Just thinking these words—my good little slut—is enough to make my cock stiffen again, blood rushing south like my body doesn't give a fuck about dignity or restraint.
I don't even hesitate. I reach down, wrap my fingers around my still-sticky shaft, and start stroking again. Slow at first, savoring it. Building.
I never get tired of this. Never get tired of jerking off to her, to the memory of what I've done, to the bodies I've left behind and the way power feels when it's absolute. I could go all day and night if I've got the right fantasy fueling me.
And Scarletta—my beautiful, broken, mine Scarletta—is that fantasy.
Everything about her makes me hard these days. Including the way she thinks she can replace me with someone safe, someone normal, someone who doesn't see her the way I do.
The way she's in that shower right now, washing Ryan's sweat off her skin, and has no idea I'm sitting here watching her door. Waiting. Hard.
The water stops.
I tense—muscles coiling, breath catching—but I don't stop stroking.
My hand keeps moving, slow and deliberate, while I wait.
Waiting, waiting, waiting for her to emerge.
My cock throbs in my fist, aching, demanding, and I lean forward slightly, eyes fixed on that bathroom door like it's the only thing in the world that matters.
The door opens.
She steps out wearing nothing but a towel, hair dripping wet, skin flushed pink from the heat. And there's this stupid, blissful smile on her face—the kind of smile that tells me everything I need to know. She's still riding the high of whatever the fuck Ryan gave her.
Still thinking about him.
She looks up.
Her eyes land on me.
The smile vanishes.