Chapter Ten Deserve to be Loved
CHapter ten
Deserve to be Loved
Kenny didn’t sleep.
Not properly.
He lay with Aaron wrapped against him, breath warm and steady beneath his chin, the slow rise and fall of his chest a rhythm Kenny had memorised like scripture. But even with Aaron’s leg slung over his, fingers laced with his tight in sleep, Kenny’s mind spun beneath the stillness.
By five, he slipped out from under the duvet without waking him, cloaked himself in a dressing gown, and made his way barefoot down the stairs, through the kitchen with its cinnamon scent still clinging to the curtains.
He made a coffee and took it to his office.
Their office. Aaron used it sometimes too.
Not often. But it was a shared space. No locked doors in this house.
The heater clicked as he shut the door.
The desk was a mess. Printouts, crime scene photos, psychological profiles, scribbled police notes fanned out like a paper autopsy.
He’d laid it all out the night before. After the fire.
After the mince pies and the mellow music.
After Aaron had brushed his teeth and mumbled something half-snarky, half-sweet on his way to bed.
Kenny had followed not long after. Body humming. Cock aching. So damn ready to have him. Fully, deeply. To take Aaron the way he’d been holding back from for days now. He could’ve. Aaron was soft. Pliant. Already slipping under in that way Kenny loved. Trusting. Open. His.
But instead, Kenny had curled in beside him. Pressed his hand to Aaron’s chest. Matched their breathing until it slowed. Until Aaron melted into sleep, still hard and aching, but safe. Because that was the connection.
Holding him there. Holding him through it.
So now, with the ache still faintly present, Kenny welcomed the distraction and let the crime scene spread itself across his desk, a puzzle begging to be solved. Something to keep his hands busy. Keep from climbing back into bed and pulling Aaron into ruin.
At least for a little while longer.
He plugged the flash drive from DS Parry into the laptop, opened the file index, and began.
Three victims.
Three signatures.
One worldview.
Luke Wells, seventeen. That one he knew.
System veteran. Couch surfer. Bright, distrustful, and brutally clever in all the ways life demanded from boys like him.
No one reported him missing. He’d been dead ten hours before anyone noticed he wasn’t loitering in his usual spot, in the corner where he could find a warm body and enough cash for something hot to eat.
A body for warmth, a meal for survival. That was the trade.
Then there were those who could have come before him. Noah Finn, eighteen. Former care home resident, transitional housing. Found in a Portsmouth field last month. At first glance: exposure. Underneath: sedative in his system. A peppermint sweet in his coat pocket.
Isla Cross. Twenty. A rough sleeper in Southampton.
Found dead in an alley behind a church hall.
Nothing unusual on paper. The coroner ruled it an accidental overdose.
A sex worker. Another tragic statistic swept into winter’s tally.
But Kenny knew better now. He saw it clearly; the pattern snapping into place like the final click of a lock.
There’d been no signs of a struggle. No convulsions. No frothing or vomit, no claw marks in the dirt. Only a stillness that didn’t fit the chaos of overdose. Isla had looked… peaceful. Clean. Body washed, repositioned, redressed. Left like a gift.
And there, tucked beside her like a calling card, had been the candy.
Peppermint.
That cloying sweetness lingered in every scene.
Pocketed, placed, presented like a blessing.
Or a curse. Kenny sipped his coffee, letting the bitterness ground him as he slid a fresh page into his notebook.
He didn’t have to search for the shape of the killer anymore; it was already coalescing. Precise, ugly, terrifyingly composed.
What pulled at him now was the break in the pattern. The earlier bodies had been washed. Every trace the killer could remove, gone. That spoke of time, forethought, and a working knowledge of forensics. But the last one? No washing. No attempt to erase the skin’s record of touch.
That wasn’t sloppiness. That was pressure. A lack of time. Or a shift in priority.
Escalation was the most dangerous phase. Behaviour driven by compulsion, even when it increased the risk of exposure. The contamination levels would be obvious to them; they weren’t ignorant. Which meant whatever was changing inside them was more urgent than the need to stay hidden.
The question was why. And who, or what, they were willing to risk everything for.
So he made his notes.
UNSUB: Likely late thirties to mid-forties.
High-functioning. Quiet. Ability to slip into vulnerable spaces.
Outreach work, volunteer circles? Without drawing suspicion.
A loner hiding in shadows. A participant.
Trusted. Admired, even. Didn’t avoid the broken; sought them out. Not out of pity. But recognition.
Modus Operandi: Sedation. Then restraint. Then asphyxiation. Likely manual. No struggle. No blood. Clean deaths, quiet as snowfall. The bodies were washed, dressed post-mortem. Tucked into place like dolls in display cases. Reverent. Ritualistic. This wasn’t brutality. It was choreography.
Signature: The peppermint wasn’t decoration.
It was a message. Reinforcement. A calling card laced with saccharine intent.
Mercy? Reward? Forgiveness wrapped in cellophane?
Or a benediction. A final rite. The last sweet handed out at the end of a sermon.
Gift tag found only on one victim. Change? Intentional?
Victimology: Marginalised. Forgotten. Survivors of systems that failed them. Former foster kids, rough sleepers, sex workers. People invisible to the public eye unless they were in the way. People society let fall through the cracks and then blamed for the bruises.
Kenny scribbled a note: Check sexuality.
If Luke had been queer, it might suggest the others could have been too.
And if that held true, the motive wasn’t random, it was refracted.
Tilted through the lens of projection. Because if the killer saw queerness not as a threat, but as a fracture, something sacred, invisible, and quietly broken, it offered a throughline.
Not salacious. Not sensational. But significant.
That idea made Kenny’s stomach turn.
Because this killer wasn’t hunting for lust, or rage, or thrill.
He was looking for grace twisted into guilt.
And rewriting it in blood. This was belief.
Doctrine. A personal theology wrapped in ritual and peppermint.
They didn’t see themself as a murderer. But as Father Christmas.
Not the commercial caricature, but the old-world figure.
The judge. The one who sees everything. The one who knows.
They weren’t killing to silence them.
They were killing to complete them.
Kenny tapped the pen on the edge of the notebook.
The cadence of thought. The weight of knowing.
Costumed killers weren’t new. BTK had played dress-up with ropes and shame.
Zodiac had his hooded symbol of power. Even the Howells—God, the fucking Howells—had used costuming to claim dominance.
Paper-thin masks. White gloves. Roses laid across cooling flesh, as if ceremony could make carnage feel like art.
And there it was.
That cold bloom of memory. Uninvited and precise. The curling rose vines twisted around their victims’ limbs. Soft petals pressed to bloodied skin. As if beauty might soften brutality. As if the flourish could rewrite the violence into something sacred.
But Kenny knew better.
It didn’t make them elegant. It made them worse.
Because they wanted you to look. To admire it. To remember.
His hand stilled as the image returned in full colour.
Blood on thorns. Ritual traced into skin.
The grotesque pageantry of a couple who hadn’t just killed but choreographed.
The Howells had never been satisfied with silence or shadows.
They needed spectacle. They dressed up death, made it beautiful and deliberate. Like grief should come gift-wrapped.
And Aaron, his Aaron, had grown up behind that curtain. Born into theatre drenched in blood. Taught that love meant pain and beauty came with a body count.
And yet.
Despite everything they tried to make him, Aaron had become this.
Beautiful, yes. But not in the way they intended.
Not as some delicate echo of their crimes.
His beauty was sharp. Defiant. Earned. A boy made in the fire who’d refused to become smoke.
He carried their scars, yes. But not their sickness.
And when he touched Kenny with reverence, when he let himself be touched, it wasn’t a reenactment.
It was rebellion.
Kenny swallowed hard, tightening his grip on the pen.
The Howells might have taught him performance, but Aaron’s vulnerability and that trembling, furious openness, that was real. And it undid Kenny more than any rose ever could.
The peppermint in this case hit the same nerve. The same sick echo. And Kenny felt the ache crawl through his chest, tight and clawing. The killer wasn’t mocking Christmas. They were reclaiming it. A holy season, turned red.
Only the good are rewarded.
Only the wrong are chosen.
“Fuck.” Kenny leaned back, scrubbing a hand over his beard.
Outside, the sky began its reluctant brightening, a faint smear of light stretching across the cliffs. He opened the window beside his desk for a breath of salt air and froze.
Footsteps.
Quiet. Bare.
The door creaked open.
Aaron came in, barefoot and bleary-eyed, hair a storm-tossed halo, wearing boxers and an open zip-up fleece with the dog shelter logo on it, skin creased from sleep. He cradled a steaming mug and Chaos trailed at his heels, yawning so widely his tongue curled.