Chapter 10
Him
She’s baiting us.
Good. Let her. Let her try.
She’s calling to us. It’s not a taunt. It’s not vengeance. It’s a lure. The way her legs are spread beneath that oversized sweater. The way her voice drips sweet and slow, like molasses on a blade. She isn’t scared.
She should be.
But she isn’t.
“I told you this would happen,” I mutter.
“You didn’t tell me shit,” the voice snaps back.
I pace.
“She wants us to come,” says the third. “She made this for us.”
“She made this for her followers,” I hiss.
“She made it for him.”
The word strikes like a match.
“Stop,” I whisper. “Stop putting it in her mouth.”
“She put herself in our hands.”
“She doesn’t even know who we are.”
“She remembers.”
I sit. I pull the laptop closer and click the screen to pause on a single frame. Her head is tilted back, masked, frozen in place as if daring me to guess what she looks like beneath. But I don’t have to. I remember. Her mouth. Her scent. The way her hips trembled beneath my grip.
My hand tightens on the edge of the desk until the wood creaks.
“What is the plan?” I ask aloud.
“She left clues,” the quiet one says, “but not clear. Not enough.”
“She doesn’t want us to just come. She wants us to work for it,” says the harsh voice. “She wants to know if we’re watching.”
“She knows,” I say.
“She’s watching back.”
I scrub a hand down my face and stare at the ceiling. Part of me wants to smash the laptop. Another wants to cradle it like a cherished toy.
“She doesn’t get to choose the ending,” I say.
“She’s already writing it,” comes the reply.
I shut the laptop.
“She wants to see us,” one of us says.
“No,” I whisper. “She wants to see him. Not us. Not all of us.”
“She called him a monster.”
“She likes monsters.”
“She said so herself. Built her whole empire on them. Who are we if not exactly what she asked for?”
We fall quiet.
Then: “We go to the shoot.”
“Not all of us.”
A pause.
“Two?”
“No. One.”
“You want to play pretend again? Let her think we’re fragments of a single broken thing?”
I run my hands through my hair. The pressure builds behind my eyes. It pulses there, steady and sharp. She lit a match inside me, and now she’s waiting for the fire to find her.
“She said something about rafters,” I mutter.
“That’s such a broad statement. Could be anywhere.”
“She wants us to dig.”
“She wants us desperate.”
I smile.
We know desperate. We were born inside it.
“I’ll go,” I say.
“You went last time. It’s someone else’s turn.”
“Yeah. What he said.”
“Fine! We rock, paper, scissors for it.”
“She’s wearing a mask now,” I whisper. “She’s not hiding. She’s hunting.”
There’s a long silence.
“She wants us to scream louder than she did.”
One of us laughs.
“She thinks she’s in control now.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
“No one screams louder than we do.”
The air in the room stills. We sit in silence, tension winding between us. She didn’t give us enough. Not in the video. Not in the set. No slip-ups on the location.
“She’s too smart to just wander into an abandoned property with a camera and hope for the best,” I reason aloud. “She scouted somewhere. That takes time. Planning. She didn’t find the perfect slaughterhouse aesthetic in a day.”
“So we figure out where she’s been.”
“Which means we need to see her GPS history."
“She’s careful,” one of us murmurs, tapping the side of our skull. “Always calculating.”
“She can be distracted,” another replies.
“But the phone never lies,” the third finishes.
“We need access to the device.”
“Not possible from here.”
The thought clicks in like a puzzle piece. We don’t go to her. We go to someone near her. Someone trusted. Someone with access.
“Lara.”
“Guess we should offer to pick Mason up for her.”
The others pause. Still. Then a slow smile spreads.
“Smart.”
“She’ll say yes.”
We make the call, offering to pick him up and saying we’ll take him for smoothies or to the museum. She thanks us before we can finish the sentence.
Easy.
Almost disappointing.
We prep what we need. The burner phone. The wireless cloning kit. A disguised USB cord tucked inside a fake charging bank. Every move is planned, down to the angle we’ll use when walking to her door.
It’ll take a minute.
Once we’re in, we’ll have it all. Her movements. Her location pins. Any saved addresses. Even deleted searches.
She thinks she’s alone out there. Thinks she’s pulling the strings.
Let her keep thinking that.
We’ll be there before she knows we’re coming.
And when we find the place—
We’ll remind her who the story really belongs to.
We drive in silence.
No music. No conversation. The cloning kit rests in one of our pockets. The burner phone is charged. Everything’s in place.
The city rolls past in slow strips of color and movement. Brick buildings. Chain-link fences. A mural we’ve seen a hundred times but never really looked at. The light turns green and we ease forward, cutting through the quiet neighborhood where Mason is.
We park across the street. From here, we can see the school doors. The chain-link fence. The painted crosswalk. The tall woman with the clipboard unlocking the side gate.
We get out and head inside, walking past all the backpacks and lunchboxes until we get to the door we know is hers. Pulling it open, we step inside, and there she is.
She’s in the middle of the room, moving fast, chasing the tail end of a sentence as Mason barrels past her, holding a sheet of paper in one hand and a half-zipped backpack in the other.
Her silver hair’s tied up in a messy bun.
Dark green bib overalls. Black long-sleeve shirt.
There’s glitter stuck to her cheek and smudges of ink on her wrist.
She’s beautiful.
“Nice to see you again,” she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her smile is soft and open. “He’s been so excited you were coming today.”
“Our pleasure.”
If only she knew.
He grabs his hoodie from the hook and bounds over to us. She’s right behind him, tugging at the strap on his backpack, checking his folder with one hand while straightening his sleeve with the other.
We see it then. A rectangle pressing against the side pocket of her overalls.
Her phone.
Right where we need it to be.
We step in closer. Close enough to smell her shampoo. Some kind of mint and lavender blend.
She’s still talking, praising us, saying something about how helpful it must be to have an extra set of hands.
We nod along.
“You’ve got something right here,” we murmur, lifting a hand to brush the shimmer of glitter from her cheekbone. Her breath hitches. She doesn’t step back.
She glances down at Mason.
The connection pings silently. The program launches on its own.
Sixty seconds.
She bends to help Mason tie his shoe.
Fifty.
She laughs when he says something about a skeleton book and how it’s not even Halloween yet.
Forty.
She asks if we think he’s too young to watch Coraline. We say no.
Thirty.
Twenty.
She looks up and smiles again. “Seriously. You have no idea how much this kid loves you.”
We smile back, matching hers.
Ten.
“Alright, Mason. Sorry I’m a chatter box. I won’t keep you. We’ll see you tomorrow, buddy.”
“Bye!” he chirps, darting ahead through the doorway.
Five.
We ruffle Mason’s hair and follow him out.
One.
She waves from the doorway, still smiling.
We don’t look back. Not until the car door shuts behind us. Not until we’re pulling out of the lot and the school disappears behind the windshield.
Only then do we open the laptop. The sync begins.
Everything she’s done for the last week, every step, every pin, every deleted address, will be ours by nightfall.
She thinks she’s hunting.
But we’ve always been the predators.