Chapter Twenty-One Grayson
Chapter Twenty-One
Grayson
The next body had surfaced at the lake.
It was closer to where Violet lived—too damn close.
The lead investigator cursed loudly enough that it drew attention from the surrounding officers. I was on the other side of the crime scene, but I could hear the fucker as if I stood right next to him.
“We’ve got bodies stacking up like firewood and not a single goddamn lead that sticks. And what do they do? They call in Iverson—who they claim is the best damn profiler in the US—and he hasn’t given us one damn crumb to help solve this shit show.”
I glanced at Matt Skillet, the lead investigator, and ground my back molars as he stood there and talked shit about me.
“Weeks go by and all we have is scraps about ‘patterns’ and ‘psychological pressure points’ while women are getting gutted in our backyard.” I sucked on my teeth as my irritation grew. “If he’s the best, I’d hate to see what the rest of them look like.”
His rant cut through the woods, but I absorbed it in silence, because I was working my way through all the evidence we actually had.
The symbols carved into every victim that no one here could identify. The surgically removed hearts taken as trophies. The bodies all arranged in religious positions. All were bound the same, and all were roughly the same age and appearance.
This was a ritualistic labyrinth, and one wrong assumption could bury the truth forever. Not that any of these dumb fucks would know anything about that.
I returned my focus to the task at hand.
I stood at the edge of the crime scene with my boots sinking into the dew-soaked earth by the creek, staring at the crudely crafted platform—altar—someone had erected less than three blocks from Violet’s street.
It wasn’t the victim’s corpse that turned my stomach.
What made bile rise in my throat was that this dumping ground was too close for comfort to Violet.
I’d given all the information I’d gathered on the ritualistic killing to the FBI. They knew without a doubt this was cult related. They just hadn’t placed which cult, and I had revealed nothing Violet had confided in me.
The cult wasn’t trying to hide. They were testing boundaries, inching nearer and nearer, like wolves circling a wounded animal. And these fuckers were mocking us, savoring the terror before the kill.
Floodlights had been hauled in, humming against the stillness of the woods.
Their pale beams fought against the fog curling through the trees, casting shadows and beams of light that stretched across the splinter-like trees.
The air smelled like pennies. Coppery, like metal on your tongue.
The sourness was a tang that hit the back of your throat.
The perfume of decay and death.
No reporters. No neighbors. The bureau had been clear.
This was off the books, controlled, a secret handled with white gloves and heavy silence.
At least for now. The sheriff’s deputies had been shoved back down the trail, ordered to hold the perimeter and keep their mouths shut.
Nobody outside the inner circle would know about this body. Not yet.
But this ticking clock would run out soon enough. A part of me wanted the townsfolk to see the raw horror festering on their doorstep. They deserved to know the monsters that hid in their shadows.
I hadn’t been able to get to Violet, to make sure for myself she was home safely, because of this fucking situation.
Part of me wanted to march straight to her door, to lay it all out—the body, the gruesome details, the escalating signs that the killers were inching closer, tightening the noose around the town . . . and around her.
I wanted to warn her that whatever she was hiding from had finally found her.
But I didn’t. Violet couldn’t know about this, not right now, at least. Not from me.
Because what would it solve? It wouldn’t bring the victim back. It wouldn’t change the fact that this cult and its leader were still out there, taunting Violet in the dark. It would only unravel her further, push her into the same spiral of paranoia I was already drowning in.
I could still picture her face the night she found the marking on her tree, the way her breath hitched when she revealed the heart on her doorstep.
The panic. The way her hands trembled even as she tried to act like it wasn’t real.
I’d watched her teeter on the edge of breaking, and if I told her about this new murder, she’d topple straight into the abyss.
And I couldn’t let that happen. So I’d keep my silence, even as it rotted in me.
I crouched closer to the victim, ignoring the way the mud sucked at my boots. The body had been posed deliberately, twisted into grotesque reverence, once again displayed to an unseen god.
Female, early twenties. Pale hair plastered to her face with drying blood, dirt, and twigs and leaves, most likely from being dragged across the forest ground. Her arms had been raised and tied to two thin trees, her legs bound so she was positioned as a cross.
But it wasn’t the pose that clawed at me.
It was the carving. Her head hung, her matted hair creating a halo around her face.
Her chest cavity had been split clean down the sternum, ribs cracked open and sticking out jaggedly.
Like the other victim, her heart was gone, leaving only a hollow cavity ringed in dark red. This was clearly the cult’s signature.
After learning Violet’s story, I’d done an extensive search on the Bleeding Ground and the Blood God they worshipped. They believed their god needed to feed on the organ.
Above the victim’s ruined chest, clumsily carved into her skin, was a word that made every muscle in my body lock. Not the crude symbol etched into the first victim, nor the image carved into the tree near Violet’s property.
This was different. Personal.
A name flayed into her skin in capital letters.
Vienna