25. Conner
CONNER
A groan rolls through the classroom like thunder—expected, uninspired, and entirely unoriginal.
“Excellent,” I murmur, brushing chalk dust from my palms. “A chorus of mediocrity. Just what I needed to start the day.”
The projector hums to life behind me, the title of today’s lecture glowing across the screen in stark serif text:
“Deviant Psychology: Understanding Compulsion, Control, and the Making of a Killer.”
I let it hang there for a moment, watching as a few heads pop up, eyes narrowing with interest. The rest still look mildly concussed from lack of sleep or too much caffeine. A boy in the back opens a Monster. He’s already lost.
“I trust you’ve all read the assigned profiles. Bundy, Dahmer, Gaskins, and the McDonald Triad framework. If you didn’t, pretend you did and try to keep up. I won’t slow down for you.”
Someone coughs nervously. Another student mutters something under his breath.
I ignore it. My attention is already shifting toward the seating chart, mentally tracking who showed up today—and who has been steadily slipping.
There’s an empty seat where Jasmine Rivera usually sits.
She hasn’t sat there in about a month. Normally, she would be manually dropped from my class, and I wouldn’t entertain the idea of her passing, but for some ridiculous reason that I can’t seem to get rid of, I want to see her again.
I mean, she is still completing all the work online, and she is ridiculously brilliant in a way that makes me want to listen to her for hours.
I am not holding on well with the distance, and it has only been a week since she reached for me—and like the cold animal I am, I turned my back on her.
I am a fucking monster, and not for the reasons I am comfortable with.
Killing men who I believe deserve to die.
Hunting killers who are sloppy enough to warrant attention.
Doing what I had to survive after the death of my mother. I am a monster for those things, yes.
But for what I did to Jasmine—well, even most monsters have a limit on what type of beast they will be.
I clear my throat and turn back to the room. “Today, we’re going to discuss what separates the fantasist from the actor. What turns obsession into action. What makes someone... break.”
I pause long enough for the silence to take root.
This is the part of the semester most students are fighting to get to.
What they think this class is really about -- serial killers.
Such a romanticized idiotic thing. If anyone in this room was a true monster hunter they’d wonder about the killers we haven’t caught and not about the ones we have. They’d wonder about me.
“Despite what the public thinks, killers don’t wake up one day and snap. They build to it. Layer by layer. Thought by thought. Most of them don’t want blood. Not at first. They want control. And they find it, more often than not, by studying people who never see them coming.”
I clear my throat and turn to my first file on Ted Bundy. “Here is your trigger warning for the people who need it.” I announce, before turning to the class with a smile that feels as unnatural and unsettling as I bet it looks. “Now what is Bundy’s victim profile?”
Hands shoot up across the room, and just as I am about to call on a redhead who keeps flashing her bare pussy at me from underneath her desk, the door to the classroom creaks open, and I am staring at perfect storm grey eyes.
“Miss Rivera, late again.” I comment, quirking an eyebrow at her.
She looks better than she did the last time I saw her.
The side of her head is freshly shaved, the red highlights in her hair have faded into a soft pink again, and she’s wearing knee-length jean shorts with an oversized black hoodie I’d bet all the money I have belongs to Landon.
Her socks are thick, and her Birkenstock sandals look too new to be anything but recently purchased.
She’s dressed to be inconspicuous—but to me, she rings like a breath of fresh air.
“Sorry, Professor Kilgore,” she calls out as she slides into the seat right by the door, like she’s planning to make a quick exit the moment the clock hits the end of class. “Traffic.”
I pause, lips pressed into a thin line. I can’t confront her the way I want to in a room full of students, but did my little sunshine just lie to me? Her apartment is a twenty-minute walk from campus. Traffic, my fucking ass.
“Well, most students know it’s proper to prepare for traffic,” I say, voice clipped as I move behind the podium. “I take it you’re also not prepared for class?”
I hear her bag thump to the floor and the soft, annoyed exhale that follows. The audacity.
“I never said that, Professor Kilgore,” she bites out, putting unnecessary emphasis on my title like it’s something vulgar.
I grip the edges of the podium, lean forward just slightly, enough to angle past the projector’s glare and catch her face in the glow.
She’s glaring at me. Good. I missed that fire.
“Then tell me,” I say, folding my arms across my chest, my voice smooth but pointed, “what was Ted Bundy’s victim profile?”
The room stills instantly. A few students shift, a few murmur, but Jasmine doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink.
“White women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Brunette. Thin. Pretty. Often perceived as educated or ‘clean’—respectable enough to warrant headlines.”
I nod once. “Almost.”
Her jaw twitches, and I watch her process the information like she’s skimming through a mental file. She’s close. So fucking close.
“What’s the missing factor?” I push.
She narrows her eyes, lips curling into something between a smirk and a dare. Then she tilts her head, her smile going shark-sharp. “They all reminded him of a woman who rejected him. Sounds like most men, Professor.”
There’s a ripple of laughter across the classroom. The kind that’s nervous but entertained. My mouth parts—ready to retort, to assert control—but I find nothing waiting on my tongue.
She’s not just answering the question. She’s challenging me. And for the first time in this room, I feel cornered.
“Well,” I say finally, straightening and adjusting my cuff with deliberate calm, “I wouldn’t know about that, Miss Rivera, would I?”
She slumps back in her chair, arms crossed tight over her chest, exasperation written across her face like a red flag. That scowl—that searing contempt—it should put distance between us.
But instead, it does the opposite.
Because that flicker of rage. The spark of the girl who held Marcus King at gunpoint. The girl who bled fear and fury the night she reached for me—begged for comfort—and I turned my back. That’s the girl I want to pull out and lay bare in front of me.
And like the sick bastard I am, I want more of it.
I want the feral version of her. The version on the edge of a breakdown.
I want to peel back every perfect layer until she bares her teeth at me.
Until she snaps. The scowl she throws at me lights a hunger low in my gut.
I want to dismiss this class. I want to bend her over this podium, fuck her until she is too cummed out that all she will be able to say is fucking “thank you.”
I clear my throat, slow and deliberate, letting the tension settle like dust in a room too tightly sealed.
A few students shift uncomfortably in their seats.
One coughs. Another pretends to jot something in their notebook just to avoid the heavy silence curling between me and the girl in the back row.
“Now,” I say, finally—quiet, but sharp enough to cut through the noise. “Miss Rivera brings up a compelling point.”
Jasmine doesn’t look up, inside she pulls out her laptop. The blue light illuminates the cool contour of her face.
“Rejection,” I continue, folding my arms slowly behind the podium, eyes scanning the rows of exhausted, barely-holding-it-together undergrads.
“Let’s discuss what it does to the human psyche—particularly when an individual is not taught to accept it as a normal, inevitable aspect of life.
When they aren’t given the tools to process it. ”
The rest of the hour passes in a slow, aching grind. Every second drips like sap from a wound. When the projector clicks off and the lights hum back to life, there’s a breath of relief that moves through the room.
“Don’t get too excited. I have your forensic lab reports.” I announce, eliciting a wave of anxiety throughout the room.
I pick up the stack of papers from the corner of my desk—lab reports from the midterm forensic lab rotation—and flip slowly through the top few. My pen’s already in my hand.
Then I see her name. Jasmine Rivera.
Top corner: A-. Tight margins. Annotated references. Surgical-level precision in her comparative analysis of wound patterns. It’s excellent. Of course it is. But I stare at it for a beat longer than I should.
I let myself imagine her writing it. Curled up somewhere late at night, hoodie sleeves pulled down to her knuckles, chewing on her pen while she tries to explain why a woman was carved from collar to hip like she was meat.
I imagine her biting her lip in concentration. I imagine her scent—cinnamon and vanilla bourbon—clinging to the pages.
And then I take the pen in my hand, and with one clean, deliberate stroke, I drag a D across the top of the paper. I press the report back into the stack and hand them to my TA.
“Make sure each one goes to the correct student,” I say, voice quiet but firm, barely more than a breath.
My TA nods and begins the pass-through. Row by row, the stack thins. The usual noise returns—backpacks unzipping, chairs scraping, a few half-hearted conversations. The classroom settles into its end-of-period hum.
Hands folded behind the podium. Spine straight. Eyes cast downward, but not blind. I don’t need to look to know where she is. I don’t need to breathe to feel the annoyed click of her pen as she awaits her grade.