Chapter 1
Chapter
One
DAPHNE
The cadaver’s tissue dragged the glide of her scalpel, the cold toughness almost reminiscent of a freezer-burned steak. Daphne’s stomach growled—unfortunate timing and loud enough for her lab partner to stop mid-liver removal to stare.
“How could you possibly be hungry right now?” Bradley appeared somewhat green, placing the large organ on the scale. There was a slight flutter to his fingers, likely trying to flick away the slippery sensation.
Daphne bit the inside of her cheek against a grumpy retort. She’d been famished since they cracked open their cadaver’s sternum because somebody had turned off her alarm. Which meant she’d missed breakfast in the dining hall to rush to her eight a.m. anatomy lab.
Somebody being her roommate Beth, who had been an absolute bitch since the incident neither of them acknowledged except through petty grievances and small acts of sabotage.
As if having an anatomy lab this early in the morning wasn’t cosmic punishment enough.
Unlike Beth, who subsisted on coffee and Cup O Noodles, Daphne took full advantage of her dining hall access and hated missing a meal.
Being elbow-deep in viscera had little impact on her appetite but she’d learned the hard way she was in the minority there. She concentrated on flaying the soft tissue of the cadaver’s face, wondering if she’d make it to the dining hall before they sold out of roast beef sandwiches.
“Oh, look at that…there’s a sub-dermal cyst here,” she mused, momentarily distracted from her gurgling guts by the revealed anomaly.
The human body was full of surprises, little mysteries crafted into the soft tissues, bones, and sinew over a lifetime of experiences.
This cadaver alone seemed to possess clusters of cysts hidden in pockets of soft tissue.
They hadn’t seemed to contribute to the cadaver’s cause of death, but Daphne found the presence of them curious.
“I wonder if that’s caused by a genetic condition—”
“Who cares? Can we please finish the weigh-in before this smell makes me puke?” Bradley shuddered from the tips of his gelled hair to the paper shoe covers on his overpriced loafers. There was a thick smear of vapor rub beneath his quivering nostrils.
The urge to roll her eyes was difficult to resist. Daphne didn’t bother with the rub.
This wasn’t some crime scene where the body had been left to putrefy in the open air.
Formaldehyde was the prevailing odor, nothing but a strong chemical smell she’d been surrounded by since high school biology classes.
Yet again, her lack of reaction made her an outlier.
Bradley’s attitude matched most of their classmates, falling somewhere on the squeamish scale—the exception being herself and Wesley, who was obviously a budding psychopath.
At least Daphne didn’t carve patterns into the cadaver skin.
She sighed, writing her observations in her own notes to mull over on her own time, and continued recording the necessary lab data.
They finished in relative silence, broken by Bradley’s periodic dry heaving.
Her partner couldn’t bail fast enough, offering to hand in their report while she closed the cadaver on her own.
Daphne pursed her lips, watching Bradley scurry away like his lab coat was on fire.
“That one’s prepping for med school,” she told the corpse.
“How’s he going to handle living bodies when he can’t stand the dead?
” She glanced at the cadaver’s face, slightly marred by her exploratory incisions.
“He forgot you were a living person who donated their body for us to learn. Thank you for your service.”
Daphne tapped the emptied chest cavity, a small personal salute to the body on the table.
Once she disposed of her soiled gloves, she rolled her lab coat into the lab laundry hamper and hustled for the dining hall. It was a seven-minute walk from the sciences building, one she made in five while weaving through clusters of chatting undergrads.
Swiping her dining hall card, she slid into the line for the cold prep bar, salivating at the rows of neatly wrapped sandwiches, the spill of ingredients flattened by the tight plastic cling.
“Please have roast beef, please have roast beef,” Daphne muttered, her fingers digging into the edges of her tray. She finally reached the bar, scanning the remaining sandwiches on offer. Her heart sank at the empty placeholder for roast beef. “Damn.”
With her first choice off the table, she scanned the other options, pouting as she snagged an Italian combo and a bag of chips.
“Stupid supply never living up to stupid demand,” Daphne grumbled, filling out her tray with a cup of autumn bisque, a fruit bowl, and some souffle inspired creation. She rounded out her lunch selection with a bottled water and a can of Coke.
Eschewing the louder, occupied tables, she found a quiet empty table in the corner and tucked into her meal.
Daphne liked eating alone. Even when she and roommate Beth were on better terms, Beth told her she gave off serious black cat energy.
It wasn’t like she exuded Goth vibes in her slate-colored blouse and skinny jeans.
Bubbly namesake aside, Daphne simply wasn’t a social butterfly.
Lunch was time to stuff her face and refill her energy tank for afternoon classes.
Besides, she’d made the mistake of socializing last semester and look how that turned out.
The sharp corner of a potato chip caught in her throat. Daphne coughed, fumbling for her bottle of water through blurred vision.
“Easy, sugar. You need to chew before swallowing,” a feminine voice drawled. A solid thump between her shoulder blades dislodged the offending chip. The water bottle pressed into her searching hands, long nails caressing the back of her hand as they pulled away. “It’s open.”
Daphne gratefully brought the uncapped water bottle to her lips, soothing the scratchiness in her throat while she blinked her vision clear.
Settled across from her was a living Barbie doll—well, maybe Barbie by way of Bettie Mae Page.
From the perfectly coifed blonde hair streaked with hot pink highlights that framed her heart shaped face, to the thick black lashes framing her deep blue eyes, pert nose, and pouty lips an eye-catching shade of man-eater red.
A crisp jean jacket covered her arms, while the rose red low square cut top beneath it revealed her generous cleavage.
The table hid her lower body, but Daphne imagined her lower proportions were as perfectly displayed as her upper half.
“Wow,” Daphne uttered around the rim of the bottle. Low and muffled and likely unheard by the woman across from her, who still sat there.
“You okay now, sugar?” the stranger asked.
Daphne watched her perfect face, surprised by the curious buzz of interest that kicked up in the back of her mind.
She took another sip of water, ordering her thoughts for a suitable answer. An acknowledgement or platitude of gratitude would be appropriate, would it not? Except…except…
Daphne always studied the people she met.
It was a habit she’d carried since childhood, a rapid catalog of personal observations she would mentally log to mull over later, but her mental notes kept tangling the longer she observed this woman.
That flawless skin could be an effect of expertly applied makeup but even the thickest coat of concealer didn’t completely erase the evidence of pores and the fine hairs of the epidermis.
Not a single freckle, mole, or dimple marked her—an eerie plastic-like perfection that echoed her initial thought to call her a Barbie doll.
“That’s the second time you called me sugar,” said Daphne, slowly screwing the cap back on her water. Staring too long was bad. She’d learned that the hard way. Her gaze slid over the manicured image presented to her until she stopped at those deep blue eyes.
The strange woman blinked at her. There was a pause before she laughed. “Maybe I thought you looked sweet,” she replied. The words could almost be construed as flirtatious in nature, if not for the other factors.
There was nothing flirtatious in the hunger of those eyes, the blue so deep she wondered if she’d drown in them.
It was a predator’s hunger that intrigued her, made her curious.
Her mother was right when she said Daphne wasn’t right in the head.
In the seconds she held that gaze, energy seemed to fizz within, creating further depths in the blue, like the yawning deep of the ocean or a cosmic starburst threating to suck her in.
“Hmmm,” Daphne kept the sound in her throat, while her gaze continued to flicker over the woman, absorbing every detail she could. “Thank you for the save.”
The blonde beamed at her. “See, I was right. Careful with the rest of your lunch, though, I won’t be around to save you.
” She winked at Daphne, rising to her feet.
Her movement revealed the light blue jeans that lovingly hugged the curves of her hips.
Pin-up Barbie possessed just the sort of curves Alex, the evil ex, said Daphne lacked.
She watched those perfect hips sashay away, silently mulling through her observations of the encounter through mouthfuls of lukewarm bisque.
There was a pause in their call and response conversation, a different sort of calculation than Daphne’s gauge of social cues.
Pin-up Barbie was lovely, in the way airbrushed models were lovely: a polished facade that couldn’t truly exist. The real chilling note of their encounter was her laugh that lacked even a hint of emotion in the sound.
Those glossy blue eyes hadn’t contained a whisper of humanity.
A predator had sat across from Daphne and smiled with gleaming white teeth. The better to eat you with, sugar. She snorted at the inward thought in the stranger’s twang. If that woman was human, she’d eat her fork.
Daphne was thoroughly fascinated.
Opening her lab notebook to a fresh page, she jotted down a series of notes.
A new hobby was just the ticket to getting over her ex.
Besides, a fresh obsession would keep her from stabbing Beth in her sleep.
She would still exact her revenge for the alarm clock, but now she wouldn’t have to hide a body.
Tapping her pen against the page, she considered her next steps. Further data was required, which meant she needed to track down her brief dining companion.
Daphne did enjoy a good chase.