Chapter 29 Raelynn
TWENTY-NINE
RAELYNN
I’ve never been inside an interrogation room before, and I hate every second of it.
The walls feel too close, the air too sterile, the hum of the overhead light too loud.
It’s cold—clinical, almost—and the metal chair under me does nothing to help.
My leg bounces uncontrollably beneath the table, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop it.
My heart hasn’t slowed down since the moment the cops pulled me out of my apartment.
I know I’m not in here because they think I’m involved—not directly, anyway.
I’m in here because they’re trying to make sense of the chaos orbiting me.
Four people I know are dead, all killed brutally, and the one thing connecting them all…
is me. They’re asking the same questions I am.
Why them? Why me? Why the hell is The Ripper leaving notes addressed to me?
And why did he break into my apartment tonight—not to kill me—but to wait for Emilio?
The problem is, I don’t have the answers they’re looking for.
Hell, I don’t even have them for myself.
How the fuck should I know why a serial killer is obsessed with me?
Why he’s picking off the people around me one by one?
But deep down, in that quiet, ugly part of my mind that I can’t shut up, I already have an idea.
It all circles back to the first note I received—the card with the old article taped inside. My mother. Her death.
The metallic click of the door handle makes me flinch. The door opens, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“Evening, Miss Carson.”
I look up from the water ring I’ve been staring at for the last ten minutes and meet the eyes of a woman I’ve only met once—Detective Meyer.
Her expression is polite, but her eyes are sharp, calculating.
Her auburn hair is pulled back in a ponytail, but strands have fallen free and frame her face.
She looks as if she has aged several years since I last saw her just a few weeks ago.
But I guess a gruesome serial murder case such as this one will do that to you.
“Evening,” I mutter, my voice coming out hoarse.
She shuts the door behind her with a soft click.
“I understand tonight has been a traumatic experience,” she says, her tone sympathetic, as she moves around the table.
She carries a file tucked under one arm, a notebook in her other hand.
When she reaches the chair across from me, she sets everything down—right on top of the water ring—and sits.
“I’ll make this as quick as I can, but I need to ask you some questions first. Can you handle that? ”
I nod, though it feels mechanical. “Yeah.” My voice barely carries.
I sit back, the metal chair creaking under me, and fold my arms across my chest for two reasons.
Reason one, I don’t want to be here, and I want to make that perfectly clear.
Reason two, it is fucking cold in this room.
The thin sleep shirt and shorts I’m still wearing offer little warmth.
I didn’t exactly have time to change my clothes when the night turned into hell.
There’s also a smudge of blood on my forearm that I can’t rub off.
It’s not mine. Emilio’s, maybe. Or Max’s.
I don’t know, and I can’t decide which option makes me feel worse.
“Cold?” Detective Meyer asks, her eyes flicking up from her notepad to study me.
“Is it that obvious?” I ask, forcing a small, humorless smile. That was a dumb question. Of course it’s obvious. My nipples are literal mountain peaks in this fucking shirt.
She chuckles softly, the sound surprisingly warm against the sterile silence of the room.
“Hang on,” she says as she stands, pushing her chair back with a scrape.
I watch curiously as she strides to the door and cracks it open.
“Hey, can someone grab me a blanket and some coffee, please?” she yells into the hallway.
She closes the door again and returns to her seat, the faintest smile curling on her lips. I give her the best smile I can manage, considering everything going on, and lower my arms.
“He’s going to be fine, you know,” she says, her tone gentler now. “Rodriguez called in before I came in here. She said there is no internal damage, so they’re stitching him up. He’ll surely be sore, but he’ll be released tonight.”
My breath catches in my throat. “You’re sure?”
She nods. “Positive.”
A shaky exhale slips from me, part relief, part exhaustion, and I try to cover it with a halfhearted laugh. “Is this a detective thing? Knowing what I’m thinking?”
She chuckles and leans back in her seat.
“It’s part of the job. You learn to read people—their emotions, their tells.
Yours are pretty loud, sweetheart.” She studies me carefully.
“Right now, they’re screaming that you’re scared and worried.
And you should be. But I meant what I said—Emilio’s okay.
And your friend’s with your dog, making sure he will be too. ”
Before I can respond, the door opens behind me. I turn slightly as an officer steps in—a tall guy, young, holding a Styrofoam cup in one hand and a folded blanket in the other.
“Thanks, Elcot,” Meyer says as he sets them down on the table.
He gives me a brief nod before slipping back out without a word.
Meyer slides the cup toward me and drapes the blanket over the edge of the table.
I reach for it immediately, wrapping it around my shoulders.
The fabric is thin, like hospital-issued fleece, but it’s better than nothing.
I lift the coffee to my lips and take a sip.
The bitterness hits instantly, and I grimace. Black coffee. Yuck.
Meyer laughs under her breath, clearly amused by my reaction. “It’s all they had.”
I set the cup down and curl deeper into the blanket. “Figures.”
Her amusement fades as she flips open her notebook again. “Alright, Raelynn. Let’s get through this, yeah?”
“What do you want to know?” I ask, ready to get this shit on the road so I can finally leave and check on Emilio at the hospital. “What can you tell me about your relationship with the victims?”
My stomach twists. The word victims feels clinical, detached, like it strips them of who they were.
“Khloe is—” I pause, swallowing hard “—my best friend and has been since middle school.” The correction catches in my throat. “Was.” My gaze drifts to my lap, where my fingers have started picking at my nails—a nervous habit I can’t seem to shake.
“I wasn’t close with Liam or Bailey. I dated Liam for a couple of months my freshman year, but it didn’t last. We stayed friends for a while but eventually stopped talking.
Bailey… I barely knew her. Tessa was closer to her than I was.
Alexis, though…” I exhale slowly. “We had classes together. This semester and last. We were pretty close friends.”
Meyer’s pen moves steadily, the faint scratching filling the heavy silence between us. The sound is rhythmic—almost soothing—if not for the tension wound tight in my chest. I can tell she’s giving me space to gather myself, but all that space does is let my thoughts spiral deeper.
Emilio never got to tell me what happened to Alexis, as he wanted, because everything went to hell before he could.
Instead, I had to find out what happened to another friend of mine through Kline.
Every brutal, gory, stomach-turning detail.
I asked, of course. I needed to know. Needed to see the complete, awful picture, no matter how much it hurt. Because not knowing felt worse.
That’s when Kline told me about the note The Ripper left for Emilio. Every word written in blood—a promise—telling Emilio that no one will be able to save me. That I was his. The words burned themselves into my head like a brand.
I think the bastard severely underestimates what Emilio is willing to do to protect me.
He wanted to prove something, to twist that message into reality.
To make sure I understood that even Emilio couldn’t stop him.
With Emilio gone, I was free game. That’s why he broke into my apartment.
He wasn’t there for me. Not yet, at least. The Ripper knew Emilio would come to see me.
Even with every nerve on alert, every instinct sharpened, Emilio still got caught off guard.
And it’s my fault. I distracted him. If I’d just stayed where I was, if I didn’t call out to him…
My stomach twists violently. Emilio wouldn’t have been hurt if I had used my fucking brain…
“Raelynn.”
The sound of my name cuts through my spiraling thoughts. I blink and look up, startled. Meyer’s watching me with a slight frown, concern etched between her brows, her pen tapping lightly against the notepad.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
She shakes her head gently. “Don’t be. You’ve been through more than most people could handle.”
I shift in my seat, pulling the blanket tighter around me. “What was the question again?”
She glances down at her notes. “Why do you think he went after your friends?”
The answer forms easily, even if saying it feels like coughing up glass. “To hurt me,” I say quietly. “To break me down. To make me suffer. There’s about a thousand reasons I could give, but they all come back to that.”
Meyer nods slowly, her eyes never leaving mine. “And why do you think he’s after you specifically?”
I swallow hard and pick up the coffee cup; it’s warm against my fingers. “I don’t know. Maybe…” My voice trails off. “Maybe it has something to do with my mother. You know what happened to her, right?”
Her expression softens, and she nods. “I do. She was the last known victim of The Butcher.”
I nod faintly, staring down into the dark surface of the coffee. The bitter smell turns my stomach. “Yeah. That’s why I think this is connected. Why else would someone target me like this? I’ve never done anything to deserve it. But it’s more than a hunch—it’s what he’s telling me.”
Meyer raises an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”
I take a breath. “A few weeks ago, someone dropped a card off on my front porch. My name was printed on the front. When I opened the envelope, the card inside was like one of those get-well cards you get at the store. When I opened it, I saw that taped inside was the headline from an article about my mother’s murder seventeen years ago.
” I pause, the memory scraping raw. “Written across the top it said, ‘You look just like her.’ And below the article—‘Will your fate be the same?’”
Meyer’s pen stills. “And you’re certain that card pertains to this case? That it wasn’t someone playing a cruel joke?”
“That’s what I thought at first,” I admit.
“Until Emilio showed me the note left at Bailey and Liam’s crime scene.
The handwriting was identical.” I shift forward, my voice sharpening.
“Speaking of handwriting, why has every method of communication been different? Why wasn’t anything left with Khloe that actually ties him to her? ”
She exhales slowly, setting her pen down. “It’s actually a fairly common practice among serial offenders. They shift their patterns to avoid detection. If the evidence doesn’t match from scene to scene, it’s harder to connect the crimes legally.”
I nod in understanding.
“Khloe was the first murder,” she continues.
“No note was left, but we did recover a string of text messages sent to her just before she died. The number traced back to a burner, so there was nothing we could get from that. In my honest opinion, I think the message he left was Khloe. She was your best friend, and whoever killed her knew this.”
I frown, leaning forward. “Wouldn’t you think he’d kill the person closest to me last? Draw it out for maximum damage?”
Meyer’s eyes flick up to mine. “Normally, yes. But this guy doesn’t follow convention.
He started with Khloe because he knew it would wreck you.
That was the first punch. The rest—Liam, Bailey, Alexis—they were the kicks that followed.
He’s not just trying to destroy your world, Raelynn.
” Her tone softens. “He’s trying to destroy you. ”
The room falls silent again, heavy with the weight of her words. Four people are dead, and Emilio is at the hospital for a stab wound, all because of me.