Chapter 1 Ayden
“I’m so sorry to interrupt everyone’s day,” I looked up from the computer that I was working on to take in the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, Jeremy Cooper. AKA my boss. “Ayden, I see you have found our satellite office to your liking.”
“I’m thankful you allowed me to move to take care of my omega.”
“We are tracking a serial killer right now.” Panic seized my chest for a moment at his change of subject. Did that mean that Cain was at risk, or even Calliope? I couldn’t take the thought that either of them would be in danger like that. “They are killing omegas.”
I took a deep breath. They couldn’t be talking about Cain. He was a highly trained assassin and wouldn’t be caught so easily. Calliope was already on our radar. Well, not her, but her kills. Seemingly random that they were. “Where at?”
“Asheville,” he sighs. I don’t know where he is going with this, but I don’t like it. “We need to add it to the board. New colors.”
Moving into the conference room where we had the investigation board, I studied the map of the state. Each group of kills was clustered together. There was one in The Blue Ridge Mountains already. Using the forest there to hide what he was doing. The campsites he chose to hunt at were on private land, or they were so deep in the forest no one would stumble upon them. Finding them fresh would have been rare if the killer hadn’t reported his actions to forest rangers. Each of his victims were solo beta males or couples with a male beta involved. Someone had used the term ‘wholesale slaughter’ to describe his murders. That wasn’t too far from accurate.
There wasn’t a part of his victims that was intact when he was done. The beta seemed to be his primary target. When we did find couples the partner that wasn’t beta was killed with a clean slice to the throat. The beta was brutalized. He had taken the blade to their hands, removing the skin. Pulled all of their teeth, skinned the face. That was what our coroner had found. Some thought it was a forensic countermeasure. That would make sense if he didn’t leave the victim’s IDs at the camp site. I was of the mind that the torture was the point. Why else would someone do all of that to someone while they were still alive?
A leak of crime scene photos made it online and was picked up by major news stations. They dubbed him The Blue Ridge Butcher.
My gaze flicked to the other two clusters. Each centered around different suburbs of Raleigh. Nearly two hundred and fifty miles away from Asheville and the part of the Blue Ridge Mountains that the Butcher used. One was in a town that bordered Raleigh, called Cary. This one belonging to my sweet omega. Her kills claiming alphas, all of whom were arrested on rape or domestic violence charges. They were seemingly random; it was intended to look that way. So, her actual targets would get lost in the mix. Her trademark was an extreme of violence. Always breaking the alpha’s knee, tying them to their own bed. Using metal tipped claws that Cain had gotten for her she would rip the alpha to shreds. The killing blow was her ripping out the throat with those claws. Everything about their profile was wrong. They said he was tall, she was short. He was mated to an omega; she was an omega. The kills cycled around her heats, they suspected he was killing during his omega’s. The profile was centered around an alpha doing the killing. They didn’t consider that an omega could be more vicious than any alpha.
The other was around a part of Raleigh proper. Those kills couldn’t be any more different. This neighborhood was even more affluent than the one in Cary that Calliope killed in. Each house was massive; mansions where the residents had more money than they knew what to do with. Raleigh royalty. They were opulent monstrosities dedicated to the worship of wealth. Somewhere the packs that were killed should have felt safe. Should have felt like they were held apart from the crime of the surrounding city. But someone was killing in that sanctuary they had carved out for themselves.
The profile for this killer was similar to the one for my omega. They believed he was an alpha, mid-thirties to forties. Strong, single. He stalked the pack. That was unusual for someone that killed families. Most lived in the house. Some studied the property for weeks at a time. A rare few were meticulous, needing to know everything that the people in the house did. Following the pack for months. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this unsub studied them for months, but he did learn about them. They made it easy. All of them were known enough that they attended the large society functions and fundraisers. Their movements weren’t hard to track.
Once he had studied them, he would strike. Breaking in through an open window or unlocked door. He was just as meticulous with his kills as he was the stalking. He always started by tying all of them up, lining them up in the living room he would do everything he could to intimidate the alphas and beta, always one beta. No more than five alphas and no less than three. Whichever one the omega put the largest fuss over was killed first. It was torture for the omega and their bonded. He enjoyed their terror, that was the only thing that made sense. The feeling of power. That was the only reason for him spending hours inside. Killing one person every hour, ending with the omega.
I turned to Jeremy, waiting for him to direct me. “You know where this cluster goes?”
I nodded, grabbing the black pins as I went to the side of the map that held Asheville. These were what the press had dubbed The Asheville Omega Slayer. Six omegas—three men, two women, and one person who identified as non-binary. Each one killed when they were alone in the house. The police only had speculation as to how he knew they would be alone. I knew better than most how that was possible. He had to stalk the entire pack for weeks, at the very least. I was sure this one was male. It made the most sense to move in the affluent neighborhoods as he did. A beta or alpha that used scent blockers. He came and went the same way each time. Using a sliding-glass door that was left open. He knew from his stalking that the omega would be alone. Whatever alarm the house had been turned off. The omega was always in bed, either down for a nap or not yet awake. He would slip into the bed behind them, wake them up and slice their throat before slipping out the door again and disappearing into the woods. We knew that much because the police always found a campfire not far from the houses. That was where he burned the comforter, why he took it was always in question. It was too large to be a trophy, but it was a bad forensic countermeasure.
That led me to suspect it was a red herring. He was toying with the cops; it was the only explanation. Everyone believed that each grouping was the responsibility of a individual killer. I was nearly certain that we were likely looking at two or three individuals at most. I knew the two in Raleigh were unrelated. I lived with the woman who committed one of those sets. There was plenty of evidence that the Omega Slayer and the Pack Annihilator were the same person. All of the omegas looked similar. There was a similar three-month break between the kills. When Calliope would claim a victim, so would The Omega Slayer—followed by The Pack Annihilator. Almost as if they were alibis for each other. I had entertained the idea that we had another murderous omega on our hands. That was statistically unlikely. The probability of one omega killing was astronomical. Having two in the same state, even the same city, was nearly a statistical impossibility. But not any more so than four separate killers in one state. I suspected that we had two alphas plus my sweet Calliope.
All of the knowledge we have on serial killers tells us designation seems to matter. Betas kill more than any other designation. Alphas less so, but that made sense there were twenty betas to every one alpha. Omegas were the ones that rarely killed and rarely ever serial. Something about needing to be taken care of meant they lacked enough protective instinct to be violent; Calliope was proof that was bullshit. There had only ever been one serial killer that had been caught that was an alpha. They did what they could to study him, convinced he was an anomaly. Little good that it did, all they came up with was something had gone wrong with his hindbrain. That intense protective instinct that all alphas had was twisted, making them monsters. That wasn’t as rare as people believed, it was a form of psychopathy that only affected alphas. Many could and did function in the wider world just fine. But for some, something went wrong sometime in childhood that twisted them just enough. But we all knew that there was no hard and fast formula for what made a serial killer.
I had studied the case files so well that I knew the omegas all smelled similar. Something floral. That was his trigger. Most people would love their omega to smell like a flower, but not this person. They hated those scents. Who else but an alpha would be that sensitive to a scent? He was also upping the difficulty with each kill, taking them closer to when their alphas leave them alone.
Either he had just started killing, something I seriously doubted, or he was getting bored. The latter was more likely in my belief. There was no way that he had just started killing. I didn’t believe that for one second. It was likely that he had moved around, perhaps not staying in one place for too long. I ran a search for similar murders that had not returned anything for me. So, I expanded including a description of the omegas. Still nothing. Widening it to just omegas returned a devastating number of results. It was a puzzle that I was just starting to see all the pieces of.
I was distracted for a moment when my phone dinged. Calliope was texting me to let me know she had made it home.