Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Cain
The amateur thinks height makes him safe.
I watch from my position forty yards west as he shifts in the abandoned hunting blind, twenty feet up in a massive white pine.
He's been there for three hours now, camera lens trained on Celeste's bedroom window like a dog waiting for scraps.
Roy’s technique is sloppy—too much movement, cigarette smoke that carries on the wind, the occasional flash of light off his lens that anyone with training would spot immediately.
But Celeste isn't trained.
She's a writer, a dreamer, someone who looks at darkness through the filter of fiction.
She has no idea that while she types at her desk, creating monsters from imagination, a real one sits in a tree, photographing her every movement.
How do I know his name? Idiot dropped his ID in the woods.
He adjusts his position again, the platform creaking under his weight.
The blind's been abandoned for at least five years—I remember when Mitchell built it, before his wife made him give up hunting.
Now it's become a nest for something far worse than any hunter.
Through my binoculars, I can see his profile.
Weathered face, prison pallor still clinging despite six weeks of freedom, teeth stained yellow from institutional coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes.
He's forty-three, according to the research I did after first spotting him four days ago.
Eight years in Fishkill for aggravated sexual assault.
The girl was seventeen, but looked younger.
Roy likes them young, vulnerable, isolated.
Like the sheriff's daughter who’s come home to write.
He found her books in the prison library—I discovered that yesterday when I followed him to the town library and watched him check the computer history he'd forgotten to clear.
Searching for "Celeste Sterling address," "Celeste Sterling photos," "Celeste Sterling boyfriend."
The last search made me grip my knife so hard my knuckles went white.
As if this piece of garbage could ever deserve to breathe the same air as her, let alone more.
Roy lifts his camera again.
The shutter clicks in rapid succession, the sound carrying in the mountain silence.
He's taking pictures of her shadow moving behind the curtains now that darkness has fallen.
Later, in whatever hole he crawls into, he'll develop these.
Add them to his collection.
Touch himself while looking at her silhouette and imagining what he'd do if he could get past her father's protection.
He'll never get the chance.
I move through the forest like water, avoiding the patches of snow that would crunch under my boots, stepping only on exposed rock and fallen pine needles.
The approach to the tree is the most exposed—fifteen feet of open ground where he could spot me if he looked down.
But Roy's never been prey before.
He doesn't know to check his six.
Doesn't know that the apex predator in these woods isn't the black bears or the coyotes.
It's me.
The tree is easy to climb.
White pines grow their branches like ladder rungs, and I've been climbing these since the Lockwoods brought me here at fifteen, trying to "rehabilitate" their damaged adopted son with nature and classical music.
They had no idea they were teaching a killer to move through his hunting grounds.
The Lockwoods.
Even thinking their name brings the taste of copper to my mouth.
Richard and Patricia Lockwood, pillars of the community, generous adoptive parents who took in two broken children.
Everyone thought they were saints.
No one knew what happened in that house once the doors closed, once the curtains were drawn.
Juliette was eleven when they adopted us.
I was thirteen.
Old enough to understand what was happening, young enough to be powerless against it.
Richard liked to say he was "preparing us for the harsh realities of the world."
Patricia liked to watch.
Sometimes she'd play the piano while it happened, Chopin nocturnes floating through the house while Richard taught us about pain.
They're both dead now.
A gas leak, the investigators said.
Tragic accident.
Juliette was already at Columbia when it happened, and I had an alibi—a camping trip with witnesses.
No one ever suspected that I'd rigged their house six months earlier, waiting for the perfect cold night when they'd close all the windows and go to sleep believing they were safe.
They were my first kills, though I didn't touch them.
I didn't need to.
Death doesn't always require hands-on violence.
Sometimes it just requires patience and planning.
My hands find purchase on the rough bark, and I ascend in silence.
Below, Sterling's house glows warm against the snow, lights in every window like they're trying to push back the darkness.
A futile effort.
The darkness is already inside, typing at a laptop, creating stories about men like me while the real thing climbs toward another monster who thinks he's the hunter.
Fifteen feet up, Roy shifts again, muttering something about his camera battery dying.
He has a backup in his bag—I can hear the plastic rattling as he searches for it.
The sound covers my final approach.
Twenty feet.
I can smell him now—stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, the sour scent of a man who's been living rough.
There's something else too, something chemical and wrong.
Meth, maybe. Prison habits die hard.
I slip into the blind behind him like smoke.
Roy is focused on his viewfinder, watching Celeste stand and stretch at her desk.
His breathing quickens, finger on the shutter button, and that's when I strike.
The ridge of my hand connects with the precise point at the base of his skull.
Not hard enough to kill—death would be too merciful, too quick.
Just enough to drop him into unconsciousness.
His body goes limp, camera falling.
I catch it before it can clatter against the platform, setting it carefully aside.
No need to break it.
I want to see what he's seen, know exactly what violations he's committed with his lens.
Roy crumples forward, and I catch him too, lowering his body to the platform with the care of a lover, but this isn't love.
This is something purer.
This is justice. Protection. The removal of a cancer before it can metastasize.
I work quickly, binding his wrists with the rope I brought, then his ankles.
The platform is small, maybe eight by eight feet, but it's enough.
More than enough for what comes next.
I position him against the tree trunk, arms pulled back around it, secured with climbing knots that will only tighten if he struggles.
His backpack is a revelation of depravity.
Three worn copies of Celeste's books, stolen from the prison library based on the stamps.
The margins are filled with notes in pencil—crude drawings, sick fantasies, places where he's crossed out the hero's name and written "ROY" in block letters.
One page just has "MINE MINE MINE" written over and over across Celeste's author photo.
The books themselves are destroyed, spine broken from repeated reading, pages yellowed with finger oils and God knows what else.
Page 247 of her second novel is bookmarked—the scene where the heroine first submits to the darkness.
Roy has underlined every word about surrender, adding his own commentary:
"She'll learn." "This is how it starts." "Soon."
Deeper in the bag: newspaper clippings about her success, printed blog interviews, photos cut from magazines.
A notebook filled with his own twisted version of her stories, where the heroine ends up chained in a basement, begging.
Where she learns to "love" her captor through pain.
I flip to the last entry, dated yesterday: Saw her arrive.
Sheriff's daughter who writes dirty books.
Thinks she knows about darkness. I'll show her real darkness.
Make her write about me. Make her write FOR me.
Make her beg to write whatever I want. She'll be my greatest work.
My masterpiece. When I'm done, every word she writes will be about me, for me, because of me.
My hands don't shake as I read.
Rage doesn't make me tremble—it makes me precise.
Clinical.
Every word he's written is another minute I'll make this last, another level of pain he's earned.
There's more.
A ziplock bag with trophies—driver's licenses of women from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont.
Some date back twelve years.
All young, all dark-haired like Celeste.
Roy's been hunting for a long time, it seems.
The police will find these eventually, match them to cold cases, give families closure.
But not yet. Not until I'm finished.
One license makes me pause.
Sarah McAllister, age nineteen.
From the date, she disappeared three weeks after Roy was released.
He didn't wait long to start hunting again.
Her photo shows a bright smile, college ID attached.
She was studying literature, just like Celeste once did.
He starts to stir, a groan escaping his cracked lips.
I pull out my hunting knife, the one I've sharpened to surgical precision.
The blade catches the moonlight filtering through pine branches, and I admire its simple beauty.
Tools can be pure in a way people never are.
"Wha—" Roy's eyes flutter open, focusing first on the knife, then on me.
Recognition dawns slowly. "You're him. The one with the skulls."
I don't respond. Instead, I let him draw his own conclusions.
"We're the same," he says, voice gaining strength as his delusion builds. "Both hunting. Both watching. We could work together. Share her."
The suggestion that we're anything alike makes my stomach turn.
I press the knife against his throat, just enough to draw a single drop of blood.
"You think we're the same?" My voice is calm, conversational. "You take trophies from victims. I take out the trash. You're not a hunter, Roy. You're just another piece of garbage I need to remove."
"She wants it," he says desperately. "Writing those books, putting those thoughts out there. She's asking for someone like us to—"
I cut him off by stuffing pages from his notebook into his mouth.
His own sick fantasies, silencing him.