Chapter Two
The screen door whines shut behind me, that same dying-hinge sound I’ve ignored for three years. The air reeks of bargain-bin vodka and the pumpkin spice air fresheners Mom got me to buy last week to ‘get in the spirit.’
She’s leaning against the kitchen doorway like last year’s discarded costume—that old pink robe she dug out of the closet after Robert disappeared.
“About time,” she slurs, her chipped ‘World’s Best Mom’ mug sloshing booze onto the floor. “Where’s the goddamn … for the little shits.”
I toss the Snickers on the counter. “King size. Like you demanded.”
Her hands scrabble at the bag, nails chipped and yellowed. “Good. They’ll remember this house.”
I almost laugh. Some part of her rotting brain still thinks it’s pre-Robert, back when Dad would carry her laughing to bed after too much spiked cider, when our porch was the one all the kids flocked to.
Last year, she called Mrs. Johnson’s daughter a slut and threw a pumpkin at the mailman. The year before, she told Max to invite his friends over, then scared them off playing Russian roulette with a Nerf gun, screaming, ‘Who wants to meet Daddy in Heaven?’ But sure. They’ll remember.
Here’s the fucked-up part. I still buy the good chocolate. Still half-ass some decorations. Still pretend not to notice how Max watches other kids’ houses from our porch, his hands shoved deep in pockets that always seem to collect candy he never gave out.
Hope’s a stubborn parasite. Even when you know better.
Her mug hits the counter as I step around her. She jerks back. As if she knows.
Her elbow knocks over the pumpkin spice air freshener. We both freeze as the plastic bottle rolls—her breath’s sour with vodka, mine with the effort of not driving my fist through the drywall—until it wedges against the fridge.
“Kade, hurry up,” Max shouts from the garage. “The strobe light just fried a spider. Now it’s twitching!”
Mom laughs. I pretend not to notice how the damn mug trembles in her grip.
The woman’s already tearing into a second bar when I head off to find Max.
Fuck her nostalgia. Fuck Robert for cheating on Mom. For driving her to the booze every night. For the bruises he left on Max. And fuck whatever ditch he’s rotting in.
And most of all, fuck Dad. For dying too soon. For leaving me his eyes. Every time I look in the mirror, there he is.
The garage is a disaster. Sawdust everywhere. Max never sweeps up.
“Think it’ll last the night?” he asks, elbow-deep in the fog machine, testing the controls.
At eleven, he’s already better with tools than his deadbeat dad ever was.
“Either it works or we tell them it’s haunted when it dies.” I yank the power cord taut. “More authentic that way.”
Mom’s in the living room. Laughing. Or whatever you call it. Already parked in front of the TV, working her way through another bottle. Three years since Robert’s gone, and she still gets wasted every October like it’s some fucked-up anniversary.
“She’s worse tonight,” Max murmurs without looking up. Too perceptive for a kid his age—just like I was, standing outside that room in the hospital while some doctor explained why Dad wasn’t coming home.
“Always is when the Great Pumpkin fails to show.” I toss him the spare extension cord. “Here. In case your dad finally sends that postcard.”
Max flips me off, but he’s grinning. Kid’s got my sense of humor. Shame he got stuck with everything else too.
He picks at the fog machine’s cord. “Think he ever misses this stuff?”
“Not his style.” What the hell else do you tell a kid? That some people aren’t worth missing? That the world’s better off when trash takes itself out?
Max tests the switch, sending eerie blue light crawling across the walls. “Is he ever coming back?”
Not in a million years.
“Would you?” I nod toward the house where Mom’s singing off-key again to the song Dad used to hum while tightening my training wheels.
Max watches me pry open the panel on his fog machine then changes the subject. “Payton gonna check out our haunted garage?”
The wrench slips, skinning my knuckle raw. “Nah.” Blood wells, thick and mean. “She’s got better shit to do.”
Like getting hunted through the woods. Like letting some faceless bastard pin her down while she—
The wrench hits concrete with a loud clang.
“Bummer. She’s cool,” Max says, picking it up. “For a girl.”
I ruffle his hair when he hands it back. Sure. The Verge. The chase. Dumb fucking plan.
We work in comfortable silence—me rigging up the motion sensors for the jump scares, Max carefully arranging the fake cobwebs. He’s got an eye for detail, this kid. Always has.
“Kade?”
“Yeah?”
“You ever think about leaving?”
Every goddamn day. I keep my voice even. “Why?”
“Just wondering. You’ll take me with you, right?”
“Sure, buddy.”
Fuck knows why I stick around.
Maybe because no kid should grow up alone in a house that reeks of broken promises.
Maybe because I was Max’s age when Dad’s heart gave out mid-sentence at the dinner table, and Mom replaced him with a vodka bottle and a revolving door of Roberts.
Or maybe because of Payton Reed.
The redhead who moved in across the street last year and rewired my brain like bad code—replaced my all-night penetration testing with tracing her shadow through curtain-lit windows.
I used to breach firewalls for fun.
Now I just monitor hers.
After we finish, I press a twenty into Max’s palm. “Pizza. Extra pepperoni. Hide the leftovers. I’ll be in The Dungeon if you need me.”
Max pockets the money and salutes, his fingers still dusty from the strobe lights. “Aye aye, Captain.”
The basement. Home sweet fucking home. Lying around are some cracked vinyl weights, a speed bag, and a pull-up bar with notches for every day I didn’t end up like the woman upstairs.
Dad’s tackle box sags in the corner. Don’t know why I keep it.
The bass on the last one’s half-peeled, stiff as a dead bug.
The monitors glow like three moons. Left screen: Brett Tanner’s work email. Middle: his Instagram DMs (deleted, but not purged). Right: the security feed outside his apartment.
Pathetic.
The man used his dog’s name as his banking password. Amateur hour.
A few keystrokes, and I’m scrolling through messages:
Brett to Lydia (3:42 am, two days after ghosting Payton):
You gonna be a good girl for me tonight?
My jaw tightens.
Twelve minutes. That’s all it takes to splice Brett’s podcast audio into a crystal-clear recording of him calling his biggest client ‘a talentless hack who wouldn’t know branding if it tongue-kissed him.’
Another three to embed it in an email thread—timed to slide into the CEO’s inbox at 8:59 am Monday, right before his make-or-break pitch.
But the masterpiece?
A script that’ll make his PowerPoint twitch like a dying animal, each slide glitching at the worst possible moment. By slide five, the room will shift. By slide ten, Brett’s career will be carved open on the table.
And the pièce de résistance?
A deepfake of Brett’s smirking face pasted onto footage from a Berlin fetish club (sourced from a forum even I don’t like to browse). HR won’t question it. They’ll just see what they want to see.
I tweak the metadata on every planted file—just enough to sting, not enough to trace. First, reduce Brett Tanner to a cautionary LinkedIn post. Second, make sure Payton never connects the dots back to me.
Revenge should be invisible.
Like a predator who knows your secrets, the sounds you make when you beg.
The mask waits in its case. Custom-fit. Modified sightlines. Beside it, The Verge’s login screen pulses:
HUNTER #13—Mercer, K.B.
PREMIUM STATUS ACTIVE.
The Verge’s paperwork is bulletproof. Cops get ‘donations.’ Lawyers get perks. And the hunters? They get whatever they want.
Took me three weeks to crack their system. Another two to ensure I’d be assigned to Payton’s group. Her signed waiver flickers behind my eyelids—that looping signature, the way she’d laughed when they warned her about ‘controlled danger.’
The mask seals against my face, and the world narrows to three truths through its slitted eyes:
Payton’s phone glows beside the tub. Her laptop’s on the bed. Another all-nighter. On-screen: some bank’s ‘edgy rebrand.’ Corporate logo. Half her tabs are stock vectors. The rest? Etsy orders for her latest sticker: a severed finger flipping the bird. Classic Reed.
The unopened knife packaging ($29.99 Halloween Special).
Max’s laughter trickles down from the garage. He’s rewiring the strobe lights, blissfully unaware that his big brother’s studying blade angles on YouTube. The tutorial plays muted, the subtitle scrolling, “Remember, folks, always cut away from—”
I snap it shut.
Why bother? Predators don’t wear warning labels. We come gift-wrapped in dimples and ‘Who, me?’ smiles, with hands that know how to pray—but oh, how they prefer to prey.
Let her think I’m just another masked stranger. Let her scream. No one else’s coming for her.
Pin her against a tree. Gloves up her thighs.
She’ll say please.
And I’ll be there.