Page 1 of I'll Be Seeing You
PROLOGUE
HIM
Guess I was wrong.
She wasn’t the one for me. Bitch screamed and forced me to slit her throat before I was two thrusts deep.
Would I have killed her anyway? Of course. She’d ripped off my mask and seen my face. But at the very least, I preferred that my pussy stay warmer a bit longer. Tighter too. Everything loosened up after they stopped breathing. After the blood stopped pumping. Till rigor kicked in but then so did the smell. Not rot. That took a day or two. But the odor of death. Something imperceptible to most but clung to the inside of my nose like tobacco. Worse than that was when they pissed themselves, though.
That was not my kink. I didn’t like fucking 'em dead. I liked the stillness. The quiet. The submission. The wide eyes that looked into my soul and realized I didn’t have one.
Maybe I never did. Wasn’t sure if souls were hereditary. If so, I was fucked from the get-go.
The mattress squeaked with the back-and-forth motions of my thrusts. Enough to have the headboard tapping against the wall but not so much that the neighbors would think my girl here was having anything more than a good time.
I grabbed the top of her head, now limp and hanging on by a sliver of meat and muscle, and forced her to look at me. Eyes so blue I could drown in 'em. Drink 'em down.
Shehad eyes just like these. Except she’d never look at me. Just stare past me. Like I didn’t exist. Like she wasn’t doing shit no mother should be doing to a kid.
I was fucked. But that woman was a fucking monster. And I couldn’t get her out of my head. No matter how many times I killed her.
That’s right. She’d been my first. Carved a set of matching red bracelets into her wrists and watched the tub water turn pink. When I was eight.
It was all in my chart.
What wasn’t in my chart was why. Because no one mentioned that. No one cared what turned a poor kid from the trailer park into a cold-blooded killer.
Don’t get me wrong; they’d pretended to care. They sure as shit ran all the right tests, put my brain under a microscope and looked for the defect. They weren’t gonna find it. Because there wasn’t shit wrong with me then.
Not like there was now…
Fuck, this pussy felt good. I was getting there.Getting closer to that high. That release I needed. But then my mind wandered back again. To that night. To what she’d done to set me off. I tried to stop it, but my thoughts always went there…
What they should have been asking the whole time was what was wrong with her. The bitch who’d been molesting me since I was old enough to realize it wasn’t my diaper she was interested in changing. They claimed you couldn’t remember shit that young. I couldn’t forget it. Or what she looked like in that tub. Too drunk to lift her arm and stop me from slashing at it. Long brown hair and bright blue eyes.
Those eyes kept me focused. Kept me suspended between the past and the present. Kept my dick hard.
Fuck, fuck, fuck…
I had to hold back my moan as I came all over her stomach. The dead girl bleeding outall over hermattress. She sure was pretty, even with the gaping wound circling her throat like a string of rubies from Tiffany’s. Or maybe because of it.
Still,shewasn’ther. My mother. No one was. No one could be.
I knew it was cliché. A serial killer with mommy issues. Then again, shit was cliché for a reason. That reason being it made fucking sense.
CHAPTER ONE
HIM
“Good night, Doctor…” Her words trailed off and she smiled. The forced kind that told me she wasn’t sure if she recognized me or not. But the rose emblem on the embroidered lab coattold herI belonged here. And I did, just not in the way she was thinking.
“Good night, Juliet.”
That gave her pause, a light shiver traveling up her spine that had her rocking back on the heels of her orthopedic shoes, before her eyes flicked down to her badge and her lips tipped up with relief.
That wasn’t how I knew it. Her name. But she didn’t need to know that.
I tugged on the sleeves of my white coat, a nervous tick—I wasn’t nervous, more like excited—and pushed off the counter with a bounce in my step. It had been six months since my last kill. And that itch was starting to turn into more of a burning ache. A need. Like breathing took too much effort unless I was popping someoneelse’s pills. That didn’t cure the ache, though. Just dulled it enough that I could forget for a few hours.
