That’s the thing about muscle memory, how over time, our actions become so familiar, so ingrained in us, we perform them with so little effort. It can be a comfort.
It can also be a nightmare.
Our bodies have the ability to retain the memory of a traumatic experience, where the slightest whisper of danger triggers our fight-or-flight response.
Tonight, I didn’t merely embrace the alarm sounding through my body—I made it my song. Every threatening, thunderous crash of a wave became a trilling note. Every strike against my bones in fear became a percussive beat that I timed to his powerful heart.
As my gaze wanders over his observatory, I imagine him there within the depths, charting his constellations.
Projecting his next kill.
My hand coasts over my neck, delicately exploring down to the buttons of my sweater. I work one open, then the next, letting my fingertips trail. A shiver tightens my skin as I envision his hands mapping my body the way he maps his star charts.
Touched by the hands of death.
When you’ve come so close, felt your last breath snatched from your lungs, your very life teased by the rough hands of death, you almost crave its cruel caress.
You get tired of fearing it.
I wrap my hand around my throat, tightening until the pressure builds. I never take my eyes off his towering haven while I touch the most intimate parts of my body. Remapping my neural pathways. Taking back stolen power.
Excited by the fear I’ll invoke in his dark eyes.
As my skirt falls around my feet, I flatten one hand against the glass to brace myself, my other slipping between my thighs. Arousal stirs my blood, muscles gathering tight.
My hunter may be in a cooldown period, but I can feel the impending shift—like the ocean drawing back right before the break, knowing there’s nothing that will stop the oncoming wave.
I saw it in the way those beautiful eyes heated with the bluest ember. Orion’s hunger is a rising tidal swell.
And I’ll be there when he breaks.
I lower my forehead to the cold glass and seal my hand around my neck, dig my blunt nails into my skin, imprinting bruises along my throat. A hit of gratification arches my back, and I moan through the trembling pleasure, my breaths short and raw as I stare into the moonless night.
Every monster harbors a little deviance. I just need to rouse that buried hunger to his controlled surface—the one he doesn’t even allow out when it’s time to hunt.
The stars burn against the darkness, calling up the memory of Orion hovering close enough I could trace the gray ring around the teal sea of his irises. So breathtaking, like gazing into a cluster of galaxies, an inferno of stars.
If Orion needs a body to use, he can have mine. It stopped belonging to me long ago.
Where I’m most vulnerable, even defenseless, what that weakness does grant me is the elimination of fear. Orion could have strangled me on that rock and I would’ve had only one regret.
Revenge won’t change the past.
No, it won’t—but I’m not trying to rewrite history.
If it’s the task of the sculptor to discover the statue inside the block of stone, then I’ll be the fucking sculptor. I’ll chip at Orion’s stone until I’ve carved his secrets free.
“I won’t get another chance,” I whisper on a broken breath.
I touch myself until my body draws taut, pleasure crashing through me. I grip my throat until my pulse roars in my ears with the rush of blood, until I’m drowning beneath thrashing waves of sensation?—
Until the beats of my heart bang strong enough to count.
Right now, there are an estimated two thousand active serial killers in the world, with approximately fifty in the US alone. Most are never caught. They either become ill, incapacitated, or are incarcerated for other crimes—but they never stop killing. The compulsion to victimize and steal power never dies.
—COLLINS HOLBROOK
9
