They can’t help you. No one can.
My hands are shaking as the next text comes through.
You’re mine. The sooner you realize that, the better.
Tossing my phone back on top of my bag, I stare ahead, my mind racing as I speed to work. Part of me decides it would be better to let this person have me. To let whoever it is chop me up and display me for my sins, but the saner part of my brain argues that if this is the Nightstalker, he’s a far more fucked-up individual than I am, and I don’t deserve his particular brand of punishment.
For a fleeting moment, I consider texting back. I’ve never tried to initiate contact from my end, but there was never a way to do so before. I immediately toss the idea away. It’s harebrained and reckless.
Even so, my stomach tightens, and my heart races the more I consider it. In theory, whatever this obsession he has with me will only deepen if I give him attention. Not that I’ve ever been on the radar of a serial killer before.
Fuck, what has my life become?
When I get to work, I stare up at the building that offers me a day of solace to keep my brain busy and off everything happening and sigh.
Then I remember I have another meeting with Penny today, so the Nightstalker that’s haunting me outside the library walls will haunt me within as well.
I take a deep breath, grab my stuff, and head inside, hearing another text chime, knowing it’s him.
Have a great day, poison. I’ll be watching.
6
KOEN
She looks disgustingly beautiful. Her brown hair ruffles in the wind as she gets out of her car with many items in tow. She always has her hands full, which isn’t surprising. She takes items that comfort her when everything around her feels out of control and daunting.
As it should. I’m at the helm of her torment.
Two years.
For two fucking years, I’ve been salivating to watch her bleed. To eat her sins and surmise if their flavor is as heady as I’ve imagined.
For a very long time, she wasmynightmare, keeping me up at night. I thought I’d never find her. She was a figment of my imagination, a vast land inside my mind, one fraught with monsters that roam freely.
I’ve toyed with her, biding my time. Kept to the shadows where men like me thrive.
She’s the only one I’ve afforded this luxury. She’s my drug.
She’s poison spreading through my veins and changing my very makeup, changing me in such a way I hate her for it.
Loathe her very fucking existence.
She’s a sickness that I can’t kick.
How many times have I stood over her bed, blade in hand, ready to end it? Ready to be rid of her. But how many times have I been unable to finish the job? Impotent and undeserving of her blood.
I need her like the earth needs rain; like lungs need oxygen, but I loathe her.
Hate her for what she did.
Hate her for how she changed me.
Howshebested me.
I am the Nightstalker, a phantom, a legend, a nightmare. Yet, she flipped my world upside down the night she mowed me down with her car.
It wasn’t the accident, really, that bothered me.
