I'm jerking myself hard now, eyes closed, picturing what I saw when I finally shut it off and slit her throat.
There was...nothingleft.
Then I picture the crème de la crème of kills.
Case number one. Eighty-three years old. Retired missionary. Respected community elder.
More than a hundred children confirmed. Probably twice that.
Decades of rape and murder hidden behind charitable donations and fuckingprayer vigils.
My first kill. The one that started everything.
I built the rack myself. Medieval design, modernized with hydraulic tension controls and digital pressure gauges. Precision engineering for maximum suffering.
I strapped him down and explained exactly what was going to happen.
"Your joints will separate first," I told him. "Shoulders, hips, knees. The ligaments tear before the cartilage fails. You'll hear it before you feel it—wet pops, like knuckles cracking butlouder."
He prayed. Actually fucking prayed while I activated the mechanism.
I was right about the sound.
Shoulders went first. Pop-pop—both at once, symmetrical failure at identical tension points.
His hips took longer. Required more pressure. When they finally gave?—
I come.
Hard.
My orgasm rips through me as I remember that sound—the wetexplosionof his hip joints detonating.
Come spurts over my hand, my stomach, hot and thick as I stroke myself through the aftershocks.
The old man screamed for forty-three minutes before his heart gave out.
I recorded every second.
Still jerk off to it sometimes.
The key code for the door chimes the number sequence. I put my cock away, ignore the sticky come on my hand and shorts, and focus.
Scarletta enters her dark apartment.
She sets her keys and phone on the counter near the door. Doesn't turn on the light. Just stands there for a moment, silhouetted against the window where downtown Idaho Falls glows orange and blue through the glass.
It's almost nine. Late for her. She left around seven. Two hours.
Two hours at a restaurant when shenevereats at restaurants. Always takes it home. Always retreats to her apartment like the hermit she is.
Was.
Because tonight she stayed. Tonight she sat in public and let strangers see her. Let them watch her eat. Let them approach her table—I'm guessing here, but it's an educated guess based on the new platinum hair and the way men can't stop staring at her now.
She's still wearing the Iron River Fitness t-shirt. Black, fitted, his logo across her tits. The bike shorts—too short, too tight, hugging her ass in a way that makes me angry and turned on at the same time.
I watch her move through her apartment. She doesn't know I'm here. I'm sitting in the chair she never uses, the expensive one that came with the furnished place. Positioned away from the window, deep in shadow where the streetlight can't reach me.
