To oblivion
My friends snortand laugh behind me, and a flush slowly wriggles its way onto his cheeks. But all I can focus on are the words he wrote, and how they resonate so deeply that I’m momentarily stunned.
Why does this feel familiar?
“You wrote this?” I ask after a while.
He nods, rubbing his lips together. “Just a scribble. Nothing important.”
The handwriting isn’t anything like that note I got … but maybe he deliberately changed his way of writing to throw me off.
I hand him back the notebook. “Impressive.”
His eyes light up like I just gave a dog a bone. “Really?”
“Yeah. I like it.”
“What?” Vivian mutters, confused.
“It’s good,” I tell her.
“Okay. I guess,” she says, making a face.
I ignore her and push the notebook back into his hands, and he visibly gulps. “In fact, I think you should write more of these…” I curl a few of strands of his blond hair around my finger and coil them up. “Fill up your notebook, then show them to me.” I add a smile for good measure as I wrap him around my finger, and his eyes follow my every move, desperate for more. “Won’t you do that for me?”
He nods a few times, swallowing, before I release him from my grasp and march off with my girls. Whether he is or isn’t the one who wrote me that note doesn’t matter … as long as he’ll do anything and everything I tell him to. Because these killing sprees of mine are not going to be free of consequences, and it will definitely come in handy to have someone on my side.
Atreus
The next day
The lightsabove my desk shine so harshly that I have to squint.
One of these days, I am going to rip them out and sit in the darkness.
“Another crime scene. No corpse this time, though. But they did leave evidence on the walls of the shop beside it.” Trent throws a set of pictures on my desk. “Thought you might be interested in these.”
I pick them up and stare at them. No body, but the splotches of blood on the walls clearly indicates a violent murder took place here. I raise them to the lamp and inspect them up close. Someone tried to clean up but didn’t do a proper job.
“You think the Bones Brotherhood is on a spree again?”
I run my fingers through my dark brown hair. “No. They kill in silence and only when necessary to keep their men in line or to get rid of enemies swiftly, mostly with bullets. This is something else entirely.”
But what? What possesses someone to exhibit such rage?
“Do you have any leads on the victim?” I ask.
“I spoke to the shop owners, and they said they hadn’t seen him in a few days. Thought he was sick but forgot to call in.”
I snort. “Meanwhile, his remains were behind their dumpster all this time without their knowledge.”
“Do you want me to bring them in for questioning?”
I nod. “I want all the details. Job function, timelines, their clients, locations, and every place he’s visited in the past couple of weeks. All of it.” I lower the photos. “Any others?”
“That’s it so far, but I’m sure there’ll be more,” he replies.
“Thanks,” I say, as he walks off and closes the door again.
