Page 6 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

“If I was actually in trouble,” she says in her characteristically flat tone, “you’d be way too late, motherfucker.”

I spin toward my entry table and grab my keys. “Where are you?”

She laughs. “I said if.”

I give an audible exhale, earning myself another laugh. “If everything’s good, why are you interrupting my night?”

“Interrupting your stalking, you mean?”

“Semantics.” I almost confess what I almost just did. Quinn Brady’s my oldest friend and the keeper of my darkest secrets. She’s never passed judgment on a single fucked-up thing I’ve done. Of course, that could be because she doesn’t care enough to have an opinion either way.

Quinn and I met as freshmen in our Psych 101 class, eliminated our first predator together the following year, and have been refining our individual techniques ever since. But she’s even more of a loner than I am and puts some tall damn fences up around anything that could possibly be called intimacy. I could tell her that I keep the cameras on, dress in a clown costume, and coat the bedroom wall with my cum every time Rue gets herself off, and she’d just raise her straight, dark brows and say, “Sounds bad for your paint.”

Still, we regularly get together to discuss her advances in murder chemistry and my refinements to the psychological profiles of our victims, and we always check in with each other after a kill. Always. That’s what she was doing tonight, and I kept swiping her away.

“Shit, I’m sorry. Are you okay?” I head to my office on the main floor, not wanting to say more until I’m safely inside its soundproof walls.

She laughs, and I hear the sneer in it. “Like one rapey emeritus professor could give me any trouble. It was messier than expected, but it’s handled.”

Dead, she means. And good riddance.

I settle into my office chair, relaxing now that I’m in my space. I need privacy for my remote sessions, but these conversations with Quinn are why I installed the best soundproofing around.

“How messy? Did you need cleanup?”

Her silence is loud.

“Quinn,” I say. “Do you need Pell?”

“Fuck no,” she snaps. Then she sighs. “Maybe.”

I sigh too. “Give me an address. I’ll reach out.”

She rattles it off, and I encrypt the information to send to our friendly neighborhood fixer. Pell’s the best at what he does, and while he’s too cheerfully psychotic for my taste, Quinn loathes him, which makes me the middleman more often than not.

“Done,” I tell her. “Hungry?”

“Wellll…”

I know that tone; that’s her feed-me tone.

“Fries?” I ask.

“God, yes. Poisoning makes me hungry.”

“Funny,” I say as I stand. “It fills me up for at least a week.”

She laughs again, but I hear the strain around the edges.

“Meet at the place?”

“Yep,” I say. “And hey, be ready to tell me everything you know about arsonists.”

“Arsonists? I thought you were going after that bad landlord.”

Rue’s face flashes through my mind, her trying and failing to hide her distress this afternoon, and despite the month I’ve spent strategizing how to kill Aaron McEwan, I don’t hesitate.

“Change of plans.”