Page 121 of Damsel in Disguise

“Seems like my situation, doesn’t it?” she murmurs without turning around, her voice quiet but threaded with something dark.

Ariella keeps staring at the screen, her back to me like I’m an afterthought.

“Probably,” I reply, unimpressed. Or at least, I make it sound that way.

A beat passes.

“My friends pranked me with your picture when I was sixteen,” she says, almost absently, as if she’s narrating someone else’s story. “They thought it’d be funny. A little social experiment.”

A pause follows while the song plays in the background.

Meanwhile, I start calculating, something I should’ve done earlier.

First-year student now—around twenty.

The presence I felt for a year—she had to be transferred here when she was nineteen. My brows mentally shoot up.

As far as I’ve looked up, she’s been maintaining the top-fan batch on my socials constantly for three years before that—sixteen.

The root goes a bit deeper than I initially gave it credit for.

“You’re everything I ever wanted in a man. My man.”

That’s… new. I’ve been called many things. None of them sounded like ownership.

I’m surprised a fucked-up psycho like me can be someone’s type. That someone can be obsessed with me.

Well, you’ve got to be mentally deranged yourself to choose another one who’s on the same wavelength as you.

Back then, she didn’t know me. Not really. Just the curated version, I allowed the world or the internet to see.

“And after I found out…” she continues slowly. “After one of them finally confessed… after letting me fall for you for over an entire year,” she turns her head.

Her eyes look so unsettling and alive in a way that should make any other man have fear crawl up his spine. However, I feel something dangerously close to intrigue.

“I fed them to piranhas,” she says lightly, as if she’s talking about disposing of spoiled food. “Then I cooked those fish and served them at their funeral.”

A beat of silence stretches.

Ah. That explains the maximum-security protocol.

“How many?” my tone flat, uninterested on the surface.

She gasps—dramatic, exaggerated—hand flying to her chest as I’ve offended her.

“Oh wow,” she breathes, blinking at me. “That’s what you’re curious about? Not the part where I ki—” she cuts herself off mid-word, lips curling into something playful “sent my besties to hell?”

“The fact that you killed them tells me nothing. The reason you believed it was necessary is far more interesting,” I say evenly, ignoring the theatrics. “People like me kill for far less convincing reasons.”

“O. M. G,” she pivots sharply toward me, eyes widening with mock revelation. “No wonder I fell for a man like you,” her tone dips, slow and deliberate. “Obsessed, I mean.”

She blushes just by confessing her innocent little crime. Or pretends to.

Suddenly, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on with her.

“How many did you send to hell, Ariella?” I repeat, emphasizing her choice of phrase.

She holds up two fingers. “Two.”