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For so long, I had let this house, these walls, control me. I trapped myself in a never-ending loop of grief and rage.

All the men I had murdered were my father. All the women I protected were my mother.

They had controlled the demons inside me, but maybe, when all of this was over, I would find a way to control the demons. I didn’t know what the future held.

But I was done. Done suffocating within these walls. Done living in this horror house.

Ryden nodded, eyes gentle, understanding.

He was not my father. He was someone who would have killed my father for me.

For a second, I thought he’d offer to take me home with him, but he didn’t.

“You deserve that, love,” he said. “You deserve everything.”

After dinner, Ryden and I sat in front of the laptop, doing what we did best—digging through every article, every lead, every scrap of information we could find on the Strangler.

Now that we knew the Strangler wasn’t a man, we had to start again at the very beginning.

We scrolled through endless pages of reports, theories, and speculation.

That one fact changed everything. It forced us to reevaluate every assumption, every profile, every lead the police had ever followed. She was a woman, and that made it easier for her to slip under the radar in ways a man never could. Because more often than not, a woman was dismissed, underestimated.

“She survived so long because she’s good at adapting,” I murmured, scanning another article.

“She doesn’t just kill and move on. She adjusts. She learns, changes, breaks patterns and forms new ones. She’s always evolving.”

“She has to,” I said, leaning back, my mind racing. “We all do. When you grow up in an orphanage, you learn early on how to blend in, to never stand out. You become a chameleon, shifting into whatever people expect you to be. To survive, you become what they need, what keeps you safe. She’s doing the same thing now.”

Ryden exhaled, rubbing a hand over his jaw.

“She’s confident. We have to make her fumble. And that’s the only way we can find her.”

“We tell her we know.”

I grabbed my phone and typed a message to her.

Patricia, isn’t it? I found you. Flora River, Tillie Stone, Alice Brown, and Erika Mills. Your first pattern of four, or should I add Katelyn Ricci to it? The women you hated. Patterns of five?

It was undelivered. Again.

17

WHERE EVIL BIRTHS

NOAH

“One day, I’ll put a pillow over your face and smother you until you stop breathing. Oh, how glorious it would be.” Her voice was soft… softer. Even when she cursed me, she was always gentle. She never raised her voice unless it was necessary. “And then… I’d find someone who will marry me. You… you are the reason why no man wants me.”

I wouldn’t tell her that that wasn’t the truth. They wouldn’t marry her because she was insane. Fucking insane.

Gardenias. She had pots and pots of them in the small room we lived in until the room smelled like them, until the air and everything rotten smelled like them. She said they reminded her of my father when he wasn’t the asshole who abandoned her to this life. Forever caging her with me.

It reminded her of the man she had fallen in love with, the man who loved her before he showed her that love was only a lie.

“No one would marry a mad whore like you,” I whispered. This time I didn’t stop. This time I finally found the courage to say it out loud.

It was only a dream, though.