No Darker Place

“I’m sure you are.” His gaze slid down her body and back up once more, pausing on her lips when they trembled. “You carry a piece strapped to your ankle, a sheathed knife at your back and a mini–stun gun tucked in your bra.”

She stiffened. How the hell did he know all that?

As if she’d asked the question aloud, he said, “I’ve been watching you. At some point during tonight’s extended run, you adjusted each of your hidden weapons.”

She put up her hands in a wait-a-damned-minute gesture. “First, you have no business following me around. Second, I arm myself because I’m smart, not because I’m afraid.”

“I got that last part loud and clear. You’re not afraid of anyone, and you’re certainly not hiding from the Storyteller. You’re baiting him. You want him to find you.” He leaned closer still. “Tell me, Detective, what do you think your chances are of surviving him a second time?”

For one fleeting instant she couldn’t move, and then she drew back, putting much-needed distance between them. “So you’re psychic and a shrink, too, are you?” She told herself to make him leave. She told herself to stop talking and to open the damned door. She apparently couldn’t do any of the above. “What would you know about how it feels to survive the worst a monster can do to you?”

His jaw tightened a little more. “Trust me,” he murmured in that dangerous whisper of his, “I know that feeling very well, and I don’t need to be a psychic or a shrink to understand that if you wanted to avoid trouble you wouldn’t live here. You’d have a monitored security system and a mean-ass dog.”

“I don’t have time for a dog.”

“Time has nothing to do with it.” He gave a dry chuckle and dropped his hand from the door. “You can’t have a dog because you won’t risk allowing another living creature to get close to you. You won’t take the chance that someone else—not even a dog—will get caught in the cross fire of what you have to do.”

She couldn’t contain the tremors any longer; her body shook in spite of her best efforts. She pointed to the door. “I want you to leave now.”

He manacled her forearm and stroked the pad of his thumb over the scarred underside of her wrist. “Take my advice, Detective—don’t try to do this alone.”

She tugged at his hold, and he released her. “Go!”

He reached for the door, grasping the knob with long fingers. “One more thing—try not to get anyone else killed.”

A full minute lapsed after he’d gone before she managed to lock the door, her hands shaking. Fury warring with the other emotions he’d resurrected, she marched to the bathroom. She hung a towel over the shower curtain bar and turned on the water. She withdrew the stun gun from her sports bra and placed it on the counter next to the sink, and then the five-inch blade and sheath from her waistband at the small of her back. The fact that he had so easily spotted all three alternately outraged and frustrated her. She ripped the holster holding the .22 from her ankle and placed it next to the other weapons. By the time she’d peeled off her running clothes and socks, steam had started to fill the room, and tears rolled in rivers down her cheeks.

She stood in front of the full-length mirror a previous tenant or maybe the owner had hung on the wall. Her right calf was marred with scars from the surgery. Little distinct bumps where the hardware was positioned still showed. Jagged scars marked her arms, her breasts, her thighs and belly from the torture she had endured. If she leaned closer to the mirror, she could see the thin, barely noticeable line where the Storyteller had kept a nylon rope fastened around her neck. Plastic surgery had taken care of the worst of the scarring there. Vanity had nothing to do with her decision to have that particular elective surgery. Erasing that hideous scar had prevented the inevitable shocked looks and sympathetic questions from anyone she encountered.

She turned to face the mirror over the sink so she could see her back...and the story he had begun on her flesh. Flowing strokes of black ink tattooed the words describing her agony onto her skin.

Over and over she cursed herself for the path she chose to take...

She squeezed her eyes shut against the memories, and yet those memories were the very reason she refused to allow the words to be removed. She didn’t deserve to have them removed...to be free of what they meant.

Who the hell did Nick Shade think he was? Damn it, she had every right to want vengeance. She climbed into the shower and let the hot water blast over her. Hard as she tried she could not clear her mind of the voices...the images...the pain.

She slid down the wall and wrapped her arms around her knees. For the first time in months she sobbed. She sobbed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She never cried for herself. It was pointless. A waste of energy. She cried for all the victims and their families. She cried for her son—her sweet, sweet little boy—and her husband. She cried because she had failed to keep them safe.

Shade was right...she wanted to get that bastard. She wanted to make him pay... She wanted to watch him scream in agony for hours on end. And then she wanted to watch his body bleed and seize and twitch until he took his last breath.

She turned her palms up and stared at her scarred wrists.

But Nick Shade didn’t know everything.

She couldn’t have what she really wanted just yet.

What she really wanted was to stop waking up in the morning to face another day without her baby...without the man she had loved with her entire being...without the life that had been stolen from her. What she wanted was to never again dream of what might have been.

What she wanted above all else...was to die.

But Gaylon Perry had to die first.

Three (#u2ef781e5-dc56-5d2d-b98d-c0ecc3b52fea)

“I know what you must be asking yourself right about now,” Gaylon said, a smile stretching across his lips as he tightened the noose he’d made around her slender neck. He draped the short remaining length of nylon rope along her chest. “Did I spend all those grueling hours at the gym for this?”

Registered Nurse Gwen Adams shivered, her soft green eyes going wider and her nipples peaking into hard points as his gaze raked over her body. Despite the relentless heat, fear caused her body to shake as if she were stretched out spread eagle on a bed of snow rather than the piss-stained mattress he’d picked up on the street in one of Montgomery’s derelict neighborhoods.

His personal taste leaned toward those who hadn’t spoiled their bodies with tanning beds and pointless body art. No annoying tan lines or wasted ink to disrupt the satiny, white skin stretched smoothly over toned muscles and interrupted only by rosy nipples and a neatly manicured triangle of silky hair. A perfect canvas. The lovely perfection would make any man want to burrow between her creamy thighs and plow into her pussy right this instant.

But not Gaylon. His ability to restrain his baser desires was far more sophisticated than that of the average male. Besides, it wasn’t time to give her what she deserved just yet. Preparations had to be made first. He sighed. All good things come to those who wait. His loving mother had ensured that adage was deeply ingrained in him during his formative years, and Gaylon had learned his lessons well.

He’d allowed his baser needs to lead him once, and look at what it had cost him.

Exiling the memory, he reviewed the essential steps he had taken. He’d placed the mattress on the floor well away from the only window that wasn’t boarded up. A table and a chair, both of which he would need in the coming days, were picked up at a thrift store. In the corner was a five-gallon bucket he’d purchased at the hardware store for waste. If his guest relieved herself anywhere but in the bucket at the appropriately scheduled piss breaks she would clean it up with her hands and mouth. The unpleasant mistake was rarely repeated. His guests were generally quite obedient.

This morning he’d brought the tools required to finish his work inside and stored them in the other room. The two-room board-and-batten shack had no electricity, and the rusty tin roof leaked. “Off the grid” was an apt description. More important, there were no neighbors. The closest occupied house was more than three miles away. Though ideally he selected a location deeper in the woods to do his work, this abandoned hovel would do quite well.

He tapped his lips with his fingers, suppressing a knowing smile. A remote location was part of his modus operandi, or so those who profiled him said. His MO and signature were carefully detailed in their haughty reports. What a spectacular waste of human resources.

All these years those who attempted to dissect and analyze him had gotten so very much wrong. The chances of the FBI catching him with their fancy profiles had been somewhere in the vicinity of zero before he made his one ruinous error. Anger flared inside him. Prior to seven months ago, no one had known his identity. Not one of his victims had survived to tell. Not one body had revealed the first significant clue about the Storyteller. He’d been far too careful...until he allowed a mere impulse—sheer lust—to best him. The relentless need had grown too insistent and too urgent to deny. He’d acted on that irresistible impulse, and it had swallowed him completely, sucking him into an uncontrollable frenzy. He’d become lost to anything but the blinding need until reality had spit him out onto the floor of that desolate cabin, bleeding like a stuck pig and gasping for air like a fish out of water.

Now his face was plastered all over the internet and in every post office in the country. The anger spread through him like a raging wildfire. Not to worry, that costly error would be rectified as soon as he was finished here. Then he would disappear. A nice tropical island with no extradition treaty. Perhaps he would create a new MO, develop a more intriguing signature, and this time there would be no lapses in judgment...no distractions.

All good things come to those who wait.

Gaylon moved to the side of the mattress. He sat down, and his lovely nurse struggled to draw away, but her restraints prevented her from doing so. “I’m going to remove the gag. If you scream, I’ll hurt you like you’ve never been hurt before. Do you understand?”

She nodded, a fresh wave of tears trickling from her eyes. Pathetic creature.

He tugged her panties from her mouth. “There. Now, I want you to tell me the story again.”

Moving her head up and down like a shaken bobblehead doll, she swallowed and then cleared her throat. “Can I have a drink of water?”

“After the story.” Irritation furrowed his brow. Every time he removed the gag she wanted something. She’d been here barely twenty-four hours. He hadn’t even started preparing her, and all she could do was make requests. She should be pleading for her life—not that pleas for mercy would help. Gwen Adams was going to die.

As aware of her improbable odds of survival as she might be, it was human nature to cling to hope. The foolish instinct made his work far more interesting and vastly more entertaining.

“Where...” The word croaked out of her dry throat. She cleared it some more. “Where would you like me to start?”

“At the beginning. From the moment you saw Detective Gentry in the ER.”

“It was just over two weeks after she escaped.” Her lips trembled, and she averted her eyes as if she feared her words would anger him. “January 31.”

He smiled. “She was in very poor condition.”

The nurse nodded, the movement stiff and uncoordinated. “She had spent two weeks in the hospital in Meridian, Mississippi.”