Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

NEO

H anging back, I tug my hat down lower over my face. I blend into the darkness surrounding me. Not that it matters. Carl Hatt is unaware, anyhow. He hasn't felt my looming presence in the slightest. He hasn't looked back even once—ignorant little prick.

Lyla is back at the hotel, finding whatever she can on the couple as I follow Carl around town. So far, he's gone to work as usual, even with everything in his life. He's headed home now, but he stopped for two drinks before heading into a taxi.

I note that.

Why would he need liquid courage before going home?

Shouldn't he be thankful his wife is home?

If my wife were just getting back from a stint in lock-up for five years, I'd be buried so deep in her cunt that I couldn't see the fucking sunshine.

Though, if my wife were in lock-up, I'd most likely burn the fucking place to its foundations to get her back. No one touches what belongs to me.

Even the fucking government.

My gut tightens when he steps out of the taxi in front of his ridiculous-sized mansion and storms up the stairs.

Are any of his grandchildren in there? Are any of his children in there?

Part of me wants to burst through the front doors and shoot him between the eyes before strangling his wife and watching the light die in her eyes.

She's the physical, breathing embodiment of what I went through as a child.

She might as well be my mother.

"Eat your fucking food, Neo. I swear to all that's holy!" Mom shouts.

She's shaking and sweating, and I don't know why my eating stresses her out so badly.

"Mom, it tastes bad!" I whine.

She lifts her hand as if she's going to backhand me, and I wince, closing my eyes tightly to prepare for the blow.

When it doesn't come, I inch open my lids.

She's got her eyes closed and tapping on her forehead, counting to ten aloud repeatedly.

"Mom?" I whisper.

She gets like this, and sometimes I wonder if she will return to me.

I look at the food before me. It's a Hamburger Helper—the one from the red box that tastes like a cheeseburger. It's usually my favorite, but it smells lemony and doesn't taste very good tonight.

It's as if my tastebuds are warning me not to eat whatever she laced inside it. But she can't mean to poison me. I'm her son.

She keeps tapping and counting as I grapple with what to do.

If I eat, she'll calm down.

But if I eat, I'll be sick .

I know it.

"Don't worry, Mom. I'll eat it," I tell her, reaching for her with my small hand.

I plug my nose and down my food when she doesn't settle.

An hour later, when I'm retching over the toilet, she rubs the back of my neck to comfort me.

"You're always such a good boy, Neo. You did so well with your dinner."

I groan as another wave of sickness overwhelms me.

Mom hushes my cries, her hand softly rubbing my back as if she wasn't the hand that fed me the poison.

"Shh, my love. It'll be alright; Mama's here," she tells me, and a strange shiver goes down my spine and stops at my toes.

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of, I think.

I shake out of the memory and shiver. That was the first time that I realized my mother was the reason I was always sick.

I was eight.

No eight-year-old should go through the things I did.

I know I'm a fucked-up man because of my past, and I'm no better than she is with the hurt I cause, but I do it because of her.

I do it to save those who can't save themselves.

When I hear a scream around the back of the residence, I rush from my hiding spot across the street without thinking. Scaling the wrought-iron gate, I'm in the backyard quickly, only to find Anne Hatt bent over the table on the stone back porch, Carl behind her.

He's pounding into her body as he chokes her with what looks to be her pants. Tears spill down Mrs. Hatt's face, and I cock my head as I watch the exchange .

There's a girl in front of me, peeking around the house's edge. She doesn't feel my presence, which is off-putting. A saner person would. However, I have gotten stealthier in my years of killing.

"Rub her clit, Father. She always likes it when you do that," the girl whispers, and I startle.

My body remains rigid and confused about what I'm looking at.

It's so brutal how he fucks her, and the harder Carl drives inside his wife, the more breathless the girl becomes as she watches.

The longer I watch, the more I wonder if Carl knows she's lurking somewhere in the shadows.

Why would a daughter want to watch her parents fuck?

My gut is churning with the realization that my stupid wife was correct in her assumption.

Something more profound and much darker is going on in the Hatt house.

And I can't help but be curious to discover what it is.

I text Lyla that I'm headed back to the hotel, and she replies that she needs to discuss her findings with me.

Nothing you can find will trump what I've just witnessed, love.

At least, I hope not.

When I get back to the hotel, Lyla is on the bed. She doesn't have to tell me something's wrong for me to know it.

I sit beside her, letting the images I just witnessed boggle my mind a moment longer before I relay them to her.

"What did you find?" I ask her, needing her to go first.

"To be honest with you, I don't know. The middle daughter, Ada, had sealed the records I broke into. After I read them, however, I didn't know what I was truly looking at."

Is Ada the one I saw?

"Alright, well, tell me what you found."

She stands and moves to her setup, many screens hooked to her laptop. My stupid girl has become such a pretty little hacker.

"So I hit a dead end when I found out she has sealed juvenile records and health records, but then I reached out to an online hacker friend I've made recently on the dark web, and she helped me get into them."

I try not to let the words dark web and hacker make my cock hard because we'll never sort this out if I let myself fall into the allure of my stupid little wife tonight.

"And?" I stand, strolling over to loom over the back of her chair.

"And… she's fucking insane. Literally. She was initially hospitalized for the ongoing illnesses in a regular hospital, but obviously, whichever parent was dosing her stopped, and she got better. Then, two years later, she was locked away in a mental institution for sexually assaulting a schoolmate."

"All of this wasn't brought up in Anne's trial? Surely this would discredit her as a witness, even to such a heinous crime," I add.

"Yes, but it was brought up by the defense of the children. The solicitor claimed that because of the maltreatment and poisoning of the children, Ada developed a mental illness. The solicitor tied it back to the chemicals Anne added to Ada's food."

"It could happen," I mumble.

"Yeah, with the amount of things found on the children's tox screen, it's feasible to think her mental illness is related to what her parents did to her all those years."

"Are there instances after abuse where the child then becomes a sexual predator?" I ask, knowing my answer is glaringly obvious.

On cue, Lyla scoffs. "Every predator known in any right has some childhood trauma. Yourself included, not that your drive is sexual."

"The long-term effects on the body and psyche from Munchausen by proxy are vast and different case by case, but there is a mental health link to the trauma the child suffers. Why do you ask? That was very pointed." Lyla turns around in her seat.

"I was following Carl. While I was lurking across the street, I heard a scream. Unthinking, I bounded over the fence and around the back of the house. Carl was fucking Anne over a table on the back porch, but a young girl was watching. She was lurking at the house's edge, whispering little things she wanted her father to do to her mother." I swallow.

I'm a fucking serial killer, and what I saw intrigued and scared the fucking shit out of me. Well, it disturbed me more than it scared me, but still.

"She was, what?" Lyla prods.

"She was giving them directions as they fucked. Obviously from afar, but it was just… disturbing."

Lyla's eyes go wide, her lip curling in disgust.

"Her own parents?"

I nod. "She called him father. Do you think it was Ada?"

"Something is wrong with this family, and this case doesn't sit well with me."

"Me either."

What I came to do was to end the woman who ruined her children, but what I'm finding out the longer that I'm here is that the poor woman looks to be the victim in this case.

Of what, I'm uncertain.

"What the hell do we do?" Lyla asks.

"Dig into more records," I say. "Find out if Ada is their biological daughter and try to find a photo of her. I'm going to ramp up surveillance on them."

"We should just kill the entire lot of them and then enjoy our honeymoon," Lyla mutters, turning back to her many screens.

I smirk, loving that she's goading me with her sassy mouth, even if it's unknowingly.

I hunch over her back, lips skimming her ear. "Are you not having fun, stupid wife?"

Her fingers stop short over her keys where they'd been typing. "Of course, it's just…"

My hand comes down between her breasts, smoothing along the plains of her tight shirt as I slip it under the waistband of her leggings.

"It's just, what?" I coax, fingers spreading her pussy lips before rubbing over her clit.

She exhales with a whimper. "It's just this family is fifty shades of fucked-up, and I'd rather be laid up with you inside me all day long while we order room service."

I chuckle against her neck as she elongates it to give me space to play. "Is that right, love? "

It's something I never call her, but I love to be called. She moans, her bottom inching forward on the chair and her legs falling open like a door with a broken latch on a breezy day.

My fingers slip inside her lithe body, her cunt gripping around me in little flutters as I crook them upward against her inner walls.

"Yes," she breathes.

"We're going to sort this out. We're going to end whatever bullshit is going on in that family, and then we're going to fuck in the blood of our kill."

"I thought you said…" she chokes on another moan as I increase the pace of my fingers inside her.

"I know what I said, stupid girl. I don't need fucking reminding. But what is the Butcher without his bloodthirsty girl beside him?"

Her reminder that I told her this job was mine was an oversight on my part. As much as I wanted to remind her who the fuck I was when I started down this rabbit hole, she reminded me of who I'd become before I could even begin.

I'm the Butcher of Crows Hollow still, sure.

But I'm also the stupid man who fell for his nurse. A stupid man who fell in love with her as she crawled to him, his pills on her tongue, his madness becoming entangled with her own.

I can't do this without her, and I'm unafraid she now knows that.

"Will you help me, stupid girl?" I ask her.

Her hands grip either side of the chair like a vise as she rides my fingers, coaxing her orgasm closer.

"I'll do whatever you want me to, Neo. You know that!" she breathes, barely getting the words out before she groans, her body nearing the climax it seeks.

I grin against her cheek, letting my tongue dart out and slip up her cheek as she lolls her head back into my shoulder.

"Scream my fucking name when you come. Let all of London know the Butcher and his wife are here to bathe their streets in red," I taunt.

And when she comes, she does just that.

What I saw tonight was disturbing, even to me, but I'm balanced once more by the screams of my wife and the knowledge that we'll end this shit together.

Then, we'll stroll the streets of London as if we're only tourists taking in the sights.

The plan comes together inside me, and my blood fizzles with thrill.

"Get on the bed, stupid wife. I haven't had my dinner, and I'm fucking starving."

Her hazy eyes roll over toward me as she shakily heeds my command.

In a world where the Hatts exist, I'm sure fucking glad Lyla does, too.

Or I'd lose my fucking mind.

More so than I already have, that is.