23. OBSESSION

23

OBSESSION

RYDEN

I t was the longest fucking four days of my life. I had resisted the urge to go find Yara, and this time, not run away like a fucking coward and stay. I kept telling myself that my life was already a mess as it was, but the conviction was fading, and I itched to have my palm around her neck, tight, as she screamed for me.

I took a sip of the beer, standing next to Enzo and staring at the painting of a crow with a skeleton’s ribs perched atop a burnt tree branch.

Smoke curled around the creature, and the night sky bled black. It was morbid. Enzo liked morbid things. He reminded me of Dracula, a bit younger but much paler.

“When did you buy this disturbing crow?” I asked, glaring at the creature that looked at me with its beady eyes full of disdain.

“I went to an art exhibit two days ago,” Enzo said, fixing his squinted gaze on the crow. “And the crow cawed at me. So loudly, too. I couldn’t resist.”

“Hah! It fucking cawed?! How much did you waste on it?” I looked at him, and he smiled glibly, tracing the condensation on his beer glass.

“The artist was a tall woman in a shit-brown tweed jacket. She looked like she’d cry if another person passed by her art. It’s a brutal world, Ry,” Enzo said, shaking his head. “The painting reminded me of Hanna. She always loved weird things.” We both sat in silence, our eyes on the crow. “She would have loved you,” he said as an afterthought, and I shook my head.

“Yeah? Thank you, but FYI, a serial killer isn’t someone you should introduce to your sister.”

Our friendship was a weird contrivance born out of a necessity and then became a strange comfort in the loneliness. When you had too much baggage to carry, you needed somewhere to leave it off once in a while, and Enzo was that place for me. He never complained about my baggage, which was often filled with the dead.

“You would have been the best thing I could have introduced to her. You know… I brought that fucker to our home. Jacob Levey. It was my fault. The guilt… it kills me.” His face twisted with pain and anger.

“You didn’t know. No one could have known,” I said as Enzo emptied his beer. “It was Jacob Levey’s fault. Only his.”

“I should have known. He was a… friend. I called that fucker my friend.” Enzo’s fingers tightened around the bottle before he pulled himself out of the darkness that he often went to whenever he thought of Jacob.

“He’s dead. We killed him for her,” I said, trying to dig him out of the pit.

“And so is she. Dead. Gone.” Enzo sighed, emptying his drink.

We sat there in tightening silence before he took a deep breath. “I hope she’s fine wherever she is, and I hope he’s burning for his sins,” Enzo said, rubbing his fingers against his temple.

“We burned him for his sins.”

We continued to stare at the crow, and I could almost hear it now—the loud caws in the creeping silence. Its eerie eyes made me shudder.

“I do love that thing the more I look at it. Those eyes…” Enzo hummed. “Keen. Don’t you think so?”

“It looks like it’s judging us!” I grunted. “Such judgmental eyes for a fucking crow.”

“That’s enough alcohol for you,” he said when I grabbed another bottle of beer. The beer almost smelled like death. Everything in this place smelled the same, and it was comfortable. Familiar. Our lives, though different, were all about dying. “You’re in a weird mood these days. Is it because of Doctor Death?”

“I can’t… fucking get her out of my mind,” I said, and Enzo snorted, looking very amused by my predicament. “She’s haunting me, and I—I think about her even when I don’t want to. I know it’s madness. She’s someone who works with the cops to find killers like me, Enzo. I’m sure she must have worked on some of my displays as well.”

“Well, the killers she helps to find—those are the ones you kill, and every one of them deserved to die,” he said, his voice tinged with pride.

“Well, not everyone thinks like you.”

“Are you still stalking her?” He gave me a look, running his tattooed fingers through his hair.

“No. I decided to stop.”

My body screamed to see her smiling as she took that first sip of coffee every morning and to see her slip her dress down that curvy, soft body every night. I was almost sure she saw me when I was following her. I felt her eyes on me when I wasn’t looking, and it felt like she was gloating.

“I want to, but I shouldn’t,” I admitted.

Everything in me urged me to give in. To say fuck it, tear every rule book I had so meticulously written for myself, and fall headfirst into this woman, into the madness she elicited within me.

My need for her had already twisted into an insatiable hunger, and the obsession was a fierce inferno. As mornings blurred into nights, the only thing that consumed me was Yara.

“Good for you,” Enzo said, emptying his beer. “But how long are you going to last? After what happened with that pretty Vanessa…” Enzo looked at me, and there was amusement in his eyes. He was fucking laughing at me.

I growled.

After that night at Yara’s home, I decided I needed to get her out of my brain, or I knew I’d go fucking insane from the torture. So, I thought, why not invite Vanessa for dinner? We went for dinner. It could have gone well, too.

The food was amazing, and the music was pleasant. We were talking about something that had happened at Vanessa’s work. We finished dinner, and then she leaned in for a kiss… and what did I do? I flinched away from her as if she’d just eaten an expired batch of fish sticks dipped in cat pee or something. Her eyes widened, and she shook her head, pulling away from me.

“You found her,” she had said then, looking at me with eyes that were so soft and a bit broken.

“I… what do you mean?” I asked with a frown, wondering if she had lost it.

“Your person. So? This is where we say goodbye.”

She once told me that we’d part ways once we found our soulmates. I said I didn’t believe in that.

“Not my person. I don’t believe in soul mates,” I had said.

“You’re lying.”

She was fucking wrong, but I just nodded. I knew I couldn’t continue this ruse with Vanessa after everything that happened with Yara. I knew she wouldn’t satisfy me anymore. No one would.

It was Yara’s face that tormented me, that contorted my insides. The way Yara West slithered into my skin like a serpent, refusing to leave, was unsettling. My cock grew raging hard whenever I thought of her, and that was not good for my fucking health.

“You swore never to bring it up again,” I muttered, rubbing my face.

“It’s fun to see you like that. I enjoy it. You’re always so in control.”

“Sadist,” I said. “You’re a fucking sadist, Enzo.”

“Says the psychopath,” he retorted, rubbing the side of his cheek.

“Hah!”

“Why not just give in? She told you that she only wanted to fuck you, didn’t she?”

“Well, Yara West is a complication I can’t afford. Not with K.Y. Wolff on my fucking ass. I haven’t gone completely mad, not yet.”

“I started listening to her podcast, too. I understand why Detective Patel said what he said. That voice…” Enzo shuddered. “But are you sure she’s the one who killed Victor?”

“I told you. It’s her. Every word she says… she says it with so much feeling.”

“Like your articles are different when you’re writing about The Abstract Killer and his victims, huh?”

“Yes, exactly.” K.Y. Wolff was still keeping her silence, while I was sitting on the sidelines for once in my life, trying to figure out the woman’s motive, which was becoming more and more elusive with each passing week.

“Did you find anything from Reah? An IP address?” Enzo asked.

“No. Reah couldn’t find anything. K.Y. Wolff is using proxy chains and encrypted tunnels, using techniques like onion routing and VPN cascading. She’s employing every trick to hide her tracks.”

“Half of that went over my head,” Enzo said. “But am I to understand that even Reah can’t find our mysterious woman?”

“Yes, and that’s saying something,” I said with a frown.

Enzo hummed. “That means she must be a computer genius.”

“I’ve been listening to Victor’s story as more episodes are posted, and I’m trying to find some kind of connection between all these victims.”

“And?” Enzo put the whiskey down and stared at me.

“Everything feels so disconnected. There’s no fucking thread connecting Jordan Kent to Michael Brown to Victor. All these cases were closed, except one. Robert Miller. I’m trying to contact the orphanage where he worked. He died in that orphanage. In other cases, the killers were arrested. How? Something’s so fucking wrong here.”

“Anything else about the victims?”

“Most of them were… you know, alleged assholes and bastards. I’ve no idea how or why she found them.” I tapped my finger against my chin.

“So, are you saying she’s basically you?” Enzo said with a wink in my direction. “Maybe you’ll find what you’ve been looking for all this time with her? Then you’ll have someone else to share your secrets with. Share this burden?”

“Fuck no. I don’t need more crazy to fill my already crazier life, but I do need to find her.”

“She’s leaving you alone for now. So why not just wait and see what she does, and then we can decide what to do with her?”

I shook my head, cutting him off.

“What if it’s too late by then? I can’t risk her exposing my secrets,” I said with a frown.

I had thought about it, to just forget about her and move on, but then there was Phil and the consequences of what I did to him. Victor, and what she did to him. We were bound in some strange way, and it’d only end when I cut it.

“What will you do if you—no, when you find her?” he asked, a hint of curiosity in his voice.

I shrugged.

On my way home, I drove toward Palmer Woods. I hadn’t made any conscious decision to drive towards Yara’s house, but talking about her with Enzo pushed me. It was instinctual, an inexplicable pull that I couldn’t resist. The need to catch even a glimpse of her was overwhelming. My animal demanded satisfaction, and he’d get it this time.

The beat of my heart quickened with each passing block. The street was almost silent, obscured by the veil of night.

As I neared her house, a mix of anticipation and anxiety coiled in my stomach.

The line between need and obsession had long become blurry, and I couldn’t shake off this compulsion. The rational part of my mind knew I should stop this, but the scream of irrational desire pushed me to drive another mile and another.

Parking at a discreet distance from her house, I looked up, knowing exactly where she would be right now. Her room was the only one that still had a light on.

“Red,” I muttered under my breath. “You’ll completely ruin me.”

The size of her mansion, buried under the canopy of oaks and pine, safely tucked away from prying eyes, still took my breath away. Oh, the possibilities that existed within the walls, where one could engage in illegal, dangerous activities and never get caught.

Doctor Yara West would never say no to whatever I wished to do. I sensed the wildness sleeping within her.

I imagined her in nothing but her white lab coat, her hands tied above her head with silk, her breasts, soft and lush, bare to my greedy eyes, and my breath hitched.

I could almost sense her silky skin under my fingers and hear her breathy moan.

Growling, I tightened my hands around the steering wheel, physically restraining myself from giving in to the impulse. It was impossible not to run to her house and demand she let me in.

She would.

She’d enjoy every deranged thing I wanted to do to her and never even blink. The book I was forced to borrow from her let me know her strange, skewed tastes, and it was hard not to get aroused when I thought of Yara tied to my bed, supple, pliant, willing to play my games.

My cock strained against my pants as I grabbed my binoculars with trembling fingers.

Breathing in and out to stop my pounding heart, I stared at her, and it was hard not to groan.

The gauzy white curtain allowed only a look at her silhouette, bent over the table, reading something. I wondered what she was reading—was she reading something like the book she gave me?

As if she could sense my eyes on her, feel me along the waves of darkness, hidden, hunting, she stood up and walked to the windows and pulled the curtain open, finally revealing herself. She was no longer a silhouette. My breath stuck. My lungs became small.

Through the lens, she felt close, so close that I could almost count the red freckles on her nose.

My heart pounded as she leaned against the window, and I was sure she was looking at me, even when she couldn’t see me.

She was wearing a skimpy pink negligee that showed more than it covered. Her skin, flushed and temptingly delicious, shone in the moonlight, begging for my fingers.

Breathtaking. So magnificent.

“Fuck. Who are you wearing that fucking dress for, Little Killer? If it’s for another man, if a man walks into your fucking room right now, I’ll lose it.”

Cursing, I rubbed my cock over my pants, anger rippling inside me.

“I’d fucking kill that son of a bitch and fuck you over his dead body, doing the right thing be damned!”

After a few more minutes, I was sure she was indeed alone.

“I… I can’t stop this madness, Yara.”

The more I looked at her, the more I craved. The ache wouldn’t allow me to even breathe properly. It grew and grew until the pressure was too much.

My fingers went to my erection, and a loud groan left my lips when she arched her back, thrusting her breasts forward, and they strained against the delicate fabric, nipples in hard peaks.

My mouth watered as I tightened my fingers around my cock.

She licked her lips before one hand clawed up and pressed against her breast.

“Are you planning to kill me, Red?” I moaned as I moved my hand up and down my cock, pulling, tugging, wanting more. I wanted her touch, her mouth, her everything.

Just her. Yara West.

She was a roaring fire, made of streaks of gold, red, yellow, orange, and blue, burning together to form something deranged, and yet fully sane.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Her throat moved as she traced a finger between her cleavage. She looked wild… tempting. She was everywhere around me. In the night air, in the trees. I could smell her scent on my skin—it smelled like vanilla and sin.

My fingers burned to rip that scrap of a dress off her body, push her to the floor, and ravish her. Everything in me demanded to hear her scream my name as I took her to hells and heavens.

Then I saw her pulling her dress up, and I saw the vibrator in her hand. Her hand inched toward her pussy, and I was done. I had never come so hard in my life.

“Fuuuckkk…”

Cursing under my breath, I hastily pulled up my pants and revved the engine, trying to outrun my own thoughts. She stilled, almost as if she could hear the roar of my engine cutting through the silence. Her lips curled into a satisfied smile. She gazed straight at where I was, her eyes challenging, and then she lifted her hand and waved. She fucking waved.

My phone blinked. I picked it up to see a message from her.

Little Killer: I see you, and I know you see me. Why don’t you come closer?!

Ding. Another message.

Little Killer: My pussy is screaming for you. Don’t you want to make me come, Ryden?

Shaking my head, I growled. She was so fucking good at this game.

“Evil creature from hell,” I muttered. “You’re going to be my fucking death!”

Another message came soon after.

My fingers were shaking when I opened it. I was sweating and panting by now.

Little killer: Want to play with me, Mr. Sinclair?

Yara_wantsurcock just shared her vibrator app details with you. Do you want to download the app?

YES.

A gasp left me as I pressed the link and it opened to a download screen. She had just shared the remote app that would link my phone to her vibrator. She practically handed me a sex toy that would let me control her orgasms.

I blamed the devil for what I did next. I downloaded it.

Fuck this woman. She’ll not rest until she buries me.

My fingers trembled slightly, sticky with cum, as I turned the car away from Yara and her magnificent body and the tempting thing blinking from my phone.

Play/pause.

Intensity: Up or down.

Speed: High to low.

Fuck you, Red.

Grunting, cursing her to the worst possible hell, I drove away.