To All the Guys I Killed Before Exclusive Preview

Can’t wait until June 23 to get your hands on Sara’s dark rom-com about the serial killers next door? Satisfy your cravings with the first two chapters below.

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PROLOGUE

Rue

I hate it when I stab a guy in the neck and he doesn’t do me the courtesy of swiftly and efficiently dying.

“Had to be an asshole to the very end, didn’t you?” I mutter at the man bleeding out on his living room rug. “Exsanguinate faster, please.”

I crouch next to him, avoiding his weakly flailing limbs, and jerk his fingers away from the gash across his throat, hoping to speed along the exit of blood from his body. 

And that’s where I am when the faint wail of sirens hits my ears.

“Fuck.” I glance over my shoulder at the still-dark street in front of the house, then reach for my knife to deliver a second, hopefully fatal slice. It slips in my glove, but my grip doesn’t matter any more. Ray Overton is still, his lifeless eyes fixed on the ceiling, his wicked life finally over.

I’m about to be over too. Cherries strobe through the front window as two cruisers roar up the driveway, painting the room a garish shade of red that turns the blood coating me, the room, and my victim into puddles and streaks of flat, bottomless black.

As uniformed officers spill out of the vehicles, all I can do is close my eyes and wait for the inevitable.

Regrets? I have a few. And for some reason, the biggest one that swims to the surface of my panicky brain — screaming fractured commands at me to fight, run, resist, surrender, shit SHIT — is my neighbor. 

My insufferable, infuriating, irresistible fucking neighbor, who’s somehow become the drumbeat of my heart as I inhale my final breaths as a free woman.

CHAPTER 1

Two Months Ago

Rue

There’s comfort in the predictability of my life. Even the irritating bits.

Death. Taxes. Hives if I so much as breathe near shrimp. And Dr. Huge-Ass Bore waiting by our mailboxes at the end of the day.

On this particular Monday, I’d managed to avoid both eating shrimp and ending up on a slab at work, and I paid my taxes months ago. But it’s a day ending in Y, which means Hugo Mohr’s going to emerge from behind his side of our duplex approximately five seconds after I turn onto our street.

“Four… three…”

I don’t make it to the end of my countdown before the door on the left side of the building swings open and the world’s most boring Telehealth psychologist ambles out, proving yet again that he’s either got bat ears or an alert set for when I’m back in Wi-Fi range.

Hugo’s welcome-home wave as I pull into our driveway is so enthusiastic that he almost trips down the front steps. Not great when he’s holding enormous gardening shears. I hold my breath until his sensible loafers are steady on the sidewalk next to his precious rose bushes before returning his greeting with a polite smile that I drop once I’m out of sight inside my single-car garage.

“Why that cardigan?” I mutter, throwing my car into park and yanking my Coroner’s Office lanyard from around my neck. “Every day, rain or shine, winter or summer, it’s that hideous cardigan and for what reason?”

Alas, my passenger seat is empty save my overstuffed work bag, so I’m yet again forced to confront Hugo’s lumpy oatmeal monstrosity on my own. Someday I’m going to sneak a pic so Felicity can experience the cable-knit horrors for herself. Sharing is caring.

Shoving my phone into my pocket with a sigh, I pop the door and brace myself for the full Huge-Ass Bore experience. 

“Howdy, neighbor girl,” Hugo says as I walk toward him, setting his shears on his bottom step and giving me a salute that’s so awkward I have to look away or risk spontaneously combusting in second-hand embarrassment.

“Hi, Hugo.” There’s not enough pity in the world to get me to return his gesture, so I keep my arms at my sides. I stayed late to finish up some paperwork after the end of my shift, but there’s still enough light in the early September sky to see the corner of his mouth tip up as he squints and adjusts his glasses. When we first met, I wondered if he was constantly messing with those thick frames to get a better look at me, but I quickly learned that it’s just one of his many nervous tics.

“How was your day?” the man-sized quaalude asks, walking with me toward our mailboxes at the foot of the driveway. “Were you working hard—”

“—or hardly working,” I reply. “Har.” I swear, we’ve had this exchange a thousand times, but he always trots it out like it’s some fresh new pickup line.

Early on, I tried blowing off my neighbor-slash-landlord’s nightly attempts to chat, but he looked so fucking sad waiting at our side-by-side mailboxes that it felt like kicking a needy, socially awkward puppy. And listen, I may kill people from time to time, but I’m not a monster. So I’m now resigned to getting through these brain-numbing conversations as quickly as possible and getting on with the rest of my night guilt-free.

“Any highlights from work to share?” he asks, crossing his arms and leaning against the brick tower housing our mailboxes.

Let’s see… I got called to investigate an accidental drowning and a possible overdose, stole some police files that might point me to my next target, and hoovered a PB&J at my desk in between.

“Nope,” I say instead, reaching into my box and emerging with junk mail, junk mail, and more junk mail.“Nothing out of the ordinary for me.”

He tilts his head a millimeter to the left. “For you?”

Dammit. I forgot how quickly my big dumb super-smart neighbor picks up on little details.

“You take up too much space.” I scowl up at him. He responds by shifting back an inch.

“You’re still not used to it?” His grin is so unexpectedly knowing that it almost makes me forget the deadly dull chats, the awful clothes, his embarrassing earnestness.

Almost.

“I promise you, I’ll never get used to it.” But I drop my scowl and give in to the inevitable, mimicking his crossed-arm mailbox lean as best as I can using all five feet, three inches of me. Even with his truly awful posture, which I’ve been privately attributing to some kind of spinal condition, I have to tip my head way, way up to meet his gaze. To anyone driving past, I’m sure it looks like Frodo Baggins trying to have a conversation with frickin’ Thanos.

“Your day, Rue?” he gently prods. Fucking therapists.  

“It was a wild weekend for the cops,” I say, shifting through the cases I reviewed for the safest ones to share with him. “People were out there using all kinds of found objects as weapons.” 

“Oh yeah?” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Like what?” The man’s positively delighted that I’ve answered beyond the usual bare minimum, although what he should be is grateful. There’s something about his voice, some combination of cheerful and nasal, that turns my vagina into the Sahara Desert. 

In theory, all of the individual elements for attractiveness exist in my neighbor. Thick black hair, yes, but he smashes it down with too much gel. Broad shoulders, maybe, but who can tell when he’s wearing pleated khakis? Absurdly square jaw… 

Okay, that one’s good no matter what. Truly, it’s a crime against humanity that that mandible was gifted to a man with all the charm and charisma of a root canal.

“Neighbor girl?” His question interrupts my wandering thoughts, and I clear my throat and try to remember what we were talking about.

Oh, right.

“The weapons?” I think back to the cop chatter I picked up when I arrived to investigate the OD. “Um… broken bottles, pool cues, that kind of thing. No fatalities, so nobody from my office got called in. But apparently one woman squirted catsup in her date’s face, then started beating him with her shoe. Practically took out his eye with a spike heel.”

“Wow,” he says, and when I glance up, I catch a flash of speculation on his face. “Did stiletto guy deserve it?”

Interesting. Hugo has the best Resting Therapy Face I’ve ever seen — and I’ve seen a lot of them. Usually, his vacantly polite expression stays firmly in place as I trot out the details of my day, from the mundane to the absolutely revolting. 

His therapist’s instincts are right on with this one, though. Based on what I saw in my skim of the report Bart slipped me, stiletto guy’s a piece of shit who was begging for a Roger Vivier pointy toe pump to the face, and I’m dying to dig deeper into his background. But I can’t let my way-too-observant neighbor know that, so I rock back on my heels and press a scandalized hand to my chest.

“I mean, does anybody deserve to be attacked like that?” I widen my eyes to project nothing but law-abiding innocence.

For a second, I worry that I went too over the top, but Hugo backtracks right away. “Of course not!” He smooths a nervous hand over his hair, knocking his glasses askew. “I’ve done some of my best work with patients who need help channeling their anger in non-violent ways.”

Christ, where was this guy fifteen years ago when that might’ve helped me and Felicity? Oh, right. He was just a kid too, although for his sake, I hope he had a much different childhood.

Hugo’s brows pinch together as he scans my face. “Did anything else happen today?” 

Too much space. 

“Um.” I tilt my body away from his calm, steady gaze. “I guess… there was a house fire on Saturday. It killed an 88-year-old woman.” I try to keep my voice steady, but based on his aggressively neutral expression when I glance up, I failed.

“That’s awful.”

I exhale slowly and drop my gaze to the frayed left cuff of his sweater. If a person wanted to risk losing a vital organ to the knife in my front pocket, they might suggest I was sticking around to unpack some things with the nice shrink next door. Which I’m not. I’m just sharing my day with my neighbor, like I always do.

 “It was intentionally set.”

Oops. That came out in a shakier voice than I intended, and the way Hugo’s hand curls around his rolled-up mail tells me he noticed. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Now I’m staring at his wrist, and my mind wanders to the light dusting of brown hair that covers it. Is it as soft as it looks? Would the muscles and sinew and bone underneath feel even stronger in contrast? What does he have hidden under that cardigan of his? Could be a pasty, sunken chest and bacne for days. Could be muscles on muscles on muscles. 

It’s not the first time I’ve wondered this about my weird neighbor. In fact, shortly after I moved in, I considered exploring the unique benefits of our size difference, but that was before I’d been subjected to lethal doses of his soft eyes and gentle therapy-speak. Fucking a man who tops me by a foot is way less appealing if he’d be stopping every two seconds to ask whether it still feels good or to double-check that I’ve got enough potassium in my system to ward off muscle cramps. I try to live my life so I don’t nod off while the guy’s still inside of me, thanks.

“Rue.” Hugo interrupts my attempts to think about anything other than the arson. “What does this case bring up for you?” 

Terror and rage. I’m eleven again. I’m too weak and scared to do a goddamn thing as—

No. Fuck this. Fuck him.

Ignoring the phantom throb in my right shoulder, I take a step back. Away from the too-soft, too-perceptive man asking me to unpack the real reason I’m so bothered by Mary Glenn’s death.

“Weird.” My icy gaze sweeps across his lawn, then mine. “I don’t see a single one of your clients here right now, asking you to fix them.”

Hugo’s professionally neutral expression freezes for a beat before it dissolves into a lopsided smile. “I don’t see a single thing about you that needs fixing, neighbor girl.”

“Oh, baby, you have no idea.” 

My unintentional confession slides out with a laugh, and when I meet his eyes, my breath catches in my chest. That’s not dorky, friendly Dr. Mohr looking back at me. There’s a sharpness in those blue eyes, a lacerating curiosity that could cut right through me.  It’s so startling to see coming from this man that I brush my fingers against that thick wrist I’d been contemplating, like I’m looking for confirmation that it’s still my awkward neighbor I’m talking to. 

Soft, warm skin. Hard muscle and bone underneath. I bet I’d barely be able to wrap my fingers all the way around it. I glance up and find that his eyes have changed again, darkening with hunger.

I snatch my fingers back. In that same heartbeat, his Adam’s apple bobs, and ravenous Hugo disappears like the moment never existed. He’s pure Dr. Bore again as he plants his hands on his hips and squints at the sky.

“Sun’s going down,” he says. “We should get inside before you get chilly.”

I cross my arms over my midsection as though I am, in fact, cold. Better he thinks that than the truth: I temporarily forgot that I’d rather pull another all-nighter cleaning blood out of Fi’s little hatchback than waste a single second searching for hidden depths in a man who has none. 

Not that it matters. Hugo’s too busy frowning at his phone to notice my little “I’m cold!” show.

“In a hurry?” I ask, curious despite myself. He’s never once acted like he had any place to be other than boring me to death during these little tête-à-têtes.

“Huh?” He looks up, his expression so blank it’s like he forgot where he was for a second. “No. Sorry.” He slides the phone back into his pocket with a grin. “I’ve got an evening session tonight. Just keeping an eye on the time.”

“Well don’t be late on my account,” I say lightly, feeling an uncomfortable wave of empathy. This poor guy, stuck inside all day long doing teletherapy session after teletherapy session in his ugly cardigan with no signs of an actual personality or social life. I’ve never seen him host a game night or have friends over to watch a big game, and that goes double for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a freaky-sex polycule or whatever guys like Hugh-Ass Bore might be into. No signs of life whatsoever beyond the occasional snatches of music or, like, PBS documentaries that permeate our shared wall. No wonder he tries to stretch out our mailbox meetups every day.

The wind’s picked up while we’ve been chatting, and a particularly strong gust has Hugo hunching even more than usual. “Brrr,” he says, flashing me another crooked smile as he moves to block the breeze with his big body.

Yeah, he definitely watches World War II documentaries on PBS. Black-and-white ones.

We say a hasty goodnight, but I feel his eyes on me as I hurry into my garage and hit the button to close the door, stopping only to grab my bag from the passenger seat.

Once I’m inside, I walk through each room on the main floor, checking that the windows are still securely fastened, the triple locks on all of the doors are in place, and the fire extinguisher’s under the kitchen sink. Then I do the same upstairs, and as the final step, I sit down at the desk in my bedroom to review the feeds on my massively expensive (and massively worth it) home security system. It’s the final confirmation that nobody came or went while I was at work, and only then will I feel comfortable changing into sweats and a hoodie to get to work. 

But my mind won’t rest as I scan through the footage from the day. It’s not just my horror over Mary’s fate that’s dogging me. It’s that tiny spark I saw in Hugo’s eyes, the brief flash of something darker that tugged at my gut. And now I can’t shake the thought of stripping him out of that cardigan, stuffing it into his mouth so he can’t fucking talk, and riding him until I can’t talk either.

Gah. I need to purge those unwelcome filthy thoughts. Dr. Bore’s too beige, too blah, too… too Boy Scout for my taste. I’m not going to let him keep me from doing more productive things. 

Like, for example, figuring out who burned down Mary Glenn’s house.

Then figuring out how to kill them.

CHAPTER 2

Hugo

The instant Rue’s cute little shoes disappear behind her garage door, I grab my clippers and rush inside. The roses will have to wait while we walk through her nightly security protocol together.

Okay, technically speaking, she doesn’t know that I follow her from room to room on the other side of our shared wall, listening for the flip and rattle of every lock in her place. It’s just one of the secrets I’m keeping from her.

Like the fact that my glasses are for show, or that I geofenced her car so I know when she’s within five miles of the duplex. That I die a little every time I say something designed to annoy her, and it works. 

Oh, and that I sometimes kill people. Can’t forget that little nugget. 

But I only kill the ones who deserve it, and that will never be her. The world’s infinitely better with Rue Bellamy in it. Mine is too, except for all of the ways she makes it worse.

Consider, for example, how I ignore yet another text from Brady, this one just a single question mark, so I can follow Rue from her living room to her kitchen. 

This was never the plan. When I bought this duplex four years ago, I was going to play the role of a picky-as-fuck duplex owner who occasionally showed the vacant half to a possible tenant while keeping the space empty as a privacy buffer. Then Rue showed up to tour the place last spring, smiled at me once, and I was a goner. Offered her a three-year lease on the spot.

To this day, I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that I was in my counselor cosplay the day we met. The positives of putting on glasses and a sweater every time we interact outweigh the negatives, for sure. My goody-goody alter-ego keeps her at the appropriate distance. A smart, gorgeous, normal woman like Rue would empty an entire can of mace into my eyes and run screaming if she caught even a glimpse of what makes Dr. Mohr’s rose bushes so healthy. Any brief fantasies I have of taking off the sweater to find out if Rue could embrace all of me are exactly that: brief and fantastical. And that’s good. I’m not equipped to be in charge of another person’s wellbeing.

Woman-repelling counselor cosplay it is.

That was the idea, anyway. But Rue, her bouncy hair, and her bouncier tits moved next to me five hundred and thirty-eight days ago, and now I find myself in a horrible new world where I picture her amber fucking eyes while worrying about her safety and happiness and whether she’s getting enough calcium. 

“Fucking creep,” I mutter. “There are diagnoses for guys like you.”

Narcissism. Depression. Antisocial personality disorder. Erotomania. De Clérambault’s syndrome. A whole host of attachment disorders. Thanks to my psychology PhD, I have plenty of words to describe myself. But unlike some of the worst cases I work with as Dr. Mohr, my situation with Rue is actually quite simple: the serial killer next door has a crush, a moral code, and a secret surveillance system. 

In my defense, Pell helped me install hidden cameras in the empty half of the duplex when I bought it in case I needed to stash a new intake there someday. Then I rented it to Rue and realized I had a convenient way to ease some of my concerns about her security.

“Not now, Brady,” I mutter when another text message appears in front of the real-time video of Rue on my phone. I swipe it away and watch as she unlocks and then re-locks the deadbolt on her backdoor, humming to herself as the flip lock and chain lock get the same treatment. If she’d asked me, I could’ve told her that nobody came or went from her side of the duplex today, but I respect that she wants to confirm it for herself.

I kick off my shoes and shrug out of my cardigan, tossing it and my glasses onto the kitchen counter so I can follow her up the stairs as myself, or whatever “myself” amounts to these days. Between interacting with Rue and juggling the increased caseload for my online counseling practice, I’ve been in my mild-mannered Dr. Mohr persona so much that it’s gotten shockingly easy to slip into his skin, like he’s a side of me that’s always been there but never had free rein until I had to embody him so much. There was even a moment today when it seemed like Rue was actually enjoying talking to him — me — and I felt…

“Happy.” I test the word on my tongue, then grimace and scrub my hands down my face, rejecting it immediately. Happy is knowing that Rue feels comfortable in her home and never looks twice at me. And that means making sure she finishes her nightly routine, then leaving her the hell alone for the night.

 First, she’ll check the windows in her guest room as I stand on the other side of the wall, catching the muffled sounds of the actions that I’m also seeing on the video. Next, she’ll move to her bedroom to do the same with the windows there, then she’ll fire up her laptop to review her security footage. At that point, I always close the security camera app because she’s about to change out of her work clothes. I’m okay with enough surveillance to make sure she’s protected from people like me, but I’ve got enough right-from-wrong to avoid any truly heinous invasions of privacy.

Besides, the walls are thin, so I have a pretty good sense of what she does after I power down my app. She cooks dinner, listens to podcasts, watches TV, talks on the phone. When music drifts through the walls, that’s when she’s reading or catching up on work. And of course, she goes for runs and has regular girls’ nights out that tend to go late, and she covers the occasional weekend shift or emergency call for the county coroner’s office. Brady always tells me I should worry about what happens if Rue’s ever called to investigate one of my crime scenes, but the things that concern me when she leaves the house are food poisoning from that disgusting carryout chicken place she loves or her airbags not deploying in a car accident. I rarely follow her out into the world. On the rare occasions that I do, it’s only because she mentioned heading somewhere with limited emergency services coverage, and that’s just common sense.

Tonight’s bedroom routine starts the same as always with window latches and the thunk of the laptop onto the desk tucked into the far corner. But after she finishes with the security footage portion of our evening, she doesn’t move to the dresser on the far side of the room to grab her lounge clothes, which is my signal to shut down the video feed. Instead, she settles on the edge of her bed.

“What are you doing, neighbor girl?” I raise the phone to my face and watch as she kicks off her shoes and rummage through her nightstand drawer, emerging with—

Shit shit shit. That’s an adorable pink vibrator in her hand.

I kill the app and slap my phone to my chest, the now-black screen resting against my pounding heart. I wasn’t prepared for this. Rue only gets herself off once she’s in bed for the night. Not every night, but a few times a week, often when I’ve overheard the clink of a wine bottle against her glass or a couple of explicit chapters in the audiobooks she loves.

I know her masturbation routine. And this is not her routine.

On those nights, once I figure out what she’s doing — again, courtesy of our thin walls and never my cameras — I grab my headphones, turn on a white noise app, and tune out what’s happening next door. Moral code and all that. Afterward, I can only assume Rue drifts off to sleep on a wave of relaxed euphoria while I lay in bed stiff as a board in more ways than one, forcing myself to wait and jack off in the shower the next morning like a gentleman and not a total fucking pervert.

But today? Today, I want to listen. Today, she talked to me, noticed me, touched me. Me, not Dr. Mohr. I saw it in her eyes when she pulled away from me in shock, and I wanted to tear away every bit of artifice and let her see it all. See how much of me she can take. 

A little gasp comes from her side of the duplex, and I press my cheek against the cool wall separating us, my dick straining like it could punch through the plaster to get to her. It’s an invasion, but it’s not like she doesn’t know how well the sound carries between our places. I watch TV, lift weights in my spare bedroom-turned-home-gym, run the blender, vacuum. She’s got to know about the acoustics of this place, right? And I’m not unzipping my pants to join her. I’m just… existing in the next room and holding myself as still as possible. 

This is how she makes my life harder. I’m constantly fighting my cravings around her. Not the dark kinds, thankfully, but the hot, pulsing need that I can only assume other men feel all the time around the person they want. For the first time ever, I want. Want to consume her, to own her completely. 

To know her fully and for her to know me. 

Even though I know that’ll never happen for me — not with her, never with her — my imagination still jumps into overdrive when she gives a sharp inhale. I picture her pressing that little pink toy against her clit. The hair at her temples is probably getting damp with sweat, her long lashes brushing her cheeks when her eyes flutter shut. And her scent, fuck. Clean and floral and like every good thing I never let myself crave until her. I bet it gets deeper, more earthy, as she gets more turned on. More slippery between her thighs, just waiting for someone to fill her up and send her over the edge.

Jesus Christ, what are you doing? 

Using the last of my rational mind, I push myself away from the wall, my cock screaming from the loss of pressure. I’m a lot of fucked-up things, but sex pest isn’t one of them, so I ignore my erection as common sense and boundaries come rushing back in and I remember what I was supposed to be—

Oh fuck. Brady.

I thunder down the stairs, hitting the call button as I do.

“Quinn,” I start, but she cuts me off.

“If I was actually in trouble,” she says in her characteristically flat drawl, “you’d be way too late, motherfucker.”

I spin toward my entry table and grab my keys. “Where are you?”

She laughs. “I said if.”

“And I said go fuck yourself.” I sag against the wall, earning myself another laugh. “If everything’s good, what did you need that was important enough to interrupt my night?”

“Interrupt your nightly neighbor stalking, you mean?”

“Semantics.” It’s on the tip of my tongue to confess to her what just happened. Quinn Brady’s my oldest friend and the keeper of my darkest secrets, and she’d never judge me for it. Of course, that’s because she doesn’t care enough to pass judgement either way on even my worst actions.

Brady and I met as freshmen in our Psych 101 class, killed our first predator together the following year, and have been refining our techniques ever since. But Brady’s even more of a loner than I am and respects the boundaries we both have on anything that could possibly be called intimacy. If I told her that I keep the cameras on and coat the bedroom wall with my come every time Rue gets herself off, she’d just raise her straight, dark brows and say, “Sounds bad for your paint.”

Still, we have dinner twice a month to discuss her exciting advances in murder chemistry and the tiniest refinements to the psychological profiles we’ve collected of our victims, and we always check in with each other after a kill. Always. That’s what she was doing tonight, and I forgot all about it.

Guilt whispers through me, followed by the discomfort of experiencing that emotion in relation to Brady. “Shit, I’m sorry. Are you okay?” I head to my office on the main floor, not wanting to say more until I’m safely inside its soundproof walls.

She laughs, and I hear the sneer in it. “Like one handsy emeritus professor could give me any trouble. It was messy, but it’s handled.”

Dead, she means. And good riddance. 

I settle into my office chair, relaxing now that I’m in my space. Sure, I need privacy for my teletherapy sessions, but these conversations with Quinn are why I sprung for the best soundproofing around. 

“Did you call the cleaner?”

Her silence is loud.

“Brady,” I say. “Do you need Pell?”

“Fuck no,” she snaps. Then she sighs. “Maybe.”

I sigh too. “Give me an address. I’ll reach out.”

She rattles it off, and I encrypt the information to send to our friendly neighborhood fixer. Pell’s damn good at his job, and while he may be too cheerfully psychotic for my taste, there’s enough deep-seeded dislike between him and Quinn that I serve as the middleman more often than not.

“Done,” I tell her. “You hungry?”

“Wellll…”

I know that tone. That’s Brady’s feed me tone.

“French fries?” I ask.

“God, yes. Strangling makes me hungry.”

“Funny,” I say as I stand. “That fills me up for at least a month.”

She laughs again, but I hear the strain around the edges.

“Meet at the place?” she asks.

“Yep. And hey, be ready to tell me everything you know about arsonists.” 

“Arsonists? I thought you were going after that bad landlord.”

Rue’s unhappy face flashes through my mind.

“Change of plans.”

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