To All the Guys I Killed Before sneek peek

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 prologue and first two chapters below.

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PROLOGUE

Rue

“Which one of us is this going worse for, do you think? You or me?” 

I use the toe of my boot to roll the man leaking blood all over his formerly pristine bedroom carpet onto his back, wanting to make sure he heard me.

“B-bitch.” His eyes glint with hatred as he coughs the word out, spraying me with even more blood. Gross, but my bigger concern is that he’s somehow still breathing.

Don’t panic. Pivot.

“Actually, bitch was my mother’s name.” I crouch next to him, inhaling an unpleasant blast of his whiskey breath. “You can call me Rue.” 

Brushing aside his weakly flailing limbs, I jerk his fingers away from the gashes across his throat, hoping to speed up the exodus of blood from his body. But the asshole insists on clinging to the last threads of his miserable life as the seconds tick by.

“Exsanguinate faster, please,” I say over the gurgling noises he’s now making. “You’ve fucked up enough of my plans already.”

I bat away the little voice asking “What plans?” and reach for my knife again. It slips in the blood-slick palm of my glove, so I swipe my hands down my pants and try again, a bead of nervous sweat trickling down my spine. I’ve finally got a good grip on the handle when the wail of sirens cuts through the noise of the college football game blaring away on the television downstairs. 

Well, fuck. It may be time to panic.

Turning my back on the still-dark street in front of the house, I lift my knife to deliver one final slice, but it’s no longer necessary. Ray Overton’s dead, his dull eyes fixed on the ceiling.

I’m good as dead too. Police lights strobe through the windows as two cruisers roar up the driveway, the flashes of red and blue turning the blood coating me, my victim, and the room he used to share with his wife into pools 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. But only one floats to the surface of my unravelling brain.

My neighbor. My insufferable, inescapable fucking neighbor.

He’s the reason Ray Overton is dead.

He’s the reason I couldn’t run.

He’s the reason.

And when the front door splinters under a police battering ram, I can’t stop the satisfied smile that flits across my lips.

Because god help me, it was worth it.

CHAPTER 1

Three 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 for me at the end of the day.

On this particular Monday, I’d managed to avoid ending up on a slab at work, I’d paid my taxes months ago, and I’d steered clear of shellfish. But it’s a day ending in Y, which means Hugo Mohr is going to emerge from 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 right 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.

“He’s already outside, isn’t he?” Felicity asks through my AirPods, amused as always by my daily welcome-home party.

“Of course he is.”

Hugo’s wave as I pull into our driveway is so enthusiastic that he almost trips down the front steps. Not great when he’s clutching enormous gardening shears. I hold my breath until his sensible loafers are on the sidewalk next to his precious rose bushes before I return his greeting, although I drop my polite smile 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?”

“I am yet again begging you to take a pic so I can experience the cable-knit horrors for myself,” Fi says.

“I’m not going to sneak photos of my neighbor for your amusement. He’s not Bigfoot, and I’m not a creep.” That, and some small part of me doesn’t want to share this little bit of Hugo with Felicity—or anyone, for that matter. But I’d rather not examine my weird protective spurt too closely, so I sigh and turn off my car. “I’d better go.”

“You could just stay on the phone with me,” Fi offers.

“No way.” My vehement response surprises both of us, so I hastily add, “The last time I tried that, he looked so sad. It felt like I was kicking a needy, socially awkward puppy.”  

“Your funeral,” my sister says with a shrug so big I can hear it. “Enjoy your time with the virgin next door.”

“Talking to the virgin next door isn’t going to kill me.”

“It could bore your vagina to death.”

“At least death by virgin would be quick,” I point out. “Awkward, but quick.”

“Do you think the cardigan is an emotional condom or a metaphorical hymen?” Fi muses. “Ohh, do you think he wears it during se—”

“Okay, love you! Call you later! Bye!” I singsong over her increasingly disturbing speculations. Then I suck in a deep breath, step out of my car, and brace myself for the full Dr. Bore experience. 

When I finally emerge from my garage, Hugo sets his shears on the bottom step and gives me a salute that’s so hopelessly nerdy, I fear I’ll spontaneously combust in secondhand embarrassment. He is—and there’s no other word for it—cringe. Are the cool kids on TikTok still saying that? I suppose it doesn’t matter when it fits the man in front of me like a worn pair of Crocs.

“Howdy, neighbor girl!”

“Hi, Hugo,” I say with a quick wave. 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 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 nervous tics.

“Congrats on surviving your day.” He falls into step beside me as I walk toward our mailboxes at the foot of the driveway. “Were you working hard—”

“—or hardly working,” I reply. “Ha.” Bless his heart, he trots this line out at least once a week.

“So?” he asks, crossing his arms and leaning against the brick tower housing our mailboxes. “Which was it?”

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

“For me? Hardly working,” I say instead, reaching into my box and emerging with junk mail, junk mail, and more junk mail.

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

Dammit. I forgot how quickly my big, goofy, supersmart neighbor picks up on little details. And he’s doing it while standing, like, right there. 

“You take up too much space.” I scowl up at the man looming over me. 

He responds by shifting an inch closer. “You’re still not used to it?” His tone is so unexpectedly playful that it almost makes me forget his deadly dull conversation, his awful clothes, his embarrassing earnestness.

Almost.

“I promise you, I’ll never get used to it.” 

But I drop my scowl and do something I’ve never done in the year-and-a-half-ish of living next to Hugo: I linger. Hell, I even mimic his crossed-arms mailbox lean as best as I can using all five feet, three inches of me. I’m sure to anyone driving past, it looks like Frodo Baggins trying to have a conversation with frickin’ Thanos. 

If that same passing motorist wanted to risk losing a vital organ to the knife in my front pocket, they might also suggest I was sticking around to unpack some things with the shrink next door. Which I’m not. I’m just sharing my day with my neighbor, like I always do.

Once I’m situated, I tip my head way, way up to meet his gaze, and I find him looking down at me with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. It’s sharp and penetrating, almost hungry, and my stomach flips at the thought of my hapless, sexless, cringey neighbor ravenous for something.

I quickly look away, not so much flustered by Hugo as by the idea that he’d be able to fluster me at all. But when I look back, that’s dorky Dr. Mohr grinning at me once again. There’s no knowing glint in his eyes, just his awful, hunched-up posture that I’ve been privately attributing to some kind of spinal condition.

I shake my head, annoyed at myself for projecting dark and mysterious onto white bread wholesomeness, and try to recall what we were talking about before my imagination went on a walkabout.

 “Sorry, you were asking about my day,” I say, mentally sifting through today’s cases for the least hair-raising ones to share with him. “Things were pretty calm at my office, but it was a wild weekend for the police. They had people out there using all kinds of found objects as weapons.” 

“Oh yeah? Like what?” A smile lights up his face, and as he pushes his glasses up his nose, I yet again ponder the waste of potential that is Hugo. 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, sure, but they’re constantly covered by lumpy knitwear. Tree-trunk thighs, maybe, but it’s tough to tell when they’re covered by pleated khakis? Absurdly square jaw… 

Okay, that one’s good no matter what. Truly, it’s a crime against humanity that this mandible was gifted to a man with the fashion sense of an eighteenth-century Quaker instead of someone who—

“Rue? Did I lose you?” His question interrupts my wandering thoughts, and I clear my throat and try to recall what we were talking about.

“I’m here. The weapons…” I think back to the cop chatter I picked up when I arrived to investigate the OD. “Um, there were some broken bottles and pool cues, that kind of thing. No fatalities, so nobody from my office got called in. But apparently, one woman squirted ketchup 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 bland, pleasant smile 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 I swiped, 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 nonviolent 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. “There’s something else, isn’t there?” 

Too perceptive. 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 eighty-eight-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. “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? What else 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 a good foot taller than me is way less appealing if he’s stopping every two seconds to stare into my eyes or to make sure 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 me, thanks.

“Rue.” Hugo goes full Dr. Mohr, disrupting my attempt 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 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 the next thing I know, my hand is resting on that wrist I’d been contemplating. It’s warm and solid. Strong. I bet I’d barely be able to wrap my fingers all the way around it. 

What the hell, Rue?

I snatch my hand back in mild horror. I do not touch my neighbor, and he reminds me of exactly why that is when he spins away from me to plant his hands on his hips and squint up 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 continue to contemplate the girth of his wrists.

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.

“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 a 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 dinner party or have friends over to watch a game, and that goes double for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever guys like Dr. Bore might be into. No signs of life whatsoever beyond the occasional snatches of music or, like, PBS documentaries that permeate our shared wall.

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 good night, 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 of life I thought I saw in Hugo’s eyes. It tugged at my gut, and now that I’ve touched his skin and felt the muscles and sinew and bone underneath, I can’t shake the thought of pulling that brief flash of awareness back to the surface. That, or 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.

“Girl, get a grip,” I mutter. “You do not want to fuck the huge-ass bore next door.”

I just need to purge these thoughts about my neighbor’s pleasingly girthy wrists so I can get back to 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 speed walk inside. The roses will have to wait while we walk through her nightly security protocols 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 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 psychologist 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 well-being.

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 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 that someone might use to explain why I am the way that I am. 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.

Another text message pops up in front of my Rue feed.

“Not now, Brady.” I swipe it away and watch as Rue unlocks and then relocks the dead bolt on her back door, 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, prepared to find bitterness. Instead, it’s tart and sweet, and that’s because today instead of rushing into her house, Rue stayed. She talked to me, noticed me. Touched me, not Dr. Mohr. I saw it in her eyes, and I had to physically turn away from her to choke down the urge to shred every bit of artifice and let her see it all. Find out how much of me she can take. 

I grimace and scrub my hands down my face, forcing myself to focus on the reality of my situation. Happy will never be anything more than making sure Rue feels comfortable in her home and never looks twice at me beyond our brief conversations every day. And that means making sure she finishes her security routine, then leaving her the hell alone for the rest of 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. She also goes for runs and has her regular Thursday ladies’ nights out that keep her away from home until the wee hours, which frees me up to pursue my own extracurricular activities without having to make up excuses for my late-night comings and goings.

It’s also convenient that she covers the occasional weekend shift or emergency call for the county coroner’s office. I should probably worry about what’ll happen if she ever investigates one of my scenes, but no, the things that actually 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 almost never 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 lift the phone to my face and watch as she kicks off her shoes and rummages through her nightstand drawer, emerging with—

Shit shit shit. She’s got the pink vibrator in her hand.

I kill the app and slap the phone to 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.

Thanks to these thin walls, I’m painfully familiar with 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 almost 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. Do I occasionally wrap my hand around my cock at the thought of her twisting with pleasure mere feet away from me? Yes. More than occasionally. But even though I’m tempted every fucking time, I’ve never once pulled up her bedroom camera. I stick to my imagination like the goddamn gentleman serial killer I’ve always been and get myself off as quietly as possible, biting my lip to keep from shouting her name.

But today, I want to listen. Want to watch.

A little gasp comes from her side of the duplex, and I press my cheek against the cool wall separating us, my dick straining to 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 listen to music, lift weights in my spare bedroom-turned-home-gym, run the blender, vacuum. She’s got to know about the acoustics of the duplex, 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.

Even though I know it’ll never happen—not with her, never with her—the dark corners of my mind still jump 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 slippery between her thighs, just waiting for someone to fill her up and send her over the edge.

That person can’t be me, but maybe, just this one time, I could watch. 

My fingers are creeping toward my phone when the last shred of my rational mind comes roaring back online. 

Jesus Christ, what are you doing? 

I push myself away from the wall, my cock screaming from the loss of pressure. I’m a lot of fucked-up things, but actual pervert isn’t one of them. I ignore my erection and run through the list of boundaries that have kept me hidden in plain sight for almost fifteen years, which includes no close, personal connections other than—

Oh fuck. Quinn.

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

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

“If I was actually in trouble,” she says in her characteristically flat tone, “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.”

I sag against the wall with a hugely audible exhale, 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. She’s never passed judgment on a single fucked-up thing I’ve done.

Quinn and I met as freshmen in our Psych 101 class, eliminated our first predator together the following year, and have been refining our techniques ever since. But she’s even more of a loner than I am and puts some tall damn fences up around anything that could possibly be called intimacy. I could tell her that I keep the cameras on, dress in a clown costume, and coat the bedroom wall with my cum every time Rue gets herself off, and 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 I’ve made to the psychological profiles we’ve collected on 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 an emotion that strong in the first place.

“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 rapey emeritus professor could give me any trouble. It was messier than expected, but it’s handled.”

Dead, she means. And good riddance. 

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

“How messy? 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 the best at what he does, and while he’s too unapologetically psychotic for my taste, there’s enough deep-seated dislike between him and Quinn that I end up acting as the middleman more often than not.

“Done,” I tell her. “Hungry?”

“Wellll…”

I know that tone; that’s Brady’s feed-me tone.

“Fries?” I ask.

“God, yes. Murder makes me hungry.”

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

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

“Meet at the place?“

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

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

Rue’s face flashes through my mind, her trying and failing to hide her distress this afternoon, and I don’t even hesitate.

“Change of plans.”

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