Page 6 of Lady Killer

This time, I didn’t restrain myself. “Does it matter? If you’re willing to sell a drug so someone can rape someone else, how far can you be from committing the act yourself?”

“Legally, they are two very different crimes,” Lucian argued.

“And the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the legal system is not designed to address sexual assaults. Less than 10 percent of cases reported to the police result in a felony conviction. Excuse me for not believing in a system with a 90 percent failure rate.”

“You said that if you hadn’t killed this man last night, he would have killed you,” Lucian said, changing the subject. There was no indication that he had been swayed by my argument.

“I knew that eventually Aaron would come after me again, so I planned ahead. I swiped some of his own stash. Then I waited for the opportunity to present itself.

“I knew Aaron went out every weekend, the same way he knew I stayed home every weekend. I decided to attend the party last night in the hopes that he wouldn’t be able to resist the opportunity to get me alone.”

I found myself nearly breathless.

“And that was exactly what he did, before leading me away and attacking me. If he hadn’t been weakened from the poison, there’s a good chance he would’ve succeeded at raping and killing me. If I hadn’t spiked the punch bowls, I wouldn’t have been able to get away from the party and lure him into the woods where I was able to kill him.”

“How did you ultimately kill him?” he asked.

“I knocked him out, and then I cut his still-beating heart from his chest,” I answered, channeling Everest’s nonchalance.

Lucian’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. The heir to the Blackwell empire could be surprised, after all.

“You cut out his heart?” he repeated slowly.

“Yes.”

Everest jumped in, no longer able to contain himself. “It was magnificent, Lucian, honestly, you should have seen it. I wanted to get some photos but—‍”

“Why?” Lucian asked brusquely, ignoringthe other man.

I chose my words carefully. This was the dicey part. Why had I needed to cut out Aaron’s heart and taunt a known serial killer with some sort of sick obsession with me and inexplicable knowledge of my past?

“Someone has been harassing me since I arrived at Hollow Oak. As I believe you know, it started when someone nailed a pig’s heart to my door. Since then, I’ve been receiving . . . messages. These messages escalated around the same time Aaron first attacked me, and they included information about the murdered girls that no one should have.” I leveled a look at Lucian.

“And you think this person was behind the murders?”

I paused, weighing my thoughts. It was a question that’d been plaguing me since I first realized Aaron had been a sheep. I didn’t have any solid evidence that he was connected to the “Virgin Sacrifice Killer” as Everest had called them.

There was the phone call the sheep took that night in the woods, and before I’d killed him, there was Aaron’s rambling about whether I belonged to him or some other nameless man. Both of which indicated Aaron wasn’t working alone and wasn’t involved in simply selling drugs. But did that make him the killer?

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “My gut tells me he’s involved, but it’s bigger than just him.”

“Then why cut out his heart?” Lucian said, irritated now.

“Because I wanted to send a message, and even if he was innocent of killing those girls, he was still a violent rapist who was going to die soon regardless. As I said, whoever has been harassing me is involved in the killings. They should know that two can play that game.”

“And can you?” Lucian rumbled. “Can you play that game, little girl?”

“Well, Aaron Croft is dead,” I said. “His body is on display near the stadium on campus with his bloody heart atop his chest, so I would argue that I am already playing the game, Mr. Blackwell.”

Chapter three

Lucian

“ . . . I am already playing the game, Mr. Blackwell.”

The unshakable impertinence of this girl was astounding.

When she had padded into my study, leaving damp sock prints in her wake, I immediately recognized her.

---