Page 21 of The Sinners Gambit

“Do you ever kill . . .” Naomi pauses and finally looks a bit shaken up, her eyes dilating. “Do you ever kill outside of these walls?”

“No, I like things contained where I can control the situation.” I take in my bottom lip. “But there was once that I did. It was . . . it wasn’t great . . .”

Her whole body starts to vibrate. “What wasn’t great about it? Killing an innocent?” she seethes.

At least she’s finally acting like I expected her to.

“Hmm. Let me show you something else.” I motion toward another door.

“We’re not done with this,” she says, but she follows and waits as I get it open. “Is there anyone here besides me right now?”

“No. No one else.”

Naomi walks into my trophy room for all my kills. There are years and years of momentos in here from each glorious moment with my victims. I always surpass the eight yearly required kills for the Society.

Her jaw drops. “These are. . .these are your trophies?” she sounds horrified.

“Yes.” I grab a bloody baseball card. “This one’s from a few weeks ago, it belonged to a guy who broke into a family’s home to rob them. But he didn’t stop there . . . he sexually assaulted every member of the family.” The horror on her face mirrors what mine was when I heard this story. “Sodomized the father with a broom. Raped and brutalized the mother. But the worst . . .” I choke up with anger and sadness at the memory. “The worst was what he did to the little girl . . .”

Naomi’s hand jumps to her mouth in a gasp. “He deserved it,” she says after a moment.

“The card was all he had on him when I grabbed him.”

“And this one?” She points to a perfume bottle.

“She was kidnapping men, women, children—anyone she could get her hands on. She was experimenting on them to bottle up their unique scents.”

She balks and walks farther down. “This one?” she asks, picking up a fake police badge.

“Would pull women over at night with the guise that he was the police, and rape them with his gun, knife, or whatever he had—before finishing off with himself,” I say, picking up the trophy and placing it back on the shelf.

“Are they in any particular order?” she asks as she scans the room. It’s like she’s looking for something. Maybe a reason to be disgusted?

“Yeah, chronological. If you go to the farthest end of the room, it’s stuff from when my kills started, the front is more recent.”

She quickens her pace to the back. “How old were you when you started?” I’m glad she’s asking questions and not fully shutting down, but I hate thinking about that first kill.

“I was eighteen. . . and it was in a fit of rage and the only one not in a contained space.”

Her eyes snap back to me, and there’s something there. “Do you have a trophy from that?” she asks curiously.

“I do,” I say as I follow her to the back. “But it’s more a reminder to never let myself lose control again.”

“Which one is it?” she asks, turning back to the trophies.

I purse my lips, wanting to know more about what's going on with her. “It’s this one. It’s a gold pocket watch.” I pick it up off the shelf, but I feel my hands shaking. Opening it, I show her that it has two parts. You unclasp the first part to show the clock, but there is a second one with a family picture. “It was this man in the picture . . .”

“A man?”

“Yeah . . . a man. Why? Did you think it was a woman?”

“Well, yeah. You seem to have so much remorse. So I assumed it was a woman. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen too muchCriminal Minds,” she word-vomits out. I still don’t fully believe her, but I let it go for now.

“Hmm. I felt remorse because I brutalized him . . .” I take a deep breath. “And . . . I had the wrong guy . . .”

Naomi’s jaw drops, but I can’t continue with what happened.

“Tell me,” she implores when a long silence fills the space.

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