Page 7 of Psycho

I could still hear the sounds from outside, but it was much quieter in here, and for the first time all night, I felt like I could finally breathe.

I opened the drawer beneath the desk for a pen and stopped when I found a white rose there.

A white rose that hadn’t been there this morning.

This made 353 white roses I had received over three years.

I blinked.

I had been scared during the first twenty white roses, then frustrated and angry around the fiftieth rose, but now…

I was just wary.

I had a stalker.

He had been watching me for three years now. A few months after my seventeenth birthday was when the first rose arrived.

The months after that were probably some of the scariest of my life, when I didn’t know what he wanted with me and was so damn afraid he would take me as I walked down the street. And knowing the neighborhood I lived in, I doubted anyone would have tried to help.

But he hadn’t done anything but give me the roses, and perhaps watched me, though I had never caught him.

I picked up the rose and let my fingers play with the soft petals before I placed it back in the drawer, grabbed the pen, and shut it closed.

Two hours later, Dad finally walked in.

“Man, was it a good idea to take on Brody,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

Brody was his newest fighter.

He was probably somewhere in his late twenties, and he was good.

I didn’t talk to him all that much.

He was quiet and rough-looking.

Dark brown hair in a buzz cut, tattoos that covered the entirety of his body save for his neck and face, and dark brown eyes. Brody was intimidating in every sense of the word.

He was also built like a tank, and this was the seventh match he’d won.

I was usually wary about the fighters that came through, but Brody hadn’t done anything to make me feel aswary of him as the others.

I noticed that he watched me sometimes, though.

Not in the creepy way I got from the men here—especially those who worked for Dad—but in a way that made me feel like he was looking out for me.

Plus, he had driven me home on several occasions, especially after a late night when Dad left me here and went off to either get high or drunk or fucked.

And when Robbie, one of the security guards, had grabbed me last week, Brody had been there. It looked like he wanted to break Robbie’s wrist for touching me, though he didn’t.

I was almost disappointed, even if I was never really one to get into violence, especially because of the way I grew up.

I sat still as Dad walked around the office, rambling about one thing or another.

I usually just filtered out most of the words he said.

He looked down at all the cash I had laid out on the desk. “Remember to take away fifteen percent of the profit and put it in the safe.”

I nodded.

---