Page 11 of Lights Out

Living alone in a big city and seeing the worst of what it could do to women on a nightly basis made me paranoid. I had a gun in my car and one more besides the one I now held hidden nearby. I slept with a baseball bat beside my bed and mace and throwing knives on my nightstand within easy reach. Two days a week, I took a hand-to-hand combat course taught by an ex-marine who didn’t go easy on me because I was the only woman in his class.If someone else was in my house right now, they’d be leaving it in a body bag.

I strained my ears as I straightened and slowly approached the bed. I didn’t hear anyone else, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t standing in my closet or waiting beneath my bed, ready to grab my ankle when I got close. With that in mind, I stopped out of arm’s reach and leaned forward, freezing in place for the second time in less than a minute. There was a mask on my bed.

And not just any mask.

Hismask.

I’d stared at it so much over the past several months that I would recognize it anywhere.

I hadn’t lost my mind and imagined my things in his video. That was really my dresser in the corner of the mirror, because he’d filmed the thirst trap I’d been lusting over all night in my actual goddamn bedroom.

Holy shit. What was happening? And what the hell did I do now? Call the cops? Check to see if he was still here?

My vision swam in and out of focus for a heartbeat. What if…what if all the blood in his videos wasn’t fake? What if none of this was a fun little kink for him like it was for the rest of us? What if he was some sort of serial killer hiding in plain sight, and he used his platform to lure his victims to him?

Was I about to be next? Was this the beginning of some twisted game of cat and mouse?

I shook my head. If that were the case, wouldn’t I have noticed all the different bedrooms he filmed in as he taunted his victims? I hadn’t. Aside from the one he shot tonight in here, all his videos had one of three backgrounds – a couch, a wall with red lighting, and a massive bed with black sheets – making this the one exception to the rule.

Why me? And why now?

And why was I so fucking turned on by it when I knew I should run screaming from my house instead?

Chapter 4

Josh

Oh, I’d fucked up. I’d fucked upbad.

The camera I’d discreetly placed in Aly’s room showed her standing several feet from her bed. Her light blue scrubs were rumpled after her marathon shift at the hospital, and strands of hair had slipped free from her braid to frame her face in loose waves. Her dark eyes were huge, an expression of pure disbelief on her face as she stared at the mask I’d left for her.

She lifted the gun she held, bracing it with both hands as she looked around the room. “Is anyone in here?” she called out, loud and clear.

I’d never been so attracted to someone in my life. She looked ready to shoot anything that moved. Thank fuck I hadn’t stayed, or I’d probably be bleeding out on her floor right now.

I quickly went over the entire night in my head, searching for any trace evidence I might have left behind. I’d been so careful while there that I didn’t think there was anything for the cops to find when Aly eventually snapped out of it and called them. Even when I took off my shirt to film the video, I’d left the balaclava on the whole time, so there wouldn’t be so much as a stray hairto give me away. I’d even taken the time to relock her back door and cover my footsteps in the melting snow.

I didn’t put the camera in her room to watch her change or sleep like some sick fuck, though, now that I thought about it…

Wait, no. I needed to stop right the hell there. That road led nowhere good. This invasion of privacy was bad enough without adding sexual predator to my list of crimes.

The reason I put the camera in her room was to gauge her reaction and learn whether or not she meant what she said in all her comments. Was she actually into the same dark shit that I was, or was she just a tourist?

Judging from her open look of horror, she was the latter. Which meant I needed to start implementing my exit strategy. I had orders to cancel, plans to scrap, and cover-up work to do. I’d taken every safety precaution I could think of to obscure my digital footprint, and knew of only three hackers in the US capable of tracing my steps and, maybe, if they were lucky and avoided all the traps I’d left in my wake, finding me. Two of them worked for the NSA, and another one was currently in jail, so I felt safe in my work for now. Plus, I doubted the local cops would go so far as to call in the feds over a run-of-the-mill home invasion in which nothing got destroyed or stolen.

Even my social media account was secure, or as secure as it could be. Anyone who hacked it would be led straight to a mid-thirtysomething dad in Utah with a secret mask kink. He was a real guy named Carl with an actual mask fetish and a matching clandestine thirst trap account his wife didn’t even know about. Our tattoos weren’t the same, and he filmed different content, but the amount of work it would take for cops to figure all that out would give me ample time to cover the rest of my tracks and disappear offline.

Sorry, Carl, but sacrifices had to be made.

I should probably feel worse for the guy than I did, but, like boundaries, empathy was hard for me. Maybe that’s where I’d gone wrong with Aly. I’d been so excited about the prospect of living out our shared fantasy that I hadn’t stopped to consider things from her perspective. What would it be like for a woman living alone to realize a stranger had invaded her home?

I popped up a second tab and split my screen, watching Aly duck down and look under her bed, gun leading the way while I typed in a quick internet search.

The results were not good. Yup, this was where I’d fucked up. According to Google, Aly was probably terrified, angry, and felt like her home was compromised, violated even, turning from a sanctuary to yet another place where she felt unsafe.

How did I make up for such a colossal misstep? Roses? Men in movies and TV were always sending roses. That didn’t seem like enough, though. Maybe if I sent a lot of them?

I popped open another tab, pausing to watch Aly clear the rest of her room like a woman who knew what she was doing. It was hot. Despite her apparent fear, she moved confidently and competently, like she had formal training. And maybe she did. Maybe that self-defense course she took taught her how to do this.

---