Page 13 of The Madness Within

I stood slowly, eyes sweeping the blood-stained room, walls still papered in clouds and happiness.

This was where it happened.

Where he snuffed out the woman who trusted him most, then played grieving father for the cameras.

Tonight, the truth would be louder than grief.

The shadows responded to my command, wrapping around the room like theater curtains, projecting the lie the world would see.

The real carnage would vanish beneath the illusion I crafted, Victor, bound and mutilated not by me, but by the memory of what he did.

I laid him on the carpet, spine contorted, wrists slashed.

I let the illusion drip red in all the right places. A pillow nearby, the fabric soaked to suggest he’d been smothered byguilt. A child's lullaby playing faintly from an old cassette player, rewound on repeat.

And left behind, nestled in the blood pooling beneath his ruined body, was a single obsidian scale, slick with shadow, sharp at the edges, like a final verdict etched in silence.

My signature.

Always just enough to whisper to those who dared to look too close.

They’ll find him like that. No one will question the scene. It will look like suicide. Remorse.

The way cowards die when haunted by sins they swore they'd buried. But you and I both knew better.

This wasn’t suicide. This was sentencing.

And I was the judge.

Brielle Knox – The Heiress Cannibal.

She wore Chanel to court and painted her nails blood red, coincidental, I was sure.

Several young men. Missing. Drained. Disposed of like bad wine.

Found scattered, some in dumpsters, some in water, all reeking of elegance and rot. Pale. Hollow. Their blood replaced with bleach and perfume. The tabloids called it tragic. I called it a message.

She cried on the stand, voice trembling just right. Played the misunderstood socialite. The victim of circumstance. Daddy’s lawyers didn’t do their job.

That’s why she came to me.

Because I did.

I shredded the prosecution, smiled at the cameras, and walked Brielle right through the front doors in six-inch Louboutins and a smirk sharp enough to gut God.

She whispered “thank you” like it was foreplay.

But I wasn’t hers.

I was just waiting for the right time to collect.

She liked to hunt young men.

Boys just shy of manhood, fragile, hungry, impressionable. She drained them in alleys, in hotel rooms, in her penthouse soaked with incense and sin.

Seven confirmed. Several still missing. I knew where one of them was, though. Pieces of him were buried in her orchids.

I watched her for a week. Memorized her movements. Her weaknesses.

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