Page 23 of The Madness Within

Chapter Seven

??The Watcher in the Dark

Dorian

They always looked so confident when they left the courtroom.

As if a verdict made them clean again. As if I didn’t walk them out only to bleed them dry in the end.

Like lambs, smiling at the butcher… Unaware the hands that shook theirs would be the last to ever touch them.

Justice wasn’t blind.

She just waited until the lights went out.

Richard Nance - Human trafficker.

Richard Nance thought the worst was over when the jury came back not guilty. Thought the courtroom absolved him.

It didn’t. It damned him.

Because the moment the gavel fell, he became mine.

I let him bask in his freedom. Watched him celebrate in velvet lounges, drink champagne like it didn’t taste like rot in his throat.

I followed him.

For weeks.

His pattern was a clockwork lullaby, gym, club, penthouse. Girls. Always younger. Always desperate. Always broken afterward.

He liked them pliable. Liked the ones who couldn’t scream anymore.

They found a few, strangled, bitten, dumped in motel bathtubs with hair shaved clean and wrists sliced neat.

But not all.

Some were never found. Just whispers of trauma and a name… Richard.

I tailed him in shadow. A ghost behind his eyes. I hacked his cameras, looped his alarms, sat outside his building in a car that didn’t exist.

Then I slipped inside his life.

Piece by piece.

The night I took him, he was drunk. Laughing. Hands all over a girl with a bruise the shape of his watchband.

I watched him stumble through the back of the club, pants undone, predator’s smile stitched to his face.

That’s when I took him.

He woke hanging upside down in my kill room, no sound but the buzz of flickering lights and the groan of pipes behind walls thick with mildew and regret.

Naked. Shackled by the ankles.

Bleeding already from the hooks I’d buried through his tendons.

I didn’t use blades.

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