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My beeper went off, jarring me out of my thoughts so badly that I almost dropped my phone. Before shoving it back in my locker, I saved the video to my favorites and typed out a hurried, “I have that comforter. This could have been filmed in my bedroom. Let’s goooo, bitches!” knowing all the other people I’d interacted with countless times before in the Faceless Man’s comments would see it and be dying of jealousy by the time I logged back in.
Nine excruciatingly long hours later, I pulled into my driveway and cut the car’s engine, leaning my forehead against the steering wheel. Tonight was shit. Complete and utter shit. Capped off by losing a heart attack patient we thought had been stable. She’d been so young, too, barely fifty, her husband and teenage kids crowded around the bed when the second heart attack hit, watching in horror as we shoved them out of there and tried and failed to save her life.
It was nights like this that made me want to quit. I’d gotten into nursing to save people, and every single death felt like a personal failure. Like it was my fault they hadn’t made it because of some sign I’d missed or test I hadn’t thought to perform.
Logically, I knew that couldn’t be true. It wasn’t like I was alone in treating them. I worked with countless nurses and specialists and doctors, and these feelings were likely caused by my lingering grief over Mom, but it didn’t make it any better or lessen the guilt that wracked me every time we lost a patient.
I made a mental note to bring this up in my next therapy session and got out of the car. Fred came yowling toward me once I was inside, and I scooped him up and smushed him for longer than usual, trying to ground myself in him and trick my brain into thinking happier thoughts.
I put him down when he started squirming, then went straight to the kitchen. Wine was calling my name. I’d held off on drinking since sending that regrettable text to Tyler, but if ever I needed alcohol, it was tonight.
The clock on my stove was blinking, reading 12:00, and it stopped me short. We must have lost power sometime during the night. My house was toasty warm, and the utility company hadn’t sent a message about it like they usually did when it went out, so it must have been a weird blip or something that didn’t last long enough to trigger a notification.
I shrugged and went to the fridge, Fred winding between my legs like he was hell-bent on tripping me. He stayed glued to my shins as I pulled out a fresh bottle of white and poured myself a large glass, extra clingy for some reason. I suppose I had been gone longer than expected again, my scheduled twelve-hour shift turning into sixteen instead. Tomorrow was an off day, so I’d make it up to him then.
Right now, I needed wine and alone time with my phone and vibrator.
You’d think all the blood and trauma I’d seen tonight would distract me from my desire, but I was so used to it that it only did so in the moment. As soon as I had a second to myself again, images of that mask lying on what could have been my comforter swirled to the forefront of my mind. Lust was a natural response to traumatic events, the body wanting a reminder of being alive after skirting so close to death, and I’d long since stopped fighting it.
“I know, buddy,” I said, leaning down to scratch Fred behind the ears. “Just give me, like, ten minutes.” That’s all it would take at this point.
I shut him out of my room, flicked the light on, and froze.
There was something on my bed.
There was something on my bed that I hadn’t left there.
The wine started trembling in the glass as my fingers shook, but I couldn’t force myself to put it down because I couldn’t move. I was completely immobile, held in place by my rising fear. Had someone been in my house? Were they still here? Fuck, was that why Fred had been so insistent? He’d been trying to warn me?
I will not be a victim, I thought, forcing myself to move, to step forward, set the glass and my phone down on my dresser, and drop to a squat as I quietly slid open the bottom drawer and pulled out the gun I kept there.
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.
His mask.
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 begi
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?