Lights out

I blame you for this, I told him.

You’re the one who left the comment, Aly.

Oh, no. You’re not pi

I have no regrets about publicly claiming you.

Claiming me?

Oh, god. No, vagina, do not quiver at that. Damn it. Not you, too, ovaries.

Conscious that I was still being watched, I went completely still and fought the urge to squirm. His declaration was oddly reassuring. Here was a digital record that tied me to him, so if he did wind up murdering me, there would be a hundred thousand witnesses online who could point to him and say, “The boyfriend did it.” He might not have actually been my boyfriend, but they didn’t know that. For all intents and purposes, he’d just insinuated he was.

Was this his way of showing me he didn’t pose a threat?

I shook my head. No, I was not going to be softened by this. He’d filmed me. He was watching me even now. He could have lied about how much he saw the other night. Hell, he might have recorded me. There could already be a video of me fucking myself with a vibrator on a revenge porn site.

I didn’t know this man, and I’d be an idiot to trust him.

I still don’t forgive you, I said.

I’m not asking you to yet, he responded. Meaning, he would later?

I lifted my head and stared at the camera, my thoughts churning like an angry tide. I needed to end this. Tell him to fuck off to space. So why couldn’t I bring myself to do it? Was some deranged part of me actually enjoying this?

My torment must have shown on my face because he texted me.

Just tell me to stop, Aly, and I will.

My thumbs hovered over the screen. I needed to do this. It was the healthy thing. The right thing. Sure, the idea of a man breaking into my house to fuck me was an appealing fantasy, but it was just a fantasy. Real life had shown me there was only one logical conclusion to this madness, and that was my eventual assault or murder.

I managed to type the letter S before my pager went off. I looked down, and all thoughts of the Faceless Man fled from my mind.

Ambulances were pulling up with multiple gunshot victims. There’d been a mass shooting at a nightclub.

I threw my phone into my locker, slammed it shut, and raced into the hall.

Brinley lurched out of the bathroom door as I passed it, and we nearly collided. I slowed down enough to steady her before we took off toward the ambulance bay together.

“On your left!” Tanya yelled, sprinting past us.

“Jesus, she’s fast,” Brinley wheezed as we hauled ass after her.

“She’s a cardio queen,” I told her. “Does three marathons a year.”

“How bad is this going to be?” Brinley asked.

I sent her a sideways look. “The truth?”

She nodded.

“As bad as it gets,” I said.

Twenty hours later, I stumbled out of the hospital. Nearly the entire nursing staff was called in to help with the shooting, and many of my co-workers showed up before we even got to their numbers. When tragedy struck, we knew to come here.

We’d only taken a fraction of the victims. The rest had gone to other ERs and trauma units across the city. Six people were dead, another fifteen had been shot, and twenty more were wounded during the stampede to the bar’s exits.

According to one of the cops collecting witness statements, the shooter had been killed by a heroic bartender. She’d popped up from behind the bar not long after he opened fire, hit him with a baseball bat, and kept hitting him until his head looked like a pulped pumpkin.

She’d saved a lot of lives, but we had at least three people who might still succumb to their injuries. Sadly, this wasn’t even the worst mass shooting I’d seen. Last year, a man had gone to his ex-wife’s place of employment, killed eight people, and injured countless others before a SWAT sniper took him out.

I managed to sleep an hour or two here and there between rushing from one room to another, but it wasn’t enough to combat the fact that I’d been awake for almost forty. This was why I left Fred with so much food and water. My vet kept telling me not to open feed him, that he was starting to get chubby, but I’d rather Fred be overweight than starving every time I got stuck at work like this.

I took the elevator up to the third floor of the parking garage, tugging my heavy winter coat tight when the doors opened, and an arctic blast rushed in. A glance to my right stopped me in my tracks. It was snowing again, coming down in big, fat flakes that the wind blew sideways. Great. Hopefully, the roads weren’t too bad.

I was tempted to turn around and go sleep in one of the bunk rooms reserved for long-shift work, but if I did that, I’d probably only get another hour or two before someone woke me up looking for help. Saying no in those situations was a problem for me, and I knew myself well enough to know that I needed to go home to avoid self-sabotaging, even if that meant taking a taxi or car service.

I just needed to get a few things out of my car first, and then I’d go back inside and order an Uber. It was stupid of me to think I could drive right now. The last thing anyone needed was for me to fall asleep behind the wheel and cause another emergency.

I pulled my gaze from the snow and ambled toward the corner of the parking garage where I’d left my car.

It was ru

I stopped fifteen feet away, staring in confusion. I didn’t have an automatic starter that might explain this. Was I so tired I was hallucinating?

I glanced around, looking for someone else so I could ask if they were seeing what I was, but there was no one nearby. It was three in the morning, and this level was the employee lot. Everyone else was hunkered inside the hospital, trying to save lives.

I blinked several times in quick succession. Nope. Not hallucinating. My goddamn car was ru

My groggy brain finally started to wake up. Was this somehow his doing?

I grabbed my mace from my purse and walked parallel to the car, looking around for anyone waiting to ambush me. The garage was brightly lit, and I didn’t see another soul, but wasn’t taking any chances. I kept my finger on the spray button until the driver’s side came into view. Someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. A large someone. Wearing a hoodie that hid their face.

No. No fucking way.

Without warning, they turned, and I jumped back, hitting the car behind me. The Faceless Man stared out of my window.

Well, I was wide awake now. And not in the mood to be messed with. The gall of this man to pull a stunt like this after the night and day and night I’d had.

He raised a hand and waved at me, then held up a finger like he was asking me to wait before it disappeared, and he looked down. My phone beeped in my purse. I kept my eyes trained on him while I dug around for it.

It took me a long time to read his text because I kept looking down at the phone and back up just as quickly to scan my surroundings. I didn’t trust him not to have an accomplice somewhere nearby, waiting for me to be distracted so they could catch me off guard.

I thought I’d give you a ride home. The weather is shit, and you must be exhausted. It’s not safe for you to drive right now.

I glared daggers at him and twirled a finger, indicating he should roll the window down.

He turned away to type again.

Don’t mace me.

“You are in no position to give me orders,” I called out. He cracked my window the barest slice to hear me better. “There are twenty cops inside that hospital right now, and I know most of them by first name. One phone call, and you’re fucked.”

He turned and started typing.

“Seriously?” I said. “You’re not going to speak to me?”

He shook his head and kept going.

I must know him well enough to recognize his voice if he was going to such an extreme. Who was he? One of the cops I’d just threatened him with? I could think of several who were about his size, and it would explain how easily he’d found me if he’d used government equipment to do it.

I’m just giving you a ride, he said. I saw what you went through, saw how dead on your feet you were as you started to pack your things, and I thought I should come.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and debated screaming for help. “Why would you think that?”

You didn’t tell me to stop, Aly.

I dropped my hand and glared at him. “Because I was interrupted by a goddamn tragedy.”

Say it now, then, he typed, then raised his head to look at me through those soul-sucking black eye holes.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Say it, Aly, I thought. Say it, goddamn it.Just fucking tell him to stop like the mentally healthy, rational person you used to be before his videos took over your social media feed.

I tried to force the words out and felt like I was choking. Fuck. I couldn’t do it. What the hell did that say about me? What did it mean? Was I actually into this?

It’s the exhaustion, I tried to tell myself, but the lie fell flat. The ugly truth was that I’d felt more alive in the past few days than I had in years. Sure, I’d spent half that time terrified, but at this point, fear was preferable to numbness. Until he broke into my house, I’d been living in a world of grays, going about my life like a robot. Work, gym, home, repeat. The brief flashes of feeling that bled through the haze all revolved around this man and his videos.

I let my gaze roam over his mask, and even though he looked out at me from a frozen plastic façade, I swear it looked like the corners of the lips had tipped up in the slight hint of a grin.

I pointed my mace at the cracked window. “Just because I’ve gone stupid enough that I can’t say it right now doesn’t mean I’m getting in the car with the man who broke into my house and filmed me without my consent.”

I hoped the parking garage cameras were recording all this and he hadn’t found some way to freeze or loop them. If someone did jump out and manage to overpower me, it’d be the only visual evidence of what had happened to my dumb ass.

He typed something else, and I was already over this communication style.

Just speak! I wanted to yell.

My phone pinged, and I did the same glance-up-and-glance-down dance I’d been doing the past five minutes.

Look in the passenger seat, he said. You’ll have all the power.

“If someone is waiting to jump me over there, I’m going to murder both of you,” I told him. “I’m not feeling very friendly toward men tonight.”

He nodded like he expected no less and motioned at me to get on with it.