Danny Johnson X Reader - Blog Posts

Fixation

Chapter 28: Backstabber

Mentions of: Past Abuse/Miscarriage, Stabbing, Death, Blood, Slight Gore, etc.

Tags: @froegis @dead-bxxxtch-walking @vandeaad @mama-miya @darthwhorecrux @stwbwwychan

“No.” That was the first word that slipped from your mouth, as you stared at his face, watching him stand with the Ghostface mask in hand. You couldn’t help but gape at his face. His bare, revealed face. “No, no, no.”

Jed Olsen. Your boyfriend. The guy you fell for. He was Ghostface. It all made so much sense now. It was so obvious. It was right under your nose, and you never even realized.

How could you be so blind? How could you be so stupid? You had promised yourself you would figure out who he was, but you chose to ignore all the warning signs. You only saw what you wanted to. You were such an idiot.

“I know you must have a lot of questions. I mean, what do you even call me? Danny, Jed, Ghostface? For the record, Danny or Ghostface is just fine.” He winked at you with a smirk. Your reaction was even better than he ever imagined.

“Why- why are you doing this?” You asked, still in shock, various emotions overwhelming you. He shrugged. “You’re the expert, you tell me.”

Your eyes went down to Alex, whose body was sprawled out on the floor, blood still seeping into the cracks and holes on the ground. “You killed him. I still can’t believe you killed him.”

“You’re welcome.” He said in a sing-song voice, leaning against the wall and still catching his breath a bit after what just happened.

“He was my ex fiancé. When I first met him, I thought he was perfect. Talented, smart, handsome, a little bit cocky, but it was okay. But after a while, he started getting possessive, controlling almost every part of my life. And then he started hurting me. It just kept happening again and again and it wouldn’t stop. I- I got pregnant, and he pushed me down the stairs, and- I managed to get away from him for awhile, but I always wanted to make him pay for what he did. I hated him.”

“Seems like you got a knack for falling for the wrong guy, sweetheart. It’s a good thing I killed that bastard.” Danny grinned, walking over, and tapping his knife to your chin, trailing it down to your throat. You let him, not even flinching. “Are you going to kill me?”

That made Danny pause. If he was being honest with himself, he had no idea what he was going to do with you. For once, he didn’t plan everything out.

Suddenly, there was the sound of sirens, making Danny jump. Police sirens. Ambulance sirens. It was just before dawn, the sky a light purple and red outside. Flashes of red and blue lit up through the window, illuminating the once dim house.

“Shit. Someone must’ve heard and called the police.” He muttered, slipping his mask on. “What now?”

While you were panicking, Ghostface seemed cool and collected, like he handled this before, which wasn’t too surprising. “C’mon.”

He picked you up by the undersides of your thighs, making you yelp in surprise. You wrapped your arms around his neck, letting him carry you out bridal style through the backdoor of your house.

The next thing you knew, you two were leaving town, in a car Danny stole. He had changed out of his Ghostface clothes, and was driving down the highway. You were with him now, and honestly, you were fine with it.

You rested your chin on your hand, looking out the window, and feeling your eyes grow heavy, before you eventually succumbed to sleep. This was your life now. Wherever Danny went, you went with him.

--

You awoke to being pushed onto the ground, hard. Wherever you were, it was cold, wet and damp. It was early morning, a light fog all around. You looked around to see who had done it, but there was nothing, no one.

“Danny?” You called out, trying to get to your feet, before you were knocked to the ground again. This time, you could see who it was.

“Right here, sweetheart.” He said from behind you. He was in Ghostface attire, sitting on your back and straddling you. You were so confused. What was happening? What was he doing?

“While this has been nice, and I’ve had lots of fun, it seems like your time is up. I would let you live, but I like to work alone.” That was when you felt the first stab.

You cried out, feeling the knife getting jammed into your back, trying to fight him off, squirming underneath him, but it was no use. He was too heavy, and you already felt so weak.

Then he jammed the knife into your side a couple of times, before shoving it deep into your back, all of the blade inside you. Tears of pain streaked down your face, as you felt him pull you back by your hair, and take one last picture of both you and him together.

You stared at the camera, feeling the blood spill through your mouth, the flash blinding you. After the picture was taken, he pulled the knife out, stepping back.

Everything was starting to get blurry and dark, and you could hear Danny’s voice, but you couldn’t understand what he was saying. All you could wonder is how you could let him do this to you? You fought so hard, and you just let yourself die like this. You let yourself trust him.

A thick, dark fog began rolling in, beckoning you. Were you dead? Was this hell?

Using all your might, you crawled towards the fog, hearing a low voice whispering into your ear. The darkness completely engulfed you, and no longer did you feel pain. Instead, you felt nothing, numbness, as you stayed there, in the void.

Eventually, the fog lifted, and you were standing on your feet, in some sort of dense, dark, unfamiliar forest. You cautiously walked through the forest, a strange feeling of dread and anxiety looming over you.

But then you felt another feeling. A more familiar one. That you were being watched. Suddenly, you felt a gloved hand grab your mouth, pulling you back. “Hey Dollie, ya miss me?”

CHERRY WAVES MASTERLIST

divider by @faeberrywine

ghostface!dannyjohnson x reader

Danny just had to save you. He just had to save your poor sad life. Knocking your sad frail body against fake plastic tiles. Shoving his fingers down your throat like a kid fishing for pennies. What was it you wrote in your diary? Your shiny white masked knight in a black shroud? Well how cute. Maybe it was time he kept a pet around.

Just to play or course.

18+ : eventual smut, themes of suicide (reader attempts), selfharm, sexual content, murder, themes of violence

Read here on AO3 !

or

prologue

chapter one

chapter two

chapter two and a half

CHERRYWAVES:TWO

Ghostface! Danny Johnson x f!reader

Danny just had to save you. He just had to save your poor sad life. Knocking your sad frail body against fake plastic tiles. Shoving his fingers down your throat like a kid fishing for pennies. What was it you wrote in your diary? Your shiny white masked knight in a black shroud? Well how cute. Maybe it was time he kept a pet around.Just to play or course.18+ : eventual smut, themes of suicide (reader attempts), selfharm, sexual content, murder, themes of violence

ao3 one masterlist

‘Want to see something gross?’ is spelled out across in blue biro on a post-it note, the bright yellow clings to your computer screen. You look up at Jed whose eyebrow is raised at you. Eyebrows furrowing in return. You watch him spin giddily in his chair, black converse tapping against the floor. You fight the urge to smirk, lips pursing at his actions. Pretending to think about it. 

You shrug and nod. “Come on then”, Jed rises, stepping over to your desk and grabbing your hand. He pulls you over to the dark room and now you're seriously confused. 

You step inside, cloaked in red, he pulls the light switch, squinting as your eyes adjust to the harsh light, you wait in anticipation. Jed smiles down at you and points to the photos hanging over on the wall. You look over. The photos are in black and white so it’s hard to make out what's actually going on. Black spills over the floor. Police are standing over something. It's blackened on the paper and you look up at him. ‘What is it?” 

“Look closer” He pushes your back until your nose nearly hits the page, the smell of chemicals still on the page. You strain your head back. Eyes focusing on the photo’s.

 And then you gasp. Your body tenses. It's a dead body. Blood spilling out like ink spilled over the paper, it's hard to see in the alley way, but the way Jed has shot the photos you can make up the paleing eyes of the victim “Jesus, Jed! Why were you there?” your eyes search the pictures in front of you.

He folds his arms over his chest,“Adam was all uneasy with reporting the murders so Mike asked if I wanted to stop writing fluff pieces and start on real crime” he pauses ,“They think it's him, the killer” 

“Why?”,you shake your head, and then look at another photo, a detective stands at a wall, gloved hand pressing into the bricks, he looks pained, as if he knew the guy.

“Well, the same weapon was used” he mutters, leaning against the wall,“the coroners say the weapon was a knife about inch wide and seven inches long, matches the same stab wounds as the Small brothers”

You sigh, looking at Jed he fiddles with the buttons of his shirt a bit, you take in his outfit. Black Dickies, white shirt, you wonder what he wears when he's home. “Do you think he did this? In an investigative journalist way?”

“No” 

“Huh, why?” your eyebrows raise.

“I'm not sure, I mean first he attacked two guys right outside their house, that seems planned out. But this? well”.You watch as Jed thinks, his hand stroking his chin as his head turns. Your back brushes the cold wall. “I think the killer plans his shit out, he's smart. Why risk getting caught killing some kid in an alleyway? And it is florida, it's probably some gang crime” 

You nod, scraping your shoes against the floor. “So the cafe piece is your last normal, happy article huh?” you smile. 

He grins in return, “oh yeah, time to write about some horrid decrepit loner killer that probably jerks it to porn in his mom's basement”

“Oh! I don't know, maybe he has his own basement”

ANOTHER FOUND DEAD

Jed olson

Junior journalist 

Photo by Jed olson 

See page four for more details 

On the late hours of Friday the 11th. The body of twenty-two year old Jack Stevens was found by a passer by. Jack had been out on run that night, his girlfriend Stella had reported his running route would take him past the same alleyway he was found in. Stella voiced concern about him not coming back that night with a friend over the phone, and was later confirmed to be correct when the police had arrived at her house, “He was always so quiet, he kept to himself, it was just him, the dog and I most nights, unless we played a board game round my mums, it wasn't like him to just run out and not say anything, so when he didn't come back after an hour i knew something was wrong” 

Police have reported the same weapon was used on this victim as the Small brothers, is the work of a serial killer at large? Or are crime rates really increasing in this little town ? 

If you have any information please contact Detective Moore at the RPD +(000) 000 000

Jack’s funeral will be held at Jameson and Jones funeral home at 11am on sunday, any friends and family will be welcome to join. 

“Do you wanna come for drinks on wednesday?” Jed’s leaning over your computer. You're trying to get the brightness right on a photo of girl scouts that raised money for a memorial bench for the Small brothers. The deaths had really affected the small town and the boy scouts had shut down after only a couple of weeks when no one wanted to take over. Now the group had formed into a disjointed version where baking and making crossbows happened in the same hall, inches apart from each other.

“Who's going?” you look around the office.

“Well, Me and a couple of my friends, then Mike said he'd stop by for a beer, and Linda said she has book club at 8 so she’ll stop by for a glass of wine, and then maybe you?” he grins. 

“Yeah okay! Straight after work?” 

He nods. “Great!”

You get home early that night after taking some photos of a new monument set up in the local park for some random pioneer. Your apartment is a mess, you quickly boil some pasta and shove all your clothes into a basket to take down to the laundry room. You change your sheets while you're at it. Then pour some tomato and cheese sauce over the pasta that's been drained off all water. 

You eat quickly, grabbing your keys and a book then cradle the laundry basket to your hip and walk down to the basement floor. The stairs are a pain in the ass when you’re on the fifth floor, but you know it's the reason your rent is so cheap, every other place with an elevator is expensive due to costs. 

The washing machine beats into the wall, you've got about 30 minutes left on the wash cycle and then you can put it in the dryer for twenty. Usually you'd come back up to your apartment, but it had felt like someone was watching you recently, even with your blinds shut, it had felt like someone was so close to you. You could almost feel their breath against your neck. It had only started a couple of weeks ago, the feeling of being watched, and now the murders had started it felt like there was danger so close by. Especially after your little visiter. You wonder if he was stopping by to keep an eye on you or if he was too busy with the murders.

Danny Johnson sits in his black truck, hands beating against the steering wheel as the music thumps through the speakers. Sally Hughes takes a great big bite of a burger and then wipes off the ketchup that has spilled over her son's arm. Danny watches as her perfect blonde hair bounces as she laughs. He takes a big swig of his milkshake and shovels fries into his mouth, he chews quickly. It’s like watching something out of a sitcom, the window in the diner is his own personal TV screen.

“And then this alien comes out of nowhere with this claw ! And rips this girl into bloody bits! And yeah it's stolen from Alien or whatever, but the blood Jed! The Blood wasn't clear or milky and sweet like most B movies, it looked so real. Like it was a deep red and clung to the actors.” Piper chews her burger before carrying on, shes perched against the door and the seat, forcing  her self into the nook of the car so she can get a better look at Jed  “I know you hate that shit and prefer like grotty serial killer, giallo’s or whatever but you have to see it, its like a fucking snuff film, you know? Filmed on a camcorder and CCTV footage.” 

Piper was sort of a plain looking girl, the only discernible quality she had was the long blonde hair that fell to her waist, she was twenty three years old and worked at the arthouse cinema about thirty minutes away. They had met at a showing of the red shoes , it wasn't exactly Danny's kind of movie, but he had wanted to check out the area anyway. The discussion of movies had ended in him walking her home, then they would meet every week for a coffee and a mid-day movie where she worked. He had thought, what's a friend in all this? Might as well get an alibi right? But then she had pulled him in for a kiss outside a book store on main and Danny wasn't looking for anything relationship wise, he much rather save his energy for murder and stalking, not sex. Danny had felt nothing. It was like paper against paper. But a girlfriend was normal. A girlfriend meant the guys at the Gazette would stop asking if he wanted to take their daughters out. 

Danny had soon realised his mistake when he saw you, glossy eyes, someone who wasn't going to chat his ear off about shitty horror movies. Someone interesting. Someone who could love Danny for himself. He hadn't exactly thought about murdering Piper, unless he wanted to get caught, but sometimes after laying beside her soft snoring body he had thought about faking her suicide, something that wouldn't hurt her. As much as he didn't care, breaking up would be far easier.

“Jed? Are you listening?” Piper slurps up her cherry coke, fiddling with her rings “you keep looking over at that kid, are you okay?” Piper mutters, voice hinting at concern, her hand reaches out to his arm. 

“I just thought he was bleeding, but he spilt ketchup down his arm” Jed shrugs, he smiles back at her and then looks at the time.Ten pm, it's not like she had a curfew or anything but Jed had special plans, he had to pop by his little pets home for a quick check up, and then, if Sally was an all clear. He would rip her to shreds on his knife. “I gotta write some stuff up at the office, is it okay if I drop you back?” 

“Yeah, of course” Piper smiles, she collects the garbage from the truck and shovels it into a paper bag. “I'll just pop this in the bin.” 

Jed watches Piper shuffle out the truck, her red hair swaying in the light breeze as she approaches the fry shaped bin, his head turns. Dark eye’s settle on Sally Hughes as she zips up her pink crushed velvet tracksuit, she takes little Joe's hands on her own and wipes them with a wet wipe. She swings her camel purse over her shoulder as she holds Joe’s tiny hand. Pulling him out of the fast food joint and into her white car. 

He watches you through the window, sliding the plastic washing basket on the floor and slumping into the couch. Your hair falls down the side as your leg lifts onto the back, then your other leg. He can tell you're bored. Your phone rings and your head shrugs to the side to the noise, you never really got phone calls. Unless it was important. 

You lift yourself off the sofa and trudge over to the phone. Taking the receiver off the wall, your finger loops round the thick coils. “Hello?” you mutter. Danny can just make out your expression on your face. He doesn't speak as he holds the phone to his ear. 

You look confused. You roll your eyes at the obvious silence. And slam the phone back onto the wall, pulling a cupboard door open and slinking out a bottle of whiskey. It's the same one he saw laying on the floor that night. You pour some in a glass and knock it back. He calls again, watching your angry stomps to the phone, you pull it up to your ear. “Hello?” you sigh and cradle your face. “Jesus christ, just fucking say something” your voice spills out over the phone in a hard hush. 

“Watch yourself” Danny mutters, He hangs up and watches you cradle the receiver against your ear. You look down and then towards the bathroom. The phone falls as you shuffle your feet towards the door, it swings angrily into the wall. You come back into the lounge, knife in hand. A hunting knife, your dads old one. Buck 110, 3.75 stainless steel blade, with a wooden handle, lockback locking mechanism. He had already felt the weight of the knife in his hand, smaller than the one he used himself. Lighter too, he had stood in your bathroom, mask off in front of your mirror and traced his neck with the blade, wondering if you'd ever have the guts to slice his own throat when he would inevitably break in for a quick catch up. 

You pull the blade out and look down at the sharp edge. Walking over to the phone to hang it back up. You pull your jeans down, sliding them over your thighs in a quick recession. Standing over close to the window and then tracing over your thighs with the knife. Danny wishes he had brought his camera. You look out the window. Eyebrows furrowing. Your eyes are searching for something. Him. But Danny slinks into the shadows. His white mask encased in darkness. He pulls out his notepad and writes down something quickly. 

Lips pursing as you shrug your shirt off over your head. You raise an eyebrow and then trace the knife up your arms. Then down your chest. You sigh. Rolling your eyes until you hold the knife against your throat. Gripping tightly. He watches your hands pale around the knife's handle and you push into your throat he sees a dribble of blood fall onto your collarbone. He waits. Your eyes tear up and the knife clatters to the ground. 

You look towards the phone on your wall. Shaking your head and grabbing your clothes from the floor. You walk into your bedroom. Danny stand’s slowly. Clawing at the outside of your window to lift it up. He slides in carefully. Moving with ease against the creaky wooden floor. He picks the knife up from the ground, and pierces the blade through the note, watching blood seep into the picture, He hears your shuffles through your hallway. Taking a quick exit, he watches you from the window standing just in plain sight. You lift the note from the floor. He watches your chest move up and down quickly. Your mouth twitching at the sides as he watches you unfold the letter and close the buck with one hand. Blue ink is smudged across the letter. 

‘Thanks for the show’ 

You don't look up.

Cherry Waves : one

Ghostface! Danny Johnson x f!reader

Danny just had to save you. He just had to save your poor sad life. Knocking your sad frail body against fake plastic tiles. Shoving his fingers down your throat like a kid fishing for pennies. What was it you wrote in your diary? Your shiny white masked knight in a black shroud? Well how cute. Maybe it was time he kept a pet around.Just to play or course.18+ : eventual smut, themes of suicide (reader attempts), selfharm, sexual content, murder, themes of violence

ao3 prolouge masterlist

Three months later,

VETERANS MURDERED IN HOME

Adam webbing

Senior journalist 

See page four for more details.

Another violent murder has shocked the small sunny town of Roseville after the body’s of Daren and his brother Edward Small were recovered outside their home in the early hours of the morning. The Brothers fought bravely in the army during the Vietnam war, Darren was a well loved member of the Roseville community and along with his brother they led the local boy scouts on numerous camping trips and charity events, last year raising nearly two thousand dollars for the local animal shelter. 

The witness (who chooses to stay anonymous) found Daren slumped over on a lawn chair with multiple stab wounds, while Edward was found lying outside the trailer door in an obvious attempt to escape with a shattered leg and seven stab wounds to the back. The stab wounds were so brutal it shattered his rib cage and punctured his lungs. The Witness said she saw a man covered in a black shroud and white mask running from the scene before calling first responders. Darren died shortly in the ambulance after attempts to stop bleeding. 

Is this the work of a new killer, or a robbery gone wrong?

If you have any information please contact Detective Moore at the RPD +(000) 000 000

A memorial will be held later today at the Roseville Community Hall at 4pm everybody is welcome to attend.

Your hand traces the words, they're so tiny you could have missed them. White mask. You bite your lip. A month ago you would have called him a knight in a shiny black robe and a white plastic mask. And now you're unsure if he really was a saviour, a guardian angel. When you had thought about it a bit more he had seemed like a vigilante, the violent ones from the comic books, like the punisher, or maybe even Batman. Cloaked in darkness protecting people from rapists by beating them to a pulp, he had reminded you a bit of the crow, your own Eric Draven. 

And maybe he was just a vigilante, maybe the Small brothers had committed multiple offences during their time in Vietnam, you heard the stories. Rape, Looting, collecting ears. You had even heard about soldiers paying for certain commodities with children. But these were just maybes, maybe he was a saviour, a blessing in disguise, but he had also threatened you with a painful death if you would ever try to attempt again. 

And although it was Florida, where crazy crack addicts try to train gators, or break into houses just to watch TV for hours. There was something shocking about the turn of events that had happened in such a short amount of time. You had a near death experience while unknowingly being saved by a masked killer, and then two 50 something year old men the community worshipped on veteran day had been killed, stabbed. 

Shot in the head would've been easier to digest, but the brothers owned guns, they hunted, they had been in the army for god sake, they had killed people. Stabbed? When either brother is able to grab a gun and shoot? This was a completely different story. Whomever had killed them was not someone to mess with. He was dangerous.

And what if you were next, what if you crashed into the guy out of costume and he saw the scars on your arms, or a pot of pills from the pharmacy. What if you cut in line or told him to ‘fuck off’, would you be next, if you even thought about suicide again would he make good on his promise?

The Police thought they were clever, that it was NCIS level shit, the only problem was, when you have a town this small. Every detective or officer was someone you had spoken to. You could spot them from a mile away as they stood ridgid against walls holding candles like batons. The police were so sure the killer was going to be in attendance that you could make out the indentation of handcuffs in the jean shorts that half of them wore.

You walked, arm linked in arm with Aaron. He was on your recently completed college course, and had just landed a gig as a touring concert photographer with some band from the 70s. Made up of fifty year old men. It was high paying, and he actually got to go to like three places in Europe. So it was something worth being jealous over. The only thing you had managed to do was get a job at the paper as a photographer and assistant to the editor, running coffees while snapping photos for the paper wasn't exactly the hardest gig, nor was it the most riveting. But hey, you had bills to pay, and your uncle hired you as a favour from your mum. 

In Fact the only reason you were here at the Memorial service at all was to snap quick photos of mourners, you had shot some photos of candles being lit by the boyscouts hall, along with flowers laid upon each other neatly, swapping from a digital camera to a film camera when you realised you were gonna have to edit either one on the difficult software you had begged your manager to buy. Aaron pointed out different ideas for the paper, but you knew your Uncle would go with the lit candles anyway, so there was no bother. After you had got your shots you head back to the gazette, zig zagging across the crowd of people heading to the memorial. You wave goodbye to Aaron as you sling your digital camera over your shoulder ready to enter the building and suddenly you're crashing into the wall. Or a person. You gaze up at your victim. He's a little shy of six feet, dirty blonde hair swooping every which way. Brown puppy eyes staring down at you, he brings his hand up apologetically, and you watch the way the curves of his lips twitch into a smile. “Im so sorry” 

You squint back at him. “It's fine,” you wave your hand at him. “Really I should watch where im going” you pause, and then force a smile, reaching your hand out to grab the door handle, his hand follows and knocks your own, you both pull back quickly. 

“Gosh! Look at us.” He smiles again, eyes crinkling into a big fake grin, you only stare back. “Well, ladies first.” he nods. You don't look back as you swing the door open, and then pull yourself into the building, not bothering if the door hits him on your way in. “Did you go to the memorial?” he asks, in an odd cheery tone, the kind you put on when you answer the phone. 

“Yep” you mutter back, you're unsure if he even heard you as you turn in a twist of corridors, yanking doors and climbing up the stairs, until you're at the office. 

The Gazette is an odd shaped building, its L shaped, the gap allowing for a parking lot that's scarcely used. The Gazette is on the second floor, underneath a marketing or lawyer firm. It's a three story building at the edge of town, a short walk from your home, and the local coffee shop you hide in. 

Jed waves bye at you as you slip into the dark room, you spend thirty minutes developing the film and bathing it into baths of chemicals. You snip the roll into sections, hang to dry over the sink with film clips weighing each of them down. Then rebottling and labelling the chemicals you've used. You've got about two to five hours to wait-out until they're dry, so you sort the film from the other day into a clear folder, checking Jeds to see if it was dry. Your eyes glaze over the shots of a new cafe that opened up recently. Then you hurl yourself out the door. 

You carefully scan your film into the kodak 35mm scanner, it takes ages to see it fully appear on screen, Then  you work on editing the contrast and changing the photos from sepia to full colour. You finally print the photos for a final go over and head over to your uncle's office. You pass Jeds desk, perfectly organised, he swings around on his chair, you pause. 

“Your films dry in there, by the way” you smile lightly and watch him lean back on his chair before standing, the chair rolls across the floor at a hurdling speed, and you pop your leg out to stop it before walking away.

Micheal Thomas Jones wasn't actually your uncle, before your dad passed he was his closest friend. He helped your mum out financially before she remarried, even offering her a job as assistant when she couldn't work due to health reasons. He's a sweet guy, you remember him swinging you around his garden at a family barbeque when you were seven. You weren't sure if they were actually hiring for a photographer/assistant when he offered you a job, in fact Jed had only been hired four months prior to your appearance and he was already taking photos for the paper. But freshly graduated you decided to take whatever you could. 

You had learnt the office admired Jed, the ladies fawned over his perfect hair and the guys laughed at his crude jokes. You weren't sure how you stood with Jed, he was a seasoned Photographer/journalist that had crashed into the tiny town right next to your little apartment. Part of you wondered why Roseville, why a tiny town? With his experience he could have aimed for somewhere bigger. It felt like charity work, barely minimum wage for beautifully written articles about the intricacies of the town. He made potholes being filled sound like someone had won the lottery. It bothered you slightly, he was put on this pedestal, even a snarky remark had sounded like a lighthearted joke. 

You push the door open to Mike’s office, planting the images on his desk as he smiles up at you. “Do you want a coffee from down the road?” you ask. Mike nods, bald head shining under the light. He stretches out his arm to check over the photos as you grab the company card from his wallet and walk out. You already had his coffee order memorised. You walk around and ask the few in if they want anything. Your feet land at Jeds desk. You purse your lips at the empty chair.

He takes it black, right?Maybe you should check. 

Your arms sway against your body as you pull yourself up to the dark room. The red light isnt on so you plant your hand on the door. Slowly turning the silver handle. “Don't come in,” Jed hisses. You shut the door. Blinking quickly. “Sorry, the lights are off and I don't want to ruin these photos” You furrow your eyebrows, eyes glazing to the now shining red light above the door.

“All good, do you want a coffee?” you ask. You wait a few seconds and lean against the door, He doesn't reply. “Jed?” you wonder if you should leave. You clasp your hands and stretch them out in front of you. 

A few moments pass and you feel the door open, you scramble to balance yourself on your feet as Jed peeks his head out the door. “Hey” He smiles. The scar on his cheek lifting. You step backwards to allow him out the room, head blocking the photographs he's hanging to dry.

“Hi”, you answer. 

You watch him adjust his button shirt, pushing his glasses up before he tilts his head at you. “I'll come grab coffee with you!” He seems almost sincere. You nod your head as he leads you out the building. 

The walk is silent. All you hear is Jeds converse scuff across the sidewalk in quick succession, he walks on the outside of the road and switches over when you cross. Hand pressed against your back as he moves round you. When you head into the Coffee shop they're nearly closing, you're glad you're only ordering four coffees. The whirring of the coffee machine fills your ears, and you sigh into the smell of freshly ground beans. After you order you wait for the coffees by the collection point. 

You pick at your nails, Jeds hands slide into his back pockets and he kicks his feet against each other. “Sorry, I hope I haven't gotten the wrong idea, but do you hate me?”

His question startles you, you feel the wind knocked out of your lungs. It's too confrontational but not out of the ordinary for Jed. “No, what? Why do you think that” 

He breathes a sigh of relief, fingers combing through his brows, “well, I guess it's because we don't really talk and I catch you giving me these horrid looks sometimes?” 

Your eyebrow raises, lips snarling, and then you relax your face. “Look, I don't hate you. I guess I'm just a little jealous, I feel like Mike likes you more than me and I've known him for like, ever~” you watch him digest your words. There's a hint of a smirk on his face. “Maybe I'm just being cynical but it's like, everyone is so captivated by you and I have no clue why you are even here. Not in a bad way, just it's a small town in Florida literally outside Jacksonville, like Miami is right there. Maybe i just think you should aim a little higher, actually get your name out there” 

He turns his head towards the barista, smiling and thanking her for the drinks. He nods at you and you follow him through the door. When you're outside you take out the carton of cigarettes from your back pocket, sliding one into your mouth and turning to Jed, he looks down at you. You feel squeamish on the inside, soft eyes hitting your own, his arm bumps your own in a sweet jokey way. You're starting to get why all those ladies like him at work. Something in his boyish nature takes you back to highschool. With those heart crushing crushes on indie nerds. You feel your cheeks blush. You smile back, it's genuine this time. You hold out the carton to him, he plucks one from the pack, slipping it in the corner of his mouth you bring the lighter towards the Cig, his lips purse as he huffs smoke from the corners of his mouth.  

When Jed Olson waves you goodbye at your door with a smile, he steps into his cramped apartment and his face falls, shoulders arching inwards as he stomps off his clothes. Stepping into the shower, washing away the achy muscles of the day. Fresh scars burning as the water steams over them.He lets his hand run over his hair slicking it back until only a strand falls over his brow. He fishes out a black shirt from a pile on the floor and shoves it over his head. Wet skin sticking to the fabric. He needs a day off. Jed Olson is making him so sick. Keeping up appearances is only so easy when everyone wants a piece of you, he wishes Jed was less likeable. That he didn't feel the need to trap flies into his web with ease and yet he felt you edge closer to the centre of his cage, ready to be coiled into a prison of silk, just like the others. Because if everyone liked him, then Danny would have a far easier job.

Danny pulled out a small folder, and flipped through the number of photos he had taken over the past few months, Darren smoking a cigarette outside, Edward teaching a young boy how to tie a knot. Sally Hughes drinking a glass of wine and watching a trashy tv show and you . 

You're sitting on the couch with your hand between your thighs. Kyle Maclachlan is on the TV drinking a cup of coffee. Another of you crying, mouth gaping open, hand over your throat. Face red from the vice grip. There’s one of you pinching the fat on your thigh. Another biting your finger in a tiny lil leopard print thong in front of the mirror. You're on the floor cutting your thigh with a small knife, blood smeared against your cheek. You licking the knife clean.

He wouldn't have run into you if he had climbed into his apartment that night. You would have been dead, rotting into the sofa. Body inflating. But he just had to save you. Knocking your sad frail body against fake plastic tiles. Shoving his fingers down your throat like a kid fishing for pennies. Pressing the leather into your tongue until you had thrown up. Patting your head as you cried. Threatening you. Saving you poor sad life. He could've ended it all right there, started the chain of events. Pulling you away from deaths edge and then pushing you straight in. He had seemed to convince himself that he would have been caught if you were dead. Apartment ransacked leading to his questioning, he’d never figure out the logistics of it. But he just knew you would be important. 

So he slides himself over to the wall above his tv, pushing pins into the photographs, anyone else would call this a shrine. But really, it was his final plan. 

Danny Johnson dresses himself in a pair of cargos, he pulls his leather combat boots on and ties them up quickly. He buckles up his brand new Shroud and slips on a white mask. He slips out the window smoothly and creeps on to the fire escape, walking slowly along the metal before purchasing himself outside your window. And then he watches.

CherryWaves

Prologue

Ghostface! Danny Johnson x f!reader

Danny just had to save you. He just had to save your poor sad life. Knocking your sad frail body against fake plastic tiles. Shoving his fingers down your throat like a kid fishing for pennies. What was it you wrote in your diary? Your shiny white masked knight in a black shroud? Well how cute. Maybe it was time he kept a pet around. Just to play or course. 18+ : eventual smut, themes of suicide (reader attempts), selfharm, sexual content, murder, themes of violence

ao3 one masterlist

There's something in the air. Maybe it's that time of year. When you feel yourself fall away like thread splitting at the seams. When you’re clutching at the fabric of your knit sweater. Pulling it closer to your skin. Jeans become looser around your waist, you watch them fall around your hips as you push down the urge to throw up. It's normal. It's a regular occurrence you swear! When winter comes round it's like you're dying from the inside. Wilting quickly. Blackened petals folding in on themself. Ready to crumble into a pile of ash. You're just another brown leaf on the sidewalk. Stepped on, splashed over. Melting into a mushy pile like the others. Until spring comes, when you find yourself blossoming all over again.

And maybe you haven't been too careful recently, watchful, cautious. You're in and out of work. The days feel slower and quicker and it's hard to remember what time it is and when you last washed the bra you're wearing. So it's not like you're keeping an eye on things. 

You rub your eyes. Eyeliner smudging underneath, you feel the grit of your mascara rub against your eyelids. You huff smoke. Cigarette hanging out of your mouth as you tuck your hair behind your ears. There’s a slight chill in the air which is slightly unusual for Florida, but you tuck your thin sweater around your chest anyway, numb fingers taking the cigarette out your mouth as you blow a billow of smoke into the air. 

You throw the cigarette on the floor and crush it under your foot, watching the embers escape into the concrete slabs. You check your watch. It's only ten past five, Thursday evening. Someone bumps shoulders with you as you pass by a crowd after work rush. You've only just escaped from a job yourself. You pat down your jeans, wallet gone. You look back quickly and watch someone scurry across the crowd of people, ducking between workers and customers. He was out of sight just as you noticed him. You sigh. Looking up at the pharmacy ahead. You bite your lip. 

You pull yourself into a nook between shops and lean down on the cold gravel. Hands digging into your pockets, you pull out 4 dollars, a lighter and a receipt for milk. You bite the insides of your cheeks. Hands scraping up the wall as you bring yourself back up on your feet. 

The door to the pharmacy swings open, it smells like an air-conditioning unit and pepto bismol, your shoes scrape across the floor as you wander around the aisles, eyes flicking through hair products, condoms, prenatal vitamins, and finally razors. A pack of twelve single blades is a buck. You wonder if you should just tuck them under your sleeve and buy a burger from over the road instead. You wonder if you should buy them at all. But you find your feet shuffling over to the counter anyway, before you can even think for yourself.

Are you really doing this? 

Yes. 

You made up your mind a long time ago. 

You slide the pack across the counter along with a two dollar bill , the pharmacist looks up at you with a smile, it stretches across his face like a mask. Skin shiny and plastic. Against the hard fluorescent lights, You smile back quickly and watch him type up the price on the cash machine, buttons clicking. He looks at you. Eyes tracing over the curves of your cheeks, you watch his lips purse, eyes flicking towards the packet you slammed down on the counter mere moments ago, the bill curling up at the sides, you wonder if it still has coke around the edges. He sighs. “Do you have any I.D?” 

You blink, biting your lip in annoyance. Of course you fucking dont. Your wallet just got stolen. You want to scream. You pat down your pockets, digging into the back ones and then shrug, baring your teeth on one side. “Oh sorry, I think I left it at home.”

He stares back in annoyance. “I'm old enough to buy them though, I promise.” you laugh, pushing the cash closer towards him. 

“You have to be over 18 to buy, I'm sorry if you don't have any I.D I can't let you buy any.” 

“I've bought them here before and you didn't ask for I.D?” 

Plan B it is.

He shrugs, pushing your cash back at you. You blink slowly, hand grabbing onto the dollar bill and pushing yourself away from the counter. He watches you pass through the aisle, and you slip your hand out quickly to grab something before running out the door, your feet thumping against the sidewalk quickly, you dash into an alleyway and pull the object into your line of sight. It's a child's lip balm shaped like some cartoon character, it's dead-stock of some kind because you had the same one when you were about five, tiny cracked lips covered in glitter. Toothy grin.

You throw it on the floor and take out your carton of cigarettes, there's one. Broken, shoved in sideways at the bottom, you fish it out quickly and rip off the end, fishing your lighter out, you bring the cancer to your lips, breathing in as you flick the clippers edge, sparks fly quickly. You bring your thumb down repeatedly but no flame appears. 

You fight the urge to bash your head against the wall. 

You walk twenty minutes down the road, climb a flight of stairs and then settle between the indentation in your cheap sofa, your apartment is inherently hot, even as the sun sets behind the curtains you feel yourself melt into the cracked leather. Skin sticking to shiny fabric. The place wasn't exactly clean, but it wasn't like you were living in squalor the whole time, clothes piled into corners of the room, a couple of empty glasses here and there. A moulding cup of coffee on the windowsill, unopened bills piled next to the door. It was a list of things you weren't going to have to deal with in the next coming days or ever.

When you blink yourself awake it's eleven pm. You smile into your palm. Bare feet pattering against linoleum tile to the cupboard in your bathroom, you pull out the full bottle of sleeping pills. Closing the door and watching your face appear in the mirror, dark circles and gaunt cheeks. You trace your brow bone with your finger, watching the nail scrape against skin, it trails down to your cheeks. Then your lips and then you smother your face in your hands. 

They won't find you till Monday, maybe Tuesday if they don’t realise you’re missing, maybe never, maybe you'll rot into the floorboards till it gives out on the weight of your swollen body and you'll collapse into the floor underneath you, you're a lawsuit waiting to happen. You wonder if the coroner will think you're pretty. Will they judge you for the underwear you're wearing, or will it be sliced off without a thought?  They'll mark it as a suicide the minute they see the scars across your thighs 

Will your Mum even attend the funeral? 

Will he?

You groan against your palms, smile disappearing into nothing. You can't keep doing this to yourself, edging yourself at the thought of death. You shake yourself out of it quickly. Pulling the door open and grabbing the first bottle of liquor you can see. You sit down on the floor near the tv. Running your fingers over the edge of the pill bottle, fingernail knocking against every divot of the cap, you bite your lip as you pull it off. Pouring a couple into your hand, five perfect pills lying neatly in your palm. You tear the bottle cap of the whiskey, shoving the pills into your mouth without care and drowning them. 

You swallow, feeling them go down your throat, nearly scratching the sides. Switching on the tv to some horror movie, you fall into the crevice of the couch.

And now you wait. 

It feels like hours have passed quickly and you're floating, and suddenly the floor is crashing up at you. You're slumped over the toilet bowl as someone's hand digs deeply into your mouth, you gag, fingers leaving a trail of spit as you puke into the toilet bowl, the taste of acid and leather on your tongue. Your eyes are half closed as your cheek rests against the ceramic seat. It feels hard to breathe, you suck in air all jagged. You're breathing all wrong. Something or someone pats your back softly, and then you're throwing up all over again, watching the white pills come up quickly. There's about four in the toilet, only a sliver of them dissolved. Snot runs down your face. It's only been a few minutes since you took them and apparently since some guy has come into your home.

Your hands grip on the floor as the black smudges approach your face again, mouth yanked open as he shoves his fingers down your throat, you feel the bile rise up. And you're chucking up all over again, it’s just pure stomach acid, but the last pill comes up and you feel yourself slump into a pile on the cold plastic floor, tears wetting the hair you're leaning against. The shower curtain billowing against your legs. Your hands feel weak and you can barely grip a fist. You cough against yourself, drooling out your mouth. You run your hands over your face as you curl into a ball. You're hot to the touch, sweating through your shirt. Back sticking to the fabric.

Whoever is in your apartment has ruined your plans. 

You blink as a cool glass of water is pressed to your lips, it tastes so sweet in comparison to the sick, and you gulp down the liquid as someone hushes at you softly. Leather wipes away your tears, you're pulled into a chest and rocked back and forth until you stop hyperventilating, it feels like you’re a child all over again, feeling so small. Half awake in the arms of comfort. You wonder if he’ll bring you to bed, tuck you in and read you a story.

It pulls off your clothes in quick recession, your limp body placed carefully in the bath, he holds your body to the wall as your scrubbed clean of spit and puke. Gentle hands running down your body. You're still so out of it. Eyes half closed the whole time, they feel so raw. The light penetrating through the window feels like they are ripping them out of your head.  

Then your body gets pulled out of the tub, into your bedroom where you’re fully clothed all over again. He chosen the nice pj’s, the ones your mum got you for christmas, fished out from the sale rack of some expensive department store. They're still so soft on your skin, even when you use the cheap detergent. Strands of hair are wiped away from your face as you lie in bed. Your arms and legs are useless, they flop against the mattress as a sheet is pulled over your body. 

You gaze up at the guardian angel. A pale face gapes back at you. Black eyes, a skeletal nose, You gasp. Wetting your lips with your tongue. Your heart beat raises for the first time that night. Your lip quivers into a smile. “Who?-”

“Shh, It's okay. Wrong place and Wrong time. Okay?” his hand grasps around your chin pulling your head into a gradual nod. You blink up at him. Lips parting. He smoothes a hand over the black sheet. He stands up, quiet on his feet as he approaches the door, you meet his gaze as he turns round. 

“Try killing yourself again and I'll gut you” his hand grasps the door, he pauses. “Got it?” 

You find yourself nodding quickly,“Yeah, I got it”.

“Good” He flicks the light off. The room pools into darkness, and he steps into the light of the hallway, whatever is on the tv switches off and the door slams shut after.

lord, thank you for letting me be born in time for danny johnson x readers.

Negotiations With The Devil

Chapter 2: Promises, Promises

Dead by Daylight

Danny Johnson “Ghostface” x f!reader

25.4k words

DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT

CW: noncon!elements, dubcon!elements (honestly this things a consent rollercoaster, strap in), obsessive behavior, death threats, spanking, oral (m!receiving), knifeplay, violence, unprotected pnv climactic intercourse, degradation, praise, Danny is a whole warning of his own lmao

Part 1

You’re having the most wonderful dream. It’s not particularly thrilling, nor is it lucid. You can’t control it, though even if you could you don’t think you’d wish it to change. It’s not even a dream per se, there’s no fluid plot or story, no basis of events that can be followed. In reality it’s more like a vivid phantom sensation. Just the serene caresses of soft, supple lips ghosting over your brow, the pleasant comforting weight of a warm body melded to your side, the featherlight draw of exploratory fingertips tracing over your skin in lazy passes.

You almost hope to never meet its end, your subconscious leaning into the dream, wishing it to last as long as humanly possible, hoping to fall deeper and deeper into its velvet clutches. Which actually seems to be working as the morning light never seems to seep its nosey fingers into the room to try and pry you away from this little bliss. But one, no matter how enthralled with the otherworldly visions that play just out of reach on the other side of our lids, can not sleep forever. And thus eventually you do begin to stir, and yet somehow it seems as though the dream isn’t quite content with the idea of letting you go. Even as you rise from the foggy depths of your dream it still seems to stick with you somehow, those lips never fade, the warmth at your side never abates and those fingers only sharpen in focus as you begin to wake.

You realize after you come to enough to open your eyes that the morning light had never woken you because you’d put on your sleep mask before bed. The memory of your migraine comes into focus slowly, the remnants of it must be the cause of this hazy fog you can’t seem to shake and there’s this horribly acrid aftertaste on your tongue. You can’t remember if you’d brushed your teeth before climbing into bed, hell you can’t remember what you’d had for dinner either. It’s all blurry and distant.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.”

The gruff rumble of a foreign male voice in your ear jars you out of the haze. All at once you scramble out of bed and rip the sleep mask from your eyes to stare in disbelief at the source of your rude awakening. He’s propped up by one arm, the palm of which is buried in his chestnut hair, pulling it back and out of his eyes. The other now occupies the space you’d just inhabited, basking in the residual warmth of you still radiating from the mattress where you’d spent the last eight hours, with his palm up and stretched out like he’s reaching out for you, tempting your return. He’s got on a plain black undershirt that covers his toned torso but leaves the musculature of his shoulders and arms exposed, the rest of him is covered by your bed sheets.

It’s when your eyes trail up to his face to peer into his own deep brown orbs that it all comes ripping back to you. The events of the previous night unfurl like the petals of a noxious flower bloom and you stiffen, your whole body going rigid with panic. Horror mounts within you and you aren’t terribly sure if you’re going to pass out or run. Your eyes flash between him and the door in indecision, inadvertently projecting your next move. He makes the decision for you, pulling a knife you are all too vividly familiar with from beneath his pillow, it’s steely edge still stained red with your dried blood.

“Whoa there, doll. While I’m sure you think you're plenty fast enough to make it from here to the door in time to scream for help before I catch up to you, it’s a chance I wouldn’t take. I’m pretty fast myself, and our little game of chase comes with pretty severe consequences for losing.” He flashes the blade in a show of just what those consequences entail and your gall withers.

“Who are you?” His face falls a bit and you’d forgotten just how out to lunch the man who’d broken into your home late last night really is as he draws a hand to his chest, as if wounded. “Oh doll, you’re breaking my heart. You don’t really mean to tell me you don’t remember all the fun we had together?”

The horrors of the previous evening are etched into the stone of your memory so deep and jagged you doubt that even with professional help you’ll ever be able to forget, forever scarred. They loop on an endless nightmare reel on every surface of your mind, flashing by in grainy stills every time you blink. “I’ve got the pictures to prove it if you need me to jog your memory.”

He pulls the covers back to draw closer, sliding out of bed headed right for you with the knife still clenched in his fist, predacious. “Or maybe you need a more physical reminder, I can walk you back down memory lane step by step by step if you want.” You shiver at the thought of letting him anywhere near you again, backing away to keep some measure of distance between you, but the room is only so wide and you jump as the cold grain of the door rises up to meet your back. To your relief he stops, his eyes ride the length of your entire body, up from the soles of your feet to the petrified gems of your eyes. He seems amused by them— that among other things his eyes keep drifting back down to.

It’s then you realize you’re still naked, the memory of your clothes being literally cut away from your body coming back to you with full force as you scramble to cover yourself from his gaze. You look at him accusatorily.

“What the fuck are you still doing in my house?” You husk out, all breathy and hoarse and pathetic. You want to scream it at him, make him feel an ounce of the sheer terror your fragile mind is coursing with, but the implications of the consequences hold you in contempt.

“I promised you I’d be here when you woke up and I take my promises very seriously.” You don’t know why you even asked, his answer would only ever prove to drive you closer to insanity, drag you down into the mouth of madness with him. You feel just on the cusp of passing out, the room swirls in and out of focus and you momentarily lose track of place or purpose or time, if it weren’t for the door at your back you’d have fainted long ago.

“I need to get dressed, I need to- I need to get ready for work, I-“

“You don’t need to worry about any of that, my love. I’ve already called in sick for you. Told them you’d come down with one of those nasty viruses going around, awfully contagious. They don’t want to see your face for at least the rest of the week and only with a doctor's note in hand at that.”

But you’re already moving, inching towards your dresser with your back still pressed flush against the wall. When you get to it you keep your eyes trained on him as you pull a bra, a skimpy night shirt and a lacy pair of panties from the top drawer, the first things your shaky fingers can seize upon and scramble to put them on before he rushes you.

It feels like the walls are closing in around you, your world is getting smaller and smaller by the second. How has your life changed so exponentially in the last twenty four hours? How could it ever have derailed so quickly? You cling to consciousness by the skin of your teeth out of pure fear over just what he may do to you if left unattended with your unconscious body. You can’t even bring yourself to think about what he’s done in the time he’s already had while you were asleep.

Before you can go back to the drawer to find anything more than that he’s grabbing you by the wrist and pulling you towards him, catching you as you nearly stumble in your resistance from digging your heels into the floorboards beneath your feet as if it were dirt. It makes you stumble into him and he has to catch you by the waist to stop you from falling forward into his chest. The feel of his hands on your hips is electric, the lace does little to conceal your skin and his fingers span a much wider surface than they could ever hope to cover, but it was all you could grab in the moment.

“What you need is something to eat, doll. You’re looking dim.”

He’s right, you’re teetering but you can’t cook like this and you won’t dare accept anything he makes for you ever again, it’s what got you into this situation in the first place. He pulls you closer and you flinch at his every touch, though he’s nothing but gentle as he pulls you out into the expanse of the rest of the house, guiding you to the kitchen and depositing you onto a stool at the bar.

He announces you need juice and though you watch the entire process from pour to procurment you still hesitate, the memories of innocently downing a glass of water to the last drop only to detect the lecherous bitter after notes of deceit a moment before your world went black sits like a weight on your shoulders, unbudging.

When several moments had passed and you still hadn’t so much as touched the glass for fear of its curses he informs you that he’d be more than happy to siphon it directly from his lips to yours if you’d prefer. That gets you going, well at least gets the glass in your hand and he watches as you slowly bring it to your lips and sip it. You get no more than enough to coat the surface of your tongue actually in your mouth, trying to detect any off flavors or distinct abnormalities.

Though you’re wary, you can’t help the way your mouth instantly salivates as the cool refreshing nectar saturates your tongue. After several hours with nothing to drink you’re quite parched, but you must exercise restraint to ensure you’re not being tricked again. After a moment goes by and you don't immediately pass out or begin expelling your guts from your esophagus, you figure it’s safe enough and end up downing the whole glass like an overeager child. He smiles, sitting across from you pleased as pie.

“That’s a start, but still not enough.” You eye him from overtop the rim of the glass and across the bar as you try to collect the last drops of juice running up towards your mouth in thinning streams onto your tongue, imagining all sorts of ways to maim or kill and flee him but acting out on none of them. You don't know what he wants from you, you’re certainly not about to sit here and break bread with this deranged stranger, though it seems he means for you to do exactly that.

“I’ll put it this way, I need to go to work but I’m not leaving until I see you eat something. So you can either cook us some breakfast or I can get up and whip us both up some real food to eat, I’m sure I can manage something without burning down your cute little kitchen in the process.”

You have half a mind to let him, at least then perhaps the firefighters will come, a truck or two full of trained professionals who may combat him and free you of this never ending nightmare. But there’s so many variables in between the house beginning to go up in flames and the five minutes it’d take for the fire trucks to arrive that it’s a chance you’re unwilling to take. He could do any number of things in that span of five minutes, none of them good.

Plus he’d just said he’d planned on going to work today, which ultimately meant he’d be leaving the house and after he left you could decide what to do from there. Now you just need to bide your time. Bide your time and keep things copacetic. You rise from your chair and find it’s much easier to stand on your own. You head into the kitchen as he takes the chair you’d just been in, sitting down and watching you intently as you get to work. You find you’ve got some eggs left in the carton in the fridge, a little bit of bacon and some bread that’s still soft, so bacon, eggs and toast it is.

You assume he’s not vegetarian, with a man as prone to violence as you’ve seen him be you seriously doubt he’s got any aversion to meat or blood for that matter. You pull out a few pans and get to work, trying not to let the intensity of his gaze get to you too badly. You had really hoped that you could go the rest of the morning in silence, just focus on cooking and coming up with a plan for after he’d left, but you had no such luck.

“Isn’t this nice?” You want to roll your eyes so hard they’ll be stuck in the back of your head for the rest of your days, at least then you’d never have to look at him again. And wouldn’t that be a relief because you find in the morning light it’s hard to look at him dead on. The dark did him no favors, if anything it only masked the real, profound nature of his natural good looks.

You steal little glances at him, bending down to grab the toaster from the cabinet, gathering up the shells to trash them after cracking eggs, grabbing plates from the shelf above the bar. And you think you know now why people can’t help but to stare at car crashes or train wrecks. There’s something inexplicably beautiful in the hauntingly macabre.

And every time his eyes met yours the direct eye contact sent sparks jolting through you. The light spilling in from the kitchen window over the sink catches in his eyes and lightens them, bringing out the lighter, honey-hued smatterings in the wash of deeper, more resolute browns. Each and every time without fail it makes your breath catch in your chest, makes your pulse quicken and there’s this lightheaded, dizziness that’s making it hard to focus.

You should be abhorred or indignant or even enraged and while to some degree you feel all these things, swirling in an emotional cocktail that’s so potent it’s making your head spin; there’s an overwhelming, archaic, dull throb resonating from deep in your greymatter. A hard to ignore conflicting emotion that makes all the rest feel like droning background noise.

You keep getting flashbacks, pleasure stained vignettes dancing across your memory of you pressed up against him, struggling for air beneath the suffocating weight of him, screaming in pleasure as he ravages you all while insisting your objections, even as you cream around his cock. No matter how much you tell yourself you’re disgusted by him, no matter how badly you tell yourself you want him out of your house, the memories of your late night foray has your pussy twitching around nothing as you flip eggs and struggle not to burn his bacon.

“Something on your mind, doll?” You come back to see him staring at you, an all-knowing smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. Your eyes widen as you wonder how he can possibly have read your mind, or if perhaps your thoughts now scroll across your forehead in real time, on full display for him like one of those digital Jumbotrons at football games or those constantly updating stock tickers on Wall Street. Your mouth parts in dumbfounded shock as you try to regain control over your short circuiting brain.

“Huh? Me? No. I-uhm... Shit!” Smoke plumes from the mouth of the toaster, billowing black and shouting your guilt to the sky with its cries of negligence. You pop the bread out, the charred surface a dead ringer as you struggle to pull it free from the cursed machine, burning the delicate pads of your fingers as you play hot potato with yourself to get it on a plate.

You figure you must look pretty silly as you simultaneously wave a tea towel around in the air erratically to keep the smoke away from the smoke detector all while trying to cut the heat from the stove to avoid burning the rest of breakfast as well. You haphazardly arrange the eggs, bacon and blackened toast onto two plates as he sits across the bar from you too lost in the pleasure of watching you squirm to offer any kind of assistance.

You huff as you set his plate down in front of him, embarrassed beyond hell at fucking something up as easy as god damn eggs and toast. But you know why you’re fucking up the simplest of tasks, the sole reason for your distractions is sitting in a chair across the bar from you, invading your space and you don’t just mean it in the way he’s asserted himself into your home. He’s much more potent than that. He’s slipped under your skin, permeated the dermis and spilled into your bloodstream. He’s spread to your brain, metastasizing. Like terminal cancer there’s no telling where you end and he begins anymore.

“God, doll. Can I just say I can’t believe we’re actually doing this right now. It’s all just so… surreal for me.” You have to tell yourself to just ignore him, but that doesn’t mean it's easy. He speaks so openly, so freely, so blunt.

“I’ve dreamed of this moment over and over again. Waking up next to you in the morning all huddled up close in your cute little bed.” As he speaks, getting lost a little in his domestic reveries you slip a knife from the butcher's block feigning for a napkin and slide it under the tea towel from earlier, for safekeeping.

“Standing in your cute little kitchen, watching you flip bacon and fry eggs in nothing but those cute little panties of yours.” He’s suddenly at your back and you had never even registered that he’d moved, never heard a sound as he snuck up behind you. He breathes the last words directly in your ear.

Pressed up against you, you can feel the bulge of his stiffening cock rub against you from behind. “Although I’ve gotta admit, in my head there was way more sex involved.” You’re ready for him, picking up the knife and whipping around on him. Though he’s also ready for you, reaching up and grabbing your wrist, stopping you just short of burying the wicked edge into the meat of his shoulder. You struggle against the strength of him, trying to push forward with all your might even despite him, but he’s stronger. “Easy there, killer. Someone could get really hurt with that.”

With a twist of his wrist your hand is pushed to the side and smacks down onto the bar, the knife clatters from your hand as you cry out and he releases. The close encounter ended just that fast. You nurse the pain blooming in your bruised knuckles, not daring a second attempt as he rounds the bar back to his seat and centers his plate in front of him while casually addressing you like he didn’t just thwart a hastily thought up and sloppily executed assassination attempt.

“Let’s eat.” You stop coddling yourself to look up at him as he picks up a slab of burnt toast and munches down on it without care. His eyes rise to yours over the blackened surface expectantly and it gets you in motion as you pull out a drawer to find two forks, sliding his across the bar at him to avoid contact of any kind.

He catches it and sets the toast down to dig into his eggs as you eye up your own plate with a kind of disdain. You don’t really want to eat, but you need to. You tread the open waters between hungry and too offput to eat, never quite finding solace on either side but he’s watching you, that much you can tell and you know if you don’t commit to shoveling food in your mouth soon he will more than likely do it for you.

So you look down at the plate, deciding on the simplest, most palatable item— the toast. It may be charred but you’re not unused to that. You really needed a new toaster but you had much more pressing matters preoccupying your time and so you picked it up and took a bite, letting the bitter, burnt flavor of it ground you as you try to compose yourself a bit.

You needed a clear head to think, to plan, to prepare. No matter how conflicted your mind was, no matter how torn you were feeling, the sentiment stayed the same. You must get this man out of your house, at whatever cost and to do that you must have composure. You take another bite to solidify the fractured parts of you, gluing them together with the chewed paste of burnt toast, united for a higher purpose and feel a bit more energized.

It helps that he’s fallen silent for once, content to eat and stew in his own thoughts. You’re grateful, not even daring to glance up at him should you break the delicate trance he seems to be under. You eat, not only to keep up appearances but because your appetite seems to be cooperating now that you’ve started towards a goal, even if you don’t know exactly what that goal really is just yet.

He startles you from thought as he sets the fork down on his empty plate and it takes that for you to realize you’re just about done as well, having scarfed down the bulk of what you’d prepared for yourself without even really realizing it. You ready yourself for his antics, bracing for whatever crazy shit he’ll launch into next. He rises from the barstool and you’re already flinching, body tensing as you observe him closely, something he doesn’t miss.

But to your surprise all he does is smirk at you from across the bar before heading out of the kitchen and towards the back bedroom. You watch him as he goes, shell shocked at the lack of… well… anything. There were no theatrics, no sweeping gestures, not even a thinly veiled threat to behave. You hear one of the doors in the back close and rush forward to crane your neck down the hall. The bathroom light is on, casting a warm bar of golden light on the floor out from beneath the crack. You stay like that for a moment, staring at it in disbelief with your mouth slightly agape, like at any moment a covey of mimes will come walking out of it, or perhaps a horse sized duck.

When none of those things happen you creep back into the kitchen and lean heavily against the counter using it to ground you in place when it seems the rest of your world has lost all its gravity. You need to think, you have limited time. You pick up the plates and round the bar to the sink, filling one side with hot, soapy dish water and setting to work. Busy hands provoke consolidated thought.

You think first and foremost about escape. Your front door was a brisk fifteen paces from where you’re currently standing and while it’s late in the morning and most of your neighbors have already left for their morning commutes, there’s a chance that maybe— just maybe, you may be able to hail a straggler, someone who’s a little behind the ball this morning.

But even as you let yourself float quietly across the house over to one of the front facing windows and peer out between the slats of the blinds you know they’re all already gone, and while there is a chance you could grab the attention of someone before he’d caught on and caught up to you, you know there’s only one person it could logically be, and that’s Mrs. Forsythe, your eighty seven year old neighbor.

And while you’re desperate for an escape from this hellish situation and you know she’d be awake and even still has good enough hearing to be able to heed your screams, you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.

Mrs. Forsythe was not only elderly— which made her slow and easy pickings should she become involved in the situation; but she was also extremely altruistic. Which meant she wouldn’t cower away from him in her attempts to aid you and that’d only get her killed, something that if you let happen you’d never forgive yourself for. So you pulled back from the front window and went back to the sink and essentially back to the drawing board.

The next idea was fighting back, definitely not ideal. He was a force to be reckoned with, every attempt thus far to combat him has ended in failure. He’s both cunning and perceptive, both taller and stronger than you and he’s got a weird, almost eerie penchant for seeing through you. The only way to level the playing field is to catch him by surprise and he’d have to really, really be caught off guard for you to have a chance at success.

As you finish up the last of the dishes you think of a million different methods to kill or incapacitate him, they play on and on in your head like an outlandish looney toons montage but none of them are practical or seem within your wheelhouse to execute.

Ultimately you decide waiting for him to leave is the smartest course of action. You had a real chance, an actual golden opportunity to see your way through this, you couldn’t risk blowing that up with half-baked surprise attacks or impetuous escape plans. After he was gone, then and only then would you go out in search of real help.

You hear a door open and are hopeless to do more than turn away from the sink, grabbing the tea towel from the counter and wringing it in your hands nervously even long after they’re bone dry as you press back into the counter, socketing the lip of the sink into the small of your back. You stare at the mouth of the hallway, waiting for him to emerge and when he finally does you can’t peel your eyes away. He walks out into the open and catches you staring, you can’t help it. You blurt out mindlessly, a little in awe. “You look-“

“Different?” He finishes for you and you’re grateful because different isn’t exactly the word you’d have chosen. He’s dressed up in what you’d call business casual. A pristine white monochromatic plaid dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top, its collar cinched with a smart, thin tie. It’s got long sleeves but they’ve been neatly rolled up to the hams of his forearms and buttoned there. The hem is tucked into a dark gray pair of Dickies slacks and are form fitted around his waist by way of a worn black leather belt. He begins to stride towards you in what looks to be a fairly new pair of white, low-cut Chuck Taylors.

As he draws further into your shared space, closing the distance between you, you detect he smells of soap and something faintly spiced and pleasant. His hair looks wet and it’s slicked back like he’s showered. The ends curl back around behind his ears like rams horns, befitting for the devil. No, different is not the word you would have chosen had he left you hanging. Good is the word that sits on the tip of your tongue, just narrowly absolved of falling from your lips. He looked damn good.

“The mask I wore when we met isn’t the only one I must don. Keeping up appearances is important.”

Keeping up appearances is an understatement, he looks like a different man. Granted your views of him are skewed but looking at him now you’d never say the man before you and the one who’d broken into your home and subsequently broken you were the same person had you not known better. They had the same height, the same build but totally different demeanors.

As he is now he does more than blend, he looks unobtrusive, inoffensive, benign. His appearance brings to mind images of coffee machines and printer jams, white picket fences and weekend baseball games, unassuming, all American. He completes the look by slinging a worn, brown messenger bag across his chest, the most beat up piece of his whole ensemble and turns to you with an unidentifiable gleam in his eye.

“As much as I’d like to stay here and spend all the hours of our day together, I do have to go to work.” That snaps you out of your daze and you come back to your senses, suddenly remembering you have a plan to execute and you’re practically vibrating with the anxiety of it. You struggle to hide it as you smile to placate him. “Of course.”

You put the tea towel down, now wrinkled from being wrung to hell and back as you push away from the sink to follow him. Every step he takes towards the door you mimic, closing in to keep him from possibly retreating or changing his mind, each one adding to the building crescendo in your mind, a symphony of anxious agony.

But as he reaches the threshold he spins around suddenly, you back away in surprise but only make it about a step before you collide with the solid wall of the entry arch, his arms reach out to prop against the wall on either side of your shoulders effectively trapping you between the wall and himself, invading your personal space. “There is one more thing, doll.” You try to keep up your cheery, cooperative ruse to the very end, though your heart beats in triple time. You’re so close you can taste your freedom. “Yes?”

“I want you to stay here. All day. Can you do that for me?” Your chest tightens reflexively. You sort of knew he didn’t want you going anywhere, it was implied when he’d taken the liberty of calling in sick for you, but here he was reiterating it again, deliberately like he somehow already knows.

“Of course.” You respond immediately, ready to agree to anything he might say just to get him out of the door, no matter what your real intentions may be.

“Promise me.” That gives you pause, did he just ask you to promise? He waits for your response, holding your gaze raptly as you stare up at him dumbly. You quickly brush it off, no need tripping over the semantics. “I promise.”

He smiles and seems satisfied with your response and you believe he’s finally going to be out of your hair. “I’m gonna hold you to that.” He states melodically in an unserious singsong tone, though you know he means it. Too bad it’ll be too late for him by then if you have anything to say about it.

A brisk wave of his minty breath fans your face an instant before you realize you haven’t had a chance to brush your teeth and get self conscious. To him though, it seems not to matter as his lips crash to yours, pulling you into a deeply sweeping kiss. It momentarily steals the air from your lungs and the thoughts from your brain as your head bumps the wall with the force of it and his tongue slides over the seam of your lips with taunting fervor. His hands roam, one around the back of your neck to keep you in place and the other sliding down the swell of your hip to grip your ass, making you squeak into the kiss. He licks into the crevice of your lips as they part, one last little taste.

Satisfied with flustering you he pulls away, his Chesire-esque toothy grin the last you see of him before he’s out the door, leaving you behind to pull yourself together again. After taking a moment to regain your bearings, you rush up to the door and bolt it. Peering fearfully out of the peephole, you’re met with a distorted, fish eyes view of your front lawn and the surrounding world. There’s no sight of him, but of course there isn’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was gone. You just can’t bring yourself to believe it, never daring to feel like you’re rid of him. But he’d left you unattended, unbound, unchained. Why?

A test, perhaps? You wonder what would happen if you pulled the front door open right now. Is he just waiting in the wings for you to poke your head out? Only for him to come running from around the side of the house to spring on you like a lion, slitting your throat in broad daylight. Would he wait for you to take a few tentative steps outside? Let you gain your confidence perhaps before dragging you back inside by the scruff of your collar and slamming the door behind the both of you, never to be seen again.

The possibilities make you fearful, make you consider crawling back into your shell, tail tucked between your legs. Sitting on your hands until his return, like a good girl. But what becomes of you then? What does that make you? Death’s pet?

But that’s just what he wants, isn’t it? Wants you to fear him so resolutely that he doesn’t even have to do anything at all, kept in compliance by nothing more than your fear of the unknown, tucked away snuggly under his thumb.

These downward spirals get you nowhere, one glance at the clock makes you realize he’s already been gone for five whole minutes, your overworked mind running in fruitless circles. If you keep this up for long he really will be back home and you’d have amounted to nothing more than a self fulfilling prophecy, worse than nothing you’d have made backwards progress. You won’t let that happen.

So you crack the door, just an inch at first, just ajar. A wispy breeze blows in through the crack of the door, innocent, deceptive. You pull it open halfway, the sun shines, the birds sing and you alternate between feeling ridiculous and ridiculously exposed. You decide to do a litmus test, he can’t fault you for simply checking the mail, right? It’s not technically a violation of his rules and it’ll tell you if he is indeed waiting to pounce on you the moment you disobey.

You step out your front door on legs that don’t feel like carrying you. There’s an itch to your skin, an irritating gnaw at your neck. A pseudo-physiological reaction to just the memory of his knife biting at your throat that’s bringing on a real, palpable ailment. Like your body's last warning, meant to hinder you from continuing. You push forward despite it.

The sun is warming to your skin as you follow the paved path of your walkway until it junctures into your driveway, past the hulk of your car still in the same place you’d parked it after coming home the previous day and out towards the street to your little black mailbox.

No one is out on your street, the kids are in school, the adults have all gone to work, there’s no joggers, no stay at home moms toting babies in strollers, nothing. You collect your mail, assorted trash and bills and close the lid. There’s no pounding of feet on pavement, no hardened body colliding with yours, no seizing hands arresting you back inside. You feel both vindicated and condemned, both empowered and imprisoned.

You hurry back inside and shut the door, leaning against the sturdy wooden frame to settle your fried nerves. With a small victory under your belt it was time to set your sights higher. It was time to be rid of him for good.

Setting the plan into motion, you immediately jumped into the shower and something about the water cascading down your body, something about the heavy peace you feel when you can finally close your eyes without worry of what happens when you do feels freeingly cathartic, like washing him from your skin. Drying off and getting dressed only solidified it.

With each action of self care you felt just a little better, just an ounce more confident in your shoes, beginning to take back what he’d stolen from you. But as you grabbed your keys and headed for the door, indecision struck again. Not to scrap the whole idea but just about taking your car. You stared out the window at your cute little car with an overwhelming feel of mistrust.

He could have done any number of things while you were out cold. He could have slipped a tracker under the chassis or the wheel well or the floorboards. Could have checked how much gas you had in the tank or even looked at your mileage.

Could have measured the distance between your tires and the garage door or the edge of the walkway or the road. It was all too easy to imagine him out there, stooped down next to the tire with nothing more than a tape measure and a mag light in the dark of night, not even having to jot the numbers down, just simply able to recall them from memory. Approximate. Accurate. Obsessive. A measurement that’d be so tedious to replicate it’d be damn near impossible. A million different ways for him to know you’d gone against his commandments.

You’re descending into paranoia and it’s making you stall. You know if you keep up like this you’ll eventually chicken out. So in a split second decision you decide to ditch your car and walk. The police station wasn’t that far away, it eased all your qualms about taking the car and maybe the fresh air would do you some good. Without sparing another second for your doubts and worries to worm their destructive little fingers into the certainty of your plan you set out, locking the front door behind you and began to head down the drive.

Out on the street, with hard, affirming pavement beneath your feet you began to feel tentatively exalted. It felt like taking back control, manifesting your own destiny. You leaned into that feeling as you rounded the end of your street and merged onto the sidewalk that would take you all the way up Rose Avenue and into the heart of downtown Roseville. It was a bright Florida day, warm but pleasant and you’d expected to see more people on your walk into town. But as far as you could tell, aside from a few stragglers here and there, it was mostly dead.

With a new lens on life you could understand why. Before you’d mostly ignored the news. There were things that you’d heard, scraps of the details passed in hushed tones. Word of mouth is almost always unavoidable but for the most part you felt the news only served to further stress people out, stop them from living their best lives, keeping them suppressed with subliminal worry.

Why dwell on what you couldn’t change? Why come home after a long day's work only to harp over whatever the media wanted you to worry about that particular day? What would drive up their views and keep you tuning in. Why lose sleep over things that mostly never concerned you? Now, in hindsight, you’d seen just how stupid that’d been, how stupid you’d been. You only wish you’d done something sooner.

You never get to see the city at this time of day, always cooped up at work during this hour. It was nothing like you’d expected, but the lonely streets didn’t deter you, you’d be getting your life back today. After thirteen hours of pure nightmare you’d be free again. And there freedom was, just a block and a half away you could see the flag poles stationed out front of the police station, the Florida state flag and the American flag waved proudly in the gentle breeze side by galliant side, beckoning you to justice.

You thought at just the sight of them you’d start sprinting, had imagined walking up the driveway that nothing would keep you from those heavy, metal double doors, but as you neared you only slowed. Standing at the head of the last crosswalk you needed to take before you’d be at your destination you imagined you’d feel nothing but an urgency to get there but now all you felt was sick to your stomach.

There was no traffic to hold you up, no crowds in your way to slow you down, this was an internal struggle, a moment of grappling with oneself. And no matter how much you tried you couldn’t bring yourself to cross the street. Like some kind of fault in your motor function you can’t bring yourself to make that first step. You stand there in agony for five minutes struggling with yourself until you give up and make a right instead, crossing the adjacent street before beelining it straight for the old, worn doors of the Roseville public library.

You don’t know what makes you climb the twelve steps and push into the old, cool building. It’s deserted at this time of day, there’s an older lady at the front desk nose deep in a romantic paperback and an younger one pushing a book trolley around reshelving, but other than that you seem to be the only other soul in the building.

You’d been inside before, though it’d been awhile you still hadn’t expected them to have done any renovations since your last visit. And you found you were correct, the same row of aging computers were right where they’d always been. You take the one on the far end looking around behind you for any book browsers or lookie loos before touching the mouse and swiping away the screensaver to get to the desktop.

Booting up internet explorer and bringing up google, you sit and stare blankly at the screen, the cursor blinking at the end of the search bar patiently, ready to bring up a million search results for whatever inquiry you may ask of it. Something in you moved your fingers for you, striking the keys without even really thinking about it and hitting the enter key before you can think better of it.

In the next instant the page fills with results for ‘The Roseville Ghost’. You read them off one by one. ‘Seven slain at the hand of Roseville's Ghost’ and ‘Roseville continues to be haunted by a bloodthirsty killer, leaving RPD baffled’ and ‘Curfew in effect for the greater Roseville area as body count rises’.

You absentmindedly click one at random, the screen blanks, the cursor buffers and then it takes you to the article, published to the Roseville Gazette website by a journalist listed as Jed Olsen. Your eyes latch onto the words, unable to break away:

You back out of the article and return to the results page, clicking on the next link. It returns you to the Roseville Gazette’s webpage, to yet another article penned by Jed Olsen.

Your heart feels as though it drops from its place nestled in your rib cage and sinks through your feet into the floor. You suddenly recall an errant line of his lunistic ramblings from the night before under a magnetizing new lens, coming to the gut wrenching realization it wasn’t simply idle chatter.

“…until I’m slicing them open by their stomachs and dragging their intestines out to hang from the ceiling.”

You finish the article, unable to rip your eyes away from any of the gory details.

This man is a serial killer, a legitimate apex predator by all aspects of the word. The man who’d broken into your house the night before is the very same man that’s been terrorizing your town for months, the same man responsible for seven previous murders and not only had he picked you to be next but he’d coerced you into sleeping with him as well. You truly believe you’re going to be sick.

You can’t do this anymore, you feel as though you may very well pass out right here in the public of this old, dying library. You go to click off, exit out of the whole damn thing and try to make it to the bathroom before your breakfast, the breakfast you’d stood in your kitchen in front of a serial murderer and cooked for the both of you, came surging up when yet another headline caught your eye. You hovered over the link and felt your stomach churn once more, you gave it a moment to pass before clicking on it and pulling up one last article from the all-knowing Jed Olsen.

Attached below is the aforementioned photograph. It’s dark and blurry and you can imagine he was probably laughed at by his editor for even suggesting they run something so indistinguishable, but you’re not laughing, not one bit.

Just barely identifiable is a figure suited in black, his silhouette almost indecipherable against the shadows but what does stand out is the pale, obtuse oval of his face and the dark contrasting pits of its sad, sunken eyes, hovering above the nonexistent hole for a nose and ending in the long, agape mouth. The very same mask you’d woken up to hovering above your bed, worn by the very same man who’d broken into your house the previous evening and taken control of your life. Your blood runs cold at the sight of it and you whip around to make sure no one is monitoring you.

Satisfied that you’re still alone, you read on.

You can’t do this anymore. You can no longer sit idly by with this kind of knowledge, this is about more than you now. This is about all those that came before you and everyone the sick fingers of this monster’s work have yet to reach out and grab and you won’t stand to see another headline.

You get up from the computer after exiting out and scorching the browser history though you fail to shut it down in your haste. You hustle out of the library and get no more than a passing glance from the woman still nose deep in her paperback at the desk. Pushing through the doors and into the warmth of the bright Florida sun you’d thought you’d feel better, but the gooseflesh that riddles your skin is from far more than chilly library air and thus runs bone deep. You’re unsure where you’re even going but as you look up to see the police station just across the street you know it’s not there.

Even in all your rage, even in all your indignation and hunger for justice you don’t think you can bring yourself to go in there in person. You don’t have the nerve, but you can make an anonymous phone call. You round the exterior of the library and find the little patio nook that was originally meant for librarians breaks and the occasional nature-inclined reader but was used far more often by high schoolers smoking pot afterschool and the occasional homeless drifter in between towns and halfway houses.

You sat on the curved stone bench and reached for your phone before pulling up the keypad with confidence in your fingers. But staring down at the numbers your will weakened, and with your fingers shakily hovering over the number 9, your throat gets tight and your vocal chords constrict. Would an anonymous tip even work in this scenario? Would they even take it seriously? Do you even have enough information to give them?

You can’t think of a single thing to say, can’t think of where to start or how much to divulge. They always say tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But can you bring yourself to tell them the whole truth? Do you leave out the more embarrassing details so you can just come out with it already or do you have to tell the whole truth? If you don't, will it come back to haunt you later? Could you be looked at as an accomplice?

Will the pictures be used against you if he brings them into play? They could certainly identify you in them and then the whole idea of an anonymous tip went out the window entirely. Could you show your face in this town after it got out that you’d slept with the infamous ‘Roseville Ghost’? You’d have to get a new job, maybe a new place, maybe a new name. Were you prepared for all that?

The little bit of money you’d saved up— what you’d offered him last night in exchange for your life is not nearly enough for you to move somewhere else in this economy. It’s not even enough to sustain you for the rest of the month and your name is on the lease of the house for another seven. What would you do then?

Your screen has long since gone dim and then relocked completely by the time you’d looked down again. You unlocked it once more, only this time you pulled up your browser and typed into the search bar ‘Jed Olsen’. Immediately a bunch of search results, many the same as last time, popped up in a list below the bar.

It’s under the article you’d read previously ‘The Ghost Face Caught On Tape’ that you found what you were looking for. You hovered over the number listed at the end of the article, reading the numbers over a few times impulsively as you solidified the decision in your mind before you clicked it.

It brought the number up instantly on the phone, all you had to do was press ‘Call’. Maybe Jed Olsen can do for you what you can’t do for yourself. It’s not like he was getting nothing out of this, you’re sure he’ll write a whole article, maybe even a whole book on how he single-handedly brought down the Roseville Ghost. Solved the case that had stumped law enforcement for months all on his own. After taking a deep breath and blowing it out, you hit call.

It rang and rang and rang, and you’d almost given up when a voice answered from the other end, what sounded like a young woman. An intern or receptionist perhaps, not who you were looking for. “Roseville Gazette.”

At first the only thing you could say was “Um.” And then the fog of your brain cleared as you closed your eyes and shook your head before continuing. “Yes, umm.. May I speak with Jed Olsen, please?”

You got back a prompt “One moment please.” before the line went dead. After a moment of measured silence someone on the other end picked up and this time it was a male voice that answered you. “Roseville Gazette, what can I do for you?”

“Jed? Jed Olsen?” You paused, bringing a hand up to your mouth and picking at your lips while you waited for confirmation, an old nervous tick. For some reason you didn’t feel safe to relay the information to anyone else. It had to be him.

“Speaking, can I help you?” He seemed a bit impatient, probably in the midst of another article or something else more important to him, you wonder if he’ll act the same after you tell him what you have to say. You don’t know how to beat around the bush, not really sure how any of this is supposed to go, so you just say it.

“I have information on Roseville’s Ghost.” There was more measured silence, but when he eventually did answer again it sounded much more like you had his full attention.

“I’m listening.” You’re still not sure where to start or how much information to give him, what did you really know about the guy, you could identify him and you knew his name, or at least the name he’d given you, was that enough to go on?

“I know who he is. I- umm.. I met.. him.” ‘Met’ is absolutely not the right word but you have no idea how else to put it without putting yourself in a bigger, shittier boat.

“May I ask who I’m speaking with?” No, no you can not, you think to yourself.

“I’d like to remain anonymous, like an anonymous source, the kind you write about all the time in your articles.” You hold your breath and hope he’ll leave it at that.

Before he’d sounded anxious, urgent, almost nervous maybe. But now he sounded calmer, cooler, back in control. Maybe he was starting to think you were pulling his leg or something. You couldn’t risk that, couldn’t risk this man not taking you seriously, he was your only hope.

“Yes, anonymous sources are certainly something we use to protect the identity of individuals when we receive information from them, but that’s to protect them from the public, I need to know you’re credible. I need your name.” You squeeze your eyes shut and pinch the scrunched bridge of your nose, you really had hoped that wasn’t something he would need. You had really hoped to be able to keep yourself an arms length away, but at this point you don’t think that’s gonna be possible.

“Do you promise I won’t be named?” When he answers he sounds smug and you’re starting to wonder if this is some kind of mistake, Jed Olsen is not turning out to be the saint you’d imagined him to be. “I promise.”

You’re not usually one to take a stranger on their word but you don’t exactly have much of a choice and he does sound sincere. You give him your name and there’s a long moment of silence where you worry that the call had dropped or maybe he hadn’t heard you. “Jed?”

“What exactly do you know?” You deflate a little at that but you’re here now and you have to tell the man something so you tell him all you know.

“His names Danny...” And that’s about the extent of it, you want to add on.

“Danny what?” You knew that was coming.

“Well, I don't know, he didn’t exactly give me his full legal name and social security number.” You can’t help but be a little snippy, what did this guy expect? “Look, he’s white, tall, 6.. 6’3 maybe, he’s got dark brown hair and dark brown eyes…”

He cuts you off. “And how exactly do you know all this?” You bring a hand to your head to shield your eyes against the sun, scanning around to make sure you’re still alone. “I told you, I met the guy, he… he broke into my house last night, ok?”

“And he didn’t kill you?” You’re beginning to get annoyed again.

“I’m talking to you right now, aren’t I?” He sounds amused on the other end of the line and you just know he’s not taking a lick of this seriously.

“And why is that exactly?” Your breath hitches in your throat as he adds. “… I mean, what makes you so special?” He’s in love with me, is why. You can’t say that but it’s the truth.

For some reason he’d picked you to imprint on, set his sights on you just how he claims he always had— seemingly at random. But when it came down time to deliver it seems he had other plans, much more tender, intimate plans. The thought makes you shiver and you know he’s waiting for an answer and your silence is probably nothing but damning. “I- I don’t know why, ok? He just didn’t.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?” He inquires.

“No, not a soul.” And that’s the god's honest truth, you’re surprised you’re even able to tell him this extremely modified version of events, you hope it’s not in vain.

“Not the police, nobody?” He seems to almost not believe you and you’re just about sick of his hesitations.

“Just you, now can you help me or not?” You were getting antsy, this was taking far longer than you’d like, the sun looked like it was beginning to sink in the sky and you were very much ready to go back home.

“Ok, I’ll help you.” Your heart does a little vertical leap in your chest, it makes your voice rise in pitch. “Really? You will?”

“Yeah, I will.” You can’t believe your ears, your troubles finally seem to be over, it doesn’t feel real. You don’t even know what his help will entail. Will he tell the police? Will they go after him immediately? Could they even with the limited information you’d given them? Would they actually be able to arrest him? Oh, who gives a fuck? He said he’d help and that’s the best news you’d heard all day.

“That’s-.. that’s great! Oh my god! Thank you!” You’re unable to hide the excitement in your tone, it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders and you could scream you’re so happy. There’s silence on the other end and you don’t know what to say. You briefly pull the phone away from your ear to check and make sure he hasn't hung up, but it still says he’s apparently on the other end of the line.

“What uh.. what happens now?” You ask, kind of wanting to get to the end of the conversation to hang up and go home.

“I’ll be in touch.” And the line goes dead, just like that. Something about the tone his voice had taken in those last moments gave you pause. It made your brow furrow, the words echoing in the hollows of your mind for a moment longer than they should have. Something about it you just couldn’t quite place made it stick out.

You pull the phone away from your ear again and look down at the screen to see the call has been disconnected. Your wallpaper stares back at you with programmed patience and you’re left almost in limbo but you don’t dwell on it for long, already sweeping the errant thought from the forefront of your mind in your excitement and rush to get home, already beginning to forget what had concerned you in the first place.

You get up from the stone bench with a much lighter heart than you’d sat down with. You feel like you’re floating in your shoes. You’d done it. You were on the up and up.

You hurried home. You weren’t exactly sure they’d get him right off the bat. You just couldn’t believe that would be possible. You certainly didn’t want to get your hopes up but, in all reality Roseville was a relatively small town and really, how many Danny’s could there be?

Before you knew it you were turning onto your street and you felt like sprinting for the door. You hadn’t had the good mind to ask Danny where he worked or when he’d be home but judging on how he was dressed you figured he probably worked some boring standard 9-5 and it was already 4 o’clock. Which gave you an hour to sit on your haunches and worry.

Just as easy as your elation had risen, making you feel ten feet tall with its ascension, here was the crash, here was the burden of not knowing, here was the waiting game.

And that’s about all the next hour and a half of your life had amounted to, waiting. You switched the news on, expecting a flashy ‘Breaking News!’ segment to dominate the feed, but it was still the same old stuff they roll in the off hours, puppy videos and traffic jam reports.

You had imagined after hanging up the phone with Mr. Olsen, that he’d have taken some sort of immediate action. Done some digging, made some calls, alerted the authorities, rallied the calvary. But it seems whatever he’d done, if he did anything at all with your information, it had at the very least not been newsworthy. You couldn’t lie, you were disappointed. Now you just had to wait and see if the psycho was going to show up at your door again tonight, and what you would do if he did, at that.

You thought about calling someone to come over, your parents were out of town and your brother lived so far away there’s no way he could get here in time. You wouldn’t subject any of your friends to something like this, with or without their knowledge and consent of the situation, it was a risk you were unwilling to take. Maybe you could invite an old boyfriend over, say you’re trying to rekindle things, you didn’t exactly mind duping one of them into something potentially hazardous, especially a few on your blocked callers list, you thought you even had a few who wouldn’t hesitate to jump at the chance, but in the end you decided against it.

Then you had the idea to try and barricade yourself inside, board up the windows and push furniture in front of all your doors to keep him out. Lock yourself inside like some kind of princess in the highest tower of the most impenetrable castle. But if he had some way in you didn’t think of or if he still managed to force his way past your blockades somehow you couldn’t imagine what he’d do to you once inside.

No, the best course of action was probably the simplest, you’d done something today, made headway in one direction. Maybe, one last night in hell would be all you had to endure. Maybe you play nice, placate him and be the sweet, little doll he wants you to be until the swat team comes busting down your door. When there were six police officers pinning him to the floor and cuffing his hands behind his back then you could plant your foot on his ass as a little treat, one last ‘Fuck-you-I-win’ and claim victory.

You had given Jed your name, you surmise he could easily find your address with just that alone, maybe he’ll show up to ask more questions. The road to fame and fortune isn’t without its risks of course, if he wants that Pulitzer he’ll have to work for it.

Hell for all you know, they could already have picked him up. Just waiting on technicalities, or red tape, or maybe the FBI to come take it from here. Murders in the multitude of his caliber are almost always certainly handled at the federal level, you would think. Maybe he won’t show up at all.

Just then you hear the minuscule sound of metal scraping metal over the blare of the tv and your heart sinks. The door cracks and like something out of a 50s sitcom he calls out to you from the entryway, his voice sinisterly chipper. “Honey, I’m home.” Imbued by your new knowledge of him the sound sends a wicked chill ripping down your spine. You try to suppress the full body shudder it sends through you from your place on the couch.

You half turn in his direction. It is indeed him and he is indeed in your home. Standing in the entryway he looks less immaculately put together than he did when he’d left that morning. His slicked back hair had become a bit disheveled, a few errant locks hung down low over his brow in rebellious defiance. He raised a hand to his throat to tug on the knot of his tie, loosening it from its chokehold around his collar before pulling the messenger bag he’d left with that morning off of him and dropping it into the lone armchair set off in the corner that you used from time to time as your reading nook.

He strolls into the living area and sits down on the couch, though you’d slid over to the far side giving him ample room he takes the liberty of plopping down right beside you, his leg skimming yours as he settles into your personal space. The seating arrangement is extremely unbalanced, with more than two thirds of it empty and unused on the far side of him, and you have to hide the uncomfortable shiver that runs through you with both the intimate details of his track record on the forefront of your mind and his immediate proximity. The spiced aroma of his cologne wafts up to your nostrils and you could have sworn that the first fragrant wisps smell as if they’re laced with the pungent, malodorous coppery notes of shed blood.

You try to hide your surprise at his arrival, but you can’t possibly suppress every impulsive reaction so in your attempt to make small talk you blurt out the first least offensive thing to come to mind. “How did you get in my house?”

Not exactly smooth or inoffensive but it is certainly the most nonvolatile thing you can think to say, and you are curious. “I snagged your spare key on my way out the door.”

Of course he did, you think to yourself. You need to redirect this, it’s already erring on the wrong side of the tracks and it’s important to keep him as docile as possible. It shouldn’t be hard for you to pretend for just one more night that you can be hospitable. The easiest way you can think of to keep things light is what you lead with, you hope he’s not suspicious of your sudden change in behavior.

“How was your day?” You say as sweet as you can manage with what you hope he perceives as a warm, genuine smile in his direction. He seems to be buying it as he returns your smile in spades, beaming at you with not only adoration, and an intense, almost cloying sense of it at that, but also something that feels like pride radiating off of him in waves.

He doesn’t even need to say it for you to know this is somewhat of a dream come true for him. It brings back memories of his little domestic fantasies this morning. You think to yourself that probably for him the only thing this is missing is a prefixed drink in your hand and not a stitch of clothes on your body. You hope you aren’t overselling it.

“It was good, a bit boring at first but then the day just kept getting more and more interesting.” You felt your heart stiffen and nearly stop in your chest. What the fuck does that mean? It’s so vague. Interesting in what way? Did someone approach him in regards to your call? Was he stopped by the police? Did they let him go already? You almost want to inquire further but you’re also almost too scared to ask. Before you can even decide if you should or shouldn’t he adds on.

“But enough about me. I wanna hear about your day.” And if your heart hadn’t stopped before, it certainly had now. You instantly forget all about what he even said in your panic. You hadn’t thought of that at all when you’d started your ‘light small talk’, even though it was completely natural that he’d ask you the same thing. You try to politely brush it off as best you can. Even laughing a bit to try to make it seem like not such a big deal and ease some of the mounting tension in your nerves.

“Oh you don’t wanna hear about that.” He even laughs a little with you and you think maybe he’ll let it slide, but then he says. “Try me.”

Your stomach twists into knots. Of course in all your trickery, in all the conniving and scheming against him you’d done today, in all your caution to cover your tracks you hadn’t even thought to make up some kind of cover story. You feel ten inches tall and overwhelmingly stupid but you have to tell him something and the longer you remain silent the more you just know he’s scrutinizing you. You really wished you had prepared better for this.

“Well… after you left I went and took a shower and got dressed and then I watched tv for a little while..”

He cut you off to inquire further. “What’d you watch?” You both faltered and scrambled. “I- uhh.. I just watched some shitty tv show, I don’t even remember what it was about really, just whatever was on, it wasn’t any good.” He maintains eye contact and nods for you to continue.

“And then that got boring so I read for a bit-“ Once more he interjected. “What’d you read?” With each further inquiry into the minute details of your day you felt cut in half. You can’t believe you could let something this stupid, something so minisculely trivial in the grand scheme of things be what trips you up, and after all that time you had to sit and do nothing but worry too. You hope it’s not a fatal mistake.

“Just a book I’ve read before, one from the shelf.” You halfheartedly point towards your bookshelf but he doesn’t even turn to look where you’re pointing, just nods twice like he understands and you don’t know what to do from there. You certainly hadn’t said enough to fill your whole day, so you just keep going.

As you speak, prattling off random, hopefully innocuous yet convincing enough things that you want him to believe filled the time slot between when he’d left and his arrival, he’s studying you intensely. Far more intensely than you’d like and there’s an ominous foreboding in the glint of his gaze, it gleams with the same promise of pain his blade does. If you’ve seen it, it’s already much too late.

But if he knows anything about what you’ve actually done, if he’s detected any of your passed off lies he says nothing, content to let you continue rambling without interruption now and you start to actually believe you’d maybe gotten away with it. You actually start to feel like you may be in the clear, though you find it surprisingly difficult to look at him as you lie to his face.

You can’t imagine why, you should have no trouble lying to this absolute fucking psychopath, nay, sociopath, you remind yourself. But it’s not like you’re some kind of pathological liar, this is not normal or easy for you in any sense, none of it is second nature. You’d never even cheated on a boyfriend before, something that for some reason feels like an accurate comparison to this, though you decidedly resign not to look too closely at that fact.

You couldn’t even remember to come up with a cohesive story to sell him, just mishmashing random things together that you hope he’ll blindly buy into. And yet somehow even that seems to be working out for you as he continues to listen and you think you may be better at this sneaking around shit than you’d thought.

That is until you bear a look in his direction to notice he’s pulled his leather gloves from somewhere while you were purposefully looking away and now as you continue, he’s putting them on, slowly.

Your words begin to taper, dropping in volume and cadence before they falter and lose their confidence altogether until you’re mumbling, and then your mumbles wither away into whispers.

You can’t help but stare as his digits perfectly fill out the fingers of his gloves, his free hand tugging tightly on the hem at the heel of his hand to pull them flush against the tips. So tight like a second skin it steals the breath from your own lungs. You stare at each other like that, you with the egg of your folly still hanging off your lips and him across from you, with all the barely restrained violence of a precariously set bear trap, poised to snap. And you know that he knows.

You suddenly feel as though you’ve been skating by unscathed only to look down and realize you’ve ventured over a patch of thin ice. His eyes like the waters beneath the fractured surface. Dark, gelid, just waiting for the moment you shift your weight in the wrong direction, like the whole world is collectively holding its breath. It's when you realize you’re holding your own breath that the brittle ice breaks.

The trap snaps down onto your paw, his gloved hands seizing your wrist in an iron grip. You jump into action, leaping from the couch and trying to sprint out away from him around your side of the couch and hopefully, out the door to scream as loud as your lungs will permit— what you should have tried this morning when you’d first leapt from bed and had what you would consider, at least a decent head start. To try to do so now was more foolish than attempting to deceive him in the first place.

But it seemed today you were throwing caution to the wind as you pulled as hard as you could away from him, surprisingly succeeding in the first aspect of your plan and broke for the gap between the end of the couch and the coffee table as a rabbit will leap for the protective mouth of its hole away from the treacherous jaws of a chasing fox.

But unfortunately for you, you didn’t share quite the same deftness as the rabbit and only possessed about a fourth of its speed and you felt his arm wrap around your waist, the jaws of the fox clamping down around you.

The next moments played out in slow motion for you as he hauled you backwards. Pressed back against his stomach as you were, you could feel the muscles there flexing as he did, pulling you back away from the freedoms of your rabbit hole and into the perilous throne of his lap.

“Where do you think you’re going, doll?” He asks mockingly. His voice calm and smooth as silk a stark contrast to the way he wrestles you into place, rather easily to your dismay.

You bucked and kicked and even bit but nothing deterred him as you felt his glove clad hands pull and tug at the waistband of your jeans, grabbing solid purchase and ripping both them and your panties down your waist, over the swell of your ass and down your thighs in three quick, hard jerks.

Your eyes widened as you realized he’s starting to undress you. And so in turn, you screamed and kicked as your struggles renewed but with the tight, bunched fabric of your jeans encasing your thighs, you didn’t make very much progress, your legs imprisoned by a denim cage. And to make matters worse, as he positioned you just as he wanted you, with your lower abdomen and crotch laid vertically across his lap, you could feel a prominent bulge stab up into you from the seat of his pants, he was enjoying the struggle.

Distracted by your realizations, you’re caught completely off guard as the first smack rains down on the soft, bare skin of your right cheek. His glove covered palm bouncing smartly off the round, springy flesh with an audible crack. It gives you rise, making you rebound off his lap as you try to escape, but with an arm secured over the small of your back you’ve nowhere to go as the second smack follows the first.

Cracking forcefully across the opposite cheek in a precise blow that makes you let out a yelp so shrill it vibrates your vocal chords, making them burn to life in your throat. As you’re still catching up to the predicament you’ve found yourself in he asks you in a casual yet authoritative tone from behind you, as nonchalant as he’d inquired the first time, as if nothing between you had changed.

“What did you do today, doll?” He waits for an answer but you’re too preoccupied to indulge him, choosing instead to continue to thrash in his grip, hellbent on escape. Your hands whip around behind you to try and grab his face or his hands or his stupidly hard cock and scratch or claw or squeeze for your dear life, reduced to squabbling in his clutches like a raccoon rife with rabies.

He catches your hands easily, swiping them out of the air in a single move and pinning them to the small of your back with the same arm that’s held you in place with ease since the struggle began so he can return to your punishment.

As soon as you’re secure his hand cracks down across your ass again, in a trio of successive attacks that leave you with little room for recovery as you hardly have time to react to one before the next one lands. Pain blooming in delayed shockwaves radiating from the ground zero of his palm. You flinch at each, your body trying to shift away from the pain but only serving to somehow rise to the occasion and receive each new blow like you’re keening for them.

You whimper as he stops, the sound emitting from your throat beyond your control as you squirm against him trying to soothe your burning flesh, and you have a terrible feeling he’s only just begun. He calmly repeats himself, asking you again what it is you’ve done today. You hear him but you can’t even begin to process what he’s saying to you as your mind reels to comprehend how you’ve let yourself come to be in this kind of compromising position.

It takes the next round of smacks; two on each cheek and then a particularly heinous blow that falls on the underside of both for you to smarten up. It connects with the rounded peaks of your peachy swells and takes a sort of sweeping motion that drags the pliant flesh with it on its follow through. Pulling at the quickly heating flesh and magnetizing the sting so that it spreads throughout your body in tingles that reach all the way to your toes as you shout in agonized protest.

You scramble to answer as soon as you’re able, your brows knitting together as you fight against the whine that resonates from the heart of your throat in an attempt to speak. Though stubborn as a mule you persist in your plea of the mundane, swearing to him on all that you hold holy that you’d done nothing more than you’d already told him.

And you start to whine in desperation in the recesses of your mind as you try to remember even a single one of the things you’d told him to try and reaffirm your shoddy alibi and find that you can’t as two more devastating blows land with planned precision in almost the exact same spots as the last and it scatters your thoughts to the four corners of the wind as you cry out sharply into the echoing expanse of your living room, the sound bouncing off the walls and back to his ears like sweet birdsong.

“I’m losing my patience, doll.” He chides from behind. Asking you again, this time with an emphasizing smack on alternating cheeks punctuating each calmly stated syllable.

“What. Did. You. Do. To. Day?” You writhe and hiss like an agitated alleycat pinned to his thighs but out of fear of the consequences of the truth you hold your tongue, opting to hand feed him the same bullshit you’d offered him up the previous times, praying that if you believe it hard enough, if you can just sell it with enough conviction, then he’ll have no choice but to believe it too. Though you're really unsure just how much more you can take. You’re fairly certain, if the lights were to go out at this very moment, your ass would glow.

“I’ll give you a hint, doll. Since you seem to be struggling with it. I already know where you’ve been today.”

Before that moment your body had been as rigid as a board, your back had been perpetually stiff, your hands under the shackles of his palm had been balled into fists, the tendons at the base of your wrists taut as tightropes, even your toes, hanging off out of the way at the ends of your bunched calves were curled and rigid the entire time.

But as he breathed those words into being, as soon as he let the pen drop, your body broke loose of its tension. As if you’d been holding your breath the entire time, as if you’d been holding out for this, he felt the exact moment you fell in defeat and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t sate something in him he never stopped being hungry for.

So that’s it then. For all your worries, for all your efforts, for all your obsessive precautions, you’d failed. Somehow, someway you had simply overlooked, he knew. He knew you’d left when he’d implicitly told you to stay. You felt humiliated, and somehow even more so now than before.

For some reason you could take degrading punishments, literally being bent over his knee like a child and still feel an ounce of self respect but something about trying your hardest to elude him, to cover your tracks and sneak around without him knowing made you sick with shame. And you swear you feel him swell with pride beyond you, like he senses it.

Your silence is deafening and he knows he’s almost got you so he leans down over you to whisper in a low warning, his tone incensed and laced with threat. “So help me baby girl, if you lie to me again I’m gonna get upset.”

That breaks you. If this isn’t upset, you truly don’t believe you’ll be able to handle whatever him getting upset looks like. Out of a pure need for survival, in a final bid to stave off serious injury or death or perhaps something in between far worse than either option, you spill.

“I- I went to the library!!” You shout up at him, your head dipping down to rest against the arm of the couch as you tremble with defeat, the only silver lining in sight being that now, surely the punishment is over.

“Ohhh babygirl; you are in sooo much trouble.”

SMACK. Your head lifts from the couch on impact, a surprised cry flying out from between your lips as you turn as best you can to try and look at him, try and plead with him to stop, but his hand comes crashing down again and again and again. SMACK. SMACK. SMACK. SMACK!

“Stop!! Stop!! No more!” You cry out, the sheer burn of your ass too intense for you to be too proud to beg. “Please!!”

To your surprise he actually does heed your cries, his hand stilling overtop of your heated cheeks after one last resounding smack and he smooths over the top of it, admiring the warmth it now exudes as you recover and you feel disgusted with yourself for actually letting yourself be soothed by it, but you can’t help it.

When your breathing evens, he asks. “What’d you do at the library, doll? I don’t see any checkouts lying around.” You swallow thickly but the dam is broken and it’s fucked beyond repair. You don’t think there’s a point in holding back anything from him at this point, he probably already knows, but there’s one thing, one single fact about today that you’ll seize upon with all the strength left in the paws of your will and clutch tightly to your chest, shielding it from review. You will not tell him about your little chat. He will have to drag that out of you with the force of god.

And you know from experience that lies tend to thrive best when they’re grounded in the soil of truth, so you’ll tell him all about what you’ve learned today, you’ll spill about everything you’d read and maybe, just maybe, you can stroke his ego enough to keep the conversation between you and Jed Olsen a secret for as long as possible. So you start, weaving your deceit into the patchwork of your story beginning with the threads of truth.

“I had to get out of the house, I just couldn’t stay here. After you left it got too quiet and I felt like I was starting to lose my mind. So I took a walk, I didn’t know where I was going, I just needed fresh air and then before I knew it I was standing in front of the library and for no real reason at all, I went in.” You pause and he continues to stroke his gloved palms over the heated flesh of your ass, waiting for you to continue, not offering a morsel of support or encouragement, just letting you fend for yourself as you inch further and further out on a limb, wondering if your story will hold your weight or send you plummeting to your death.

“I went back to the computers and… and I looked up articles on Roseville’s Ghost.” You feel him tense a bit beneath you, shifting a bit at the mention of his moniker and it makes your stomach churn, your eyes squeezing shut where he can’t see as you sit uncomfortably across his lap, wishing to be literally anywhere else.

“And what did you find?” He implores and while it only serves to freak you out more, it’s a small victory. If he’s interested in listening to you regale him with the tales of his grotesqueries then maybe your plan to stroke his ego and distract him may be picking up wind beneath its sails. You just have to keep feeding it, but you’re nervous and you have to stop yourself from shaking in his hold. You hope he’s receiving the tension in your body and the uneven tone in your voice as fear of him and what you’ve learned he’s truly capable of and not fear of being found out.

“I… I read about the murders.” You begin sheepishly, still terrified out of your mind, but you take a deep breath and begin again, you have no other choice.

“I read about you.” You state boldly, almost spitting out the phrase at him in disgust. Though you’d like to pride yourself and call it a ploy; a subtle way to make him believe you’re being completely transparent by showing him real raw emotion, it’s not.

You simply let the mask slip for a second, not shying away from the disgust you’re feeling but more so leaning into it. Dropping your fear of him for a moment to truly be able to express the disgust you harbor for him and his misdeeds. You simply just can not feed into the bullshit— his bullshit, knowing all you know.

This is where the curtain drops, this is no act, this is the truth. You are nothing but utterly disgusted by what you’d read today, the thought of it makes your skin crawl and your throat tight, making it harder to continue, but you press on all the same.

“I think I read the counts up to eight now.” You can’t bring yourself to look at him, like there needs to be a sort of visual barrier between the two of you to even speak of such evil, like a confessional. Though you’re unsure who should be confessing to who in this scenario, they’re his crimes but it’s your transgressions.

“Julie Andrews, Mark Recosta, Donna Blaine…” You’d memorized their names, how could you not, you’d nearly been one of them, an exclusive club of poor souls with seemingly nothing in common. Living normal, contributive lives that, of no fault of their own— besides maybe living a bit too unguarded, were ripped unjustly from them, many before they even knew it. You continue.

“Claire Richards, Thomas Steiner, Edward Steltz..” Your voice wavered on the last two as you recall the way the article stated Mr. Marsh was so brutally mutilated, the way his remains were… disturbed. “James Marsh, Henry Lancaster.”

He speaks and it startles you from the trance-like state you’d fallen under as you mourn for people whose circumstances of their connection to you are almost too vile for you to take. Like he’s plucked the thought from your brain he adds your name to the list, letting it audibly hang in the air just adjacent to the others, like a reminder it’s not too late for you to catch the train and join them and it makes you squeamish.

“You know, if you wanted to know more about me you could’ve just asked, doll. I’d have told you everything and more than you read through in those articles today. What was it that solidified it for you? Indulge me. Which part did you read that made those cute little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end when you realized I was telling you the truth, hmm? Which details really set it in stone for you?”

You hesitate at his words, you felt like you had been building up momentum to berate him, gathering the courage to confront him and maybe even shame him for the things he’d done and in one fell swoop he’d toppled it.

“Or was it the picture that did you in? I bet it was, wasn’t it?” His voice rises in pitch, just an octave above his usual purr but you can pick out the giddiness in it, not needing to even see him to know he’s smirking, it leaks into his tone, tainting it.

“Just a passing glimpse, not much more than a blur really but you recognized me in it, didn’t you. You recognized my mask.” You want to shiver on his lap, his ability to oh so easily settle on the truth never failing to unnerve you. It’s just like he’d said the night before, his voice echoing in your ears as he claimed he knew you, and here he was proving it over and over and over again.

“I really caught hell over that one, took some serious ass kissing to get it published but it worked out in the end, we sold out every single printed copy in half a day.” Your breath hitches in your throat, your ears piquing at his words. Drawing wiry, crisscrossed connections between your current knowledge and your continuous new discoveries until your mind was tangled to hell and back in red yarn.

Your eyes widen as a thought occurs to you and then like a freight train, it slowly picks up steam, building and solidifying until it’s too exigent, too deafening. A dawning epiphany on the horizon of your mind, a roaring abomination rearing its ugly head that refuses to be ignored.

Your voice starts softly, a whisper that grows louder in tandem with your horror. “No. N-no. It-… it can’t be. you’re-“ You trail off, unable to finish it, unable to utter it aloud.

He leans down over your back, his body eclipsing you as he crowds in to get right up close behind your ear. With his breath hot on the back of your neck, goosebumps rise from the pores of your skin like the dead from their graves.

“I told you I’d be in touch didn't I, doll?” He muses smuggly from just behind you. The all too familiar phrase falls from his lips and your hopes and dreams of ever escaping this hellhole you’ve found yourself at the bottom of falls with it, crashing and burning down around you in a violent blaze that scorches all in its path, consuming you whole.

“You know, when we got off the phone initially, I was pretty pissed, I can’t lie. I had half a mind to make it a half day and come home early, but I really don’t like doing things out of anger. Things done in the heat of the moment almost always end up laced with regret, so I made myself wait all day and by the end I was actually rather impressed with you.”

“It takes a lot of balls to do what you did, it’s just too bad I suppose you didn’t have the brains to save yourself all this trouble.” He adds at the end, slapping you with the backhanded portion of his compliment.

“You see, if you’d have done half as much research on Jed Olsen as you did on Ghostface you’d have known then what you know now. Hell if you’d have just gone to the homepage of the newspapers website where you got my phone number from, you’d have seen a big ole picture of all the newspaper staff right there on the front, including yours truly.”

You had honestly thought you were at the bottom of the pit in terms of being freaked out, you honestly believed he couldn’t possibly surprise you any more than he already had but like rotten russian nesting dolls, each horror only encased a smaller more vile atrocity lurking beneath the surface.

And here was the next horror to set your teeth on edge, causing each individual vertebrae in the column of your spine to shift and contract until they were as straight as an arrow. Here were the many layers of the rotting onion, each pulled back to reveal a fresh, new face of decay smiling up at you from beneath.

You still deny it, unaccepting of the truth that sits heavy on your shoulders like a crushing weight. “No. No, that's impossible. You can’t-“

“Can’t be committing the crimes and reporting them too?” He cuts you off, almost giddily. His voice is elevated now, dripping with the excitement of your revelations, a showcase of the intricacies of his carefully crafted cogwork.

“Oh doll, it certainly is possible. Ever heard of Vlado Taneski?” He waits patiently but just as he’d expected there’s no answer from you, not positive or negative in response, only silence, which he doesn’t mind, it gives him a rare teaching opportunity.

“He was a serial killer from Macedonia. He killed three women over the span of three years and he wrote freelance articles reporting on their deaths. As you can imagine, that's something that I just could not get over. It’s… brilliant.”

“It’s not weird or strange to keep the articles written about your murders like trophies if you’re the one who writes them. They just call that a portfolio.” You can feel the confidence rolling off of him in waves, he thinks he’s so clever.

“But he made one fatal error. Can you guess what it was?” You squirm in his lap, not wanting to give into his little games or weird fucking pseudo-educational lectures.

After a moment of silence he grows impatient and you raise your head in alarm as you suddenly register he’s lifted his hand off your ass only a second before you feel it slap down again on your tender cheeks, making you yelp and become lively again, bringing you back to him before he continues.

“He got caught…” He pauses, emphasizing his words impatiently. “…because he used details in his articles that the police did not release to the public.” He reveals, smoothing over the heated skin of your perched ass like one might stroke a curled up cat.

“A stupid mistake that was easily avoidable.” He talks like there’s a manual for this kind of thing, rules laid down and etched in the blood of those who had failed before. A field manual meant to guide the future generations to follow, to learn from their mistakes and make them more effective, more deadly, more elusive.

That sick feeling in your stomach from earlier is churning again and it marinates the back of your throat in a bile so thick you feel like you’ll choke on it, it makes you bold, lets you speak your mind.

“Are you fucking telling me that you do these things, this… sick fucking shit and then wake up in the morning and go sit at a desk all day and write about it? Just… just fucking pretending to be normal and good and shit?”

While he’s not thrilled with your attitude about the situation he’s not stupid. He knows this probably comes as a bit of a shocker to most and he will give you credit for being at least open to discussion on the topic, so he indulges you.

“This isn’t the movies, doll. The world isn’t as black and white as they’d have you believe. There’s a whole world, a whole infinite spectrum of grays in between, toeing the line on both sides. What I’m doing is not new or abnormal under any circumstances. You do realize that, yes?”

You squirm in his lap, you can’t help it. What he’s suggesting is fucking insane. That everyone just oozes dirty little secrets. Like the general public is all walking around with a gaggle of skeletons trailing behind them, just a side effect of the wicked little ways we find to kill the monotonous, obtrusive, overbearing weight of our boredom.

“No. No fuck you. That is not true. Not everyone fucking kills people. You’re fucking sick. You’re fucking insane!” Your voice rises in pitch as you get a bit manic towards the end, coming a bit undone at the seams and to your dismay he only seems to grow more confident and composed as the conversation continues.

“You keep telling yourself I’m batshit crazy but you wanna know the truth?” He leans in close, his hot breath fanning over your neck and ear. “You’re just as batshit as I am, doll.” Your brows furrow, your eyes minutely flick back and forth with your flitting thoughts as you try to decipher just what the hell he’s talking about.

“Bullshit. I’m nothing like you.” His hand comes smacking down on your ass again and it makes you scream. A barrage of unfettered attacks that make you cry out weakly, your ass growing numb from the repetitive abuse.

“These are for lying to me. You say you’re nothing like me but That is bullshit and you know it. I know the sick shit you’re into.” His voice takes another upsweep in tone towards the end and you know he’s smiling above you again.

“You can fucking lie to yourself all you want but don’t try and sell me the same bullshit.” His gloved hand smacks down again right before he makes it clear to you just what he’d meant earlier.

“Every tumblr reblog, every ao3 bookmark, I’ve read them all.” Your body goes rigid beneath him at the mention of your more private social media platforms, the type of content they contain far different than the stuff you post onto Facebook and Instagram for your family and old high school friends to see.

“Porn is porn doll, physical video or written word it doesn’t matter. In fact, I find the latter to often be far more nefarious than the stuff you’ll find on the first page of pornhub. And some of the stuff you’ve been looking into? Well.. I bet you’d shame the shit out of the devil in comparison.”

He chuckles darkly above you as you come face to face with the extent of his knowledge of your dirty little secrets. Everything you’d ever clicked on, every story you’d read through, every indulgent fantasy you’ve ever subscribed to. You don’t know why you thought there were any secrets you could claim to hold sacred against him, he’d probably watched you masturbate to each and every one of them, there was no hiding from him.

“As much as you cry and beg me to stop, I know the truth.” He states plainly, squeezing the heated flesh of your ass just to hear you squeak, just to make sure you’re still with him. “The truth is you fucking love this. And that’s your real punishment, isn’t it?” It makes your blood run cold which only serves to intensify the burn in your ass as it spreads from your cheeks down into the crook between your thighs to your horror.

The laundry list of subject matters you’d perused through in your down time ran on and on in your brain. A growing list of kinks and fantasies, the most private bits of personal information held so close to your chest you’d never even tell your closest friends about and there wasn’t a shred of it he wasn’t privy to. Your mouth hung agape in a shock that ran bone deep, an embarrassment you’d never recover from.

To emphasize his point he started up again, raining smacks down that, emboldened by the new understanding between the two of you, you felt on a whole new level of torment.

“Oh, what am I gonna do with you, doll?” He muses as he continues, doling out smack after smack after devastating smack.

“If I can’t trust you to behave I’m gonna have to do something drastic.” Your eyes widen in alarm, this man’s definition of drastic could mean anything. You can only imagine what fate may befall you if he commits to something he deems drastic. Hell, you’d broken a promise, a verbal agreement held sacred to the authority of five year olds. Legally binding on account of the fact you’d crossed your heart and hoped to die, and now you were being bent over his knee, your ass spanked ruthlessly raw until his handprints were seared into your flesh like brands.

The thought of this man’s definition of drastic frankly terrified you and you caved. “Yes!! Ok, fuck!! I’m sorry! Please! I’m so sorry!” He didn’t stop right away, a few more stinging smacks laid out in perfunct succession across your blazing skin for good measure. “Please!”

Your tears had overtopped the levees of your lash line, warm tributaries that spilled down your cheeks and fell away in fat drops to land somewhere into the abyss between his lap and the cushions of the couch.

“Do you promise to take your promises more seriously?” He asks tauntingly, his smacks landing further down, right overtop the sensitive, unabused skin of the backs of your upper thighs. A blow you knew was intentional, a blow meant to bring you to your knees, meant to bring you to heel. It had the desired effect.

“Yes!! Yes, fuck!! I promise! I fucking promise, just please! Fucking please!!” Your chin trembles as the pain of his punishment rattles you, radiating out from your terribly sore ass and pulsating throughout your entire body in waves. The next time his palm grazes your flushed skin it’s far more gentle and you can tell even through the numbness that’s starting to settle in that he’s removed his glove, choosing to feel the heat of his afflictions without the barrier of the leather.

“Now you need to make it up to me.” Dreaded words you can’t even begin to imagine the exact extent of, but you’ll do anything for him to stop. You can’t possibly bare any more.

In a shaky, uneven tone that sounds pathetic even to your own ears you croak out a soft and almost unwilling “How?” There’s a silence after you utter the single, measly syllable. One that swells and expands until it fills the ambient space of the room around both of you like a vacuum, sucking the air out and leaving behind a greasy miasma of boundless, insidious opportunity in its place.

You can’t stand it any longer, you’ve stared down into the arm of your couch for so long you’ve memorized the way the threads in the fabric weave together, singed into your retinas by the shock of the pain and the burn of your tears. So you chance a look at him, turning your head to get a peek at his face when the anticipation grows too suffocating to stand any longer.

You look up to him, still draped over his knee, your ass throbbing. The tides of pain have started to recede, leaving nothing but alternating waves of heat and arousal in its wake. His smile widens at the sight of you, so quick the plump skin of his bottom lip catches in between his teeth as the idea of exactly how you can make it up to him graces him with its enlightenment. His loose locks hang down over the smooth cliff of his brow and down in front of his bright, gleaming eyes, glinting deviously with malicious excitement.

“That depends, doll. How bad do you really wanna make it up to me?” He asks in smooth jest, confident that he’s got you right where he wants you and ready to capitalize on the fact.

You scowl up at him; dark, hateful thoughts beginning to swirl in the space just behind your eyes. Something he catches in that same instant and all it really takes is lifting his offending hand off your ass and up into the air to correct it. You scramble and shift back, wiping the sour look from your face to replace it with a supplicating pout as the words fly from your puckered lips.

“No!! No! I- I wanna make it up to you. Please! Please let me make it up to you!” It does the trick, he lets his hand sink back down out of the air slowly and settle over your ass again in a soothing swipe, as if to say ‘that’s what I thought’.

He’s not fully broken you just yet; he can tell. Behind the simpering, docile little thing you’re masquerading as there’s an ember of defiance burning in the back of your brain and it pleases him to see it. He’d be a bit disappointed if you were subdued so easily. But there’s something else burning there, a fire of a different kind, one that burns slower. More smolder than outright blaze, and he can see that too, it only stokes the flames of his own desire knowing he’s the cause of it.

It makes his next words fall from his lips in a smooth, pleased purr. “Get off my lap and stand in front of me.” It’s a simple command, but it’s the unspoken commands that sit just behind it that makes you slow to comply— that and the humiliation of having to slide off his lap in the first place.

You swing your legs out off the side first and put your hands on his knees to push yourself up onto your feet. It’s the way your eyes never leave his as you do it that makes something low and dark in his chest stir. Probably unintentional on your part, just wishing to keep your eyes on the threat in the room but it has an effect on him all the same. Once you’ve done as he’s instructed his next command is as simple as the first, yet far more degrading. “Strip.”

Your eyes closed momentarily, you knew this was coming. It wasn’t enough to best you, it wasn’t enough to figure out your simple deceits, it wasn’t enough to humiliate you for them by bending you over his knee and then promptly humbling you by making you beg him for mercy. He wanted all of it, the full monty.

You shifted from foot to foot, thought for just a brief moment about trying to run again before succumbing to the fall of your pride and beginning to strip. You made it no slow, sensual theatric. Simply pulling your clothes off and throwing them to the side before modestly crossing one arm over your chest and the other in front of the apex of your thighs to subtly cover what little you’re able.

Saving yourself the ridicule of stopping halfway only to have him clear his throat and goad you into finishing the task and the mortification that comes with it. If you’re to subjugate yourself to him you may as well be brave about it. Hold your head high and look him in the eye while you do it, even if it’s just an arbitrary display of faux bravado to ease the ache in your already shattered pride.

He’s shifted since you’ve risen from your place on his lap, he takes up the whole of the couch now, sliding over from your side until he’s perched in the center of it. His arms are stretched out, resting over the back on either side, taking up most of its breadth with his impressive arm span. His legs are similarly positioned, his feet set flat out in front of him on either side, man-spreading far and wide with his feet planted into the low pile like he owns the space.

His eyes are currently preoccupied, slowly sweeping up the length of your body from the floor and trailing higher until his dark, lust-blown irises meet yours. A smug, pleased smirk tugs at one corner of his lips.

“My bag is in that chair behind you.” He says, barely lifting a hand up off the backrest to lazily point in the direction he means. “In that bag is my camera, I want you to go retrieve it for me.” Your heart sinks at the thought of more compromising photos, you think for a moment about begging him for an alternative but you’ve had just about as much groveling at his feet you think you can stand for one evening. So instead you turn to make your way towards the armchair in the corner when he stops you with an arrogant, almost melodic “Ah ah ah.”

You stop in your tracks but don’t turn back to him just yet, having to soothe your loathing for him that surges to the surface and taints the features of your face.

“Crawl.” He corrects, and you do turn back to him then, if only to gauge the seriousness of his command but his eyes brook no argument. And so, begrudgingly, you kneel, before settling down on your palms facing away from him, keeping your legs as tight together as humanly possible to try and conceal as much of you from his sight line as you can. It works mostly, until you start to move and then as one of your thighs shifts forward to start your crawl towards your destination and all is revealed. He makes it known by the low, approving growl that sounds from where he’s sat on his throne behind you.

You try and not think about it too hard as you shuffle as quickly as you can to the chair and reach into his bag for the camera, the bulk of it’s not hard to find and you pull it free from the confines of the old messenger bag as you turn to sort of kneel-walk back towards him when he stops you again.

“You can’t carry my camera in your hands and crawl, babygirl. You’re gonna have to find another place to hold it.” He can’t be fucking serious. You chime in at that point, your voice simultaneously light and coquettish while also dark and ground out between the grit of your teeth.

“And how exactly do you expect me to do that?” His answer comes after a soft yet smug smile that tells you he knows exactly how you’re meant to do just that.

“Put the strap between your teeth. That should free your hands up nicely, don’t you think?” If there was ever a single solitary moment in your existence where you could wish to kill someone with just a simple look, now would be the time you’d choose. Glaring daggers at him you’d love nothing more than to watch the tips of sink into the soft fleshy pits of his eyes.

You bite down on the strap and let it hang down from your lips as you resume your trek back towards the couch and if you thought the trip to the chair was the most embarrassing part of the whole ordeal you were dead wrong. There’s something about having to watch him watch you that is oh so much more degrading. The way his eyes keep trailing down to watch where the camera dangles as you sway, the pertinent position of it in relation to the rest of your body.

You watch as he adjusts himself at the sight of you and as much as you loathe to admit it, it sets you aflame. His obvious desire for you, the way he doesn’t even try to hide how he fixates on every aspect of your body, never skipping over the rough or unshapely parts of you. He drinks you in greedily like he’s got a thirst he can never quite quench and it sets your nerves alight with desire despite everything.

When you reach him he reaches out and plucks the strap from between your teeth with a satisfied smirk and you have the audacity to think it’s over when he brings his hand to his forehead animatedly— like he’s just remembered something he can’t believe he’d be so stupid as to forget.

“I almost forgot, doll. I’m gonna need you to get one more thing from the bag for me.” You just stare up at him in disbelief as he explains.

“On the back of the bag in a separate pouch you’ll find my knife, I need you to bring it to me.” You sit in front of him for a moment longer, the shame of your defeat rising in the back of your throat and you let it burn you, hoping that the memory of this will deter you from ever letting this kind of thing happen to you again.

You turn away from him and start to make your way back to the armchair when the telltale flash of his camera illuminates the wall in front of you, the sound of the shutter going off accompanying it along with a new sense of shame for you to wallow in. There’s no getting these images back, they’re in the world now, in his possession and always would be. That thought alone threatens to make you sick.

The shutter clicks off a handful of times behind you again before you make it back to the chair. You flip the bag over and after searching for a minute, you find the separate pouch in question. It’s hidden along the seams and doesn’t look original to the design, after opening it you stick your hand in and pull the cursed thing out into the light before turning back towards him.

It was much bigger in your hand than you’d imagined it to be. The sheath covered blade juts out from the end of your fist, a wicked extension of it. You turn it over a few times in fascination, gripping it proper as you choke up on the hilt, cool to the touch against the web of your hand, and something clicks into place.

It’s when your hand wraps around the curvature of the handle, when the phenolic resin melds against the swell of your palm that a most devious idea pops into your head. Here was the moment at hand, here was another golden opportunity. You had his knife and he had nothing but a camera.

You could saunter over to him and stick the thing right into his neck or go for the lager target and jam the blade right through his chest, lots of vital bits in there, or better yet you could just let the blade bite right into his thigh, let the tip nick his femoral artery and he’d bleed out in minutes.

His voice pulls you from your plotting. “We won’t be needing the sheath, doll.” You couldn’t agree more.

You hear him but don’t look at him, mesmerized as you grip the leather covering the blade and pull, feeling it slide smoothly up and away until the steel beneath is slowly revealed. Its surface is polished and you can’t help but to run your thumb along its blood groove and down along the upsweep of its clip point.

You look up at him and he snaps a shot of you at just that moment, one he can’t help but go back and review. A still of you staring up at him in all your naked glory, his knife gripped in one hand as the other toys with the tip. He thinks to himself it’s probably the single greatest photograph he’s ever taken and he’s going to cherish it for the rest of his life, make a million copies of it so the world will never be rid of it, eternalize it forever.

He’s still staring at it when he orders you. “Bring it to me.” He seemed caught up in the moment which played to your advantage, maybe you could work with that. You flipped the knife around and brought it to your lips. Parting them before settling the cold spine of the knife between your teeth and biting down, holding it in place as you settled back down on all fours and looked up at him from beneath your lashes as you crawled back towards him.

The low, sultry groan he lets out is like music to your ears and you tried to focus on that and not the fact that the blade between your teeth has been saturated with the blood of his victims, people you now knew the names of.

Julie Andrews, Mark Recosta, Donna Blaine.

Claire Richards, Thomas Steiner, Edward Steltz.

James Marsh, Henry Lancaster.

You.

You have to shut your eyes against your overactive imagination as you swear you can see it flowing through the fuller and dripping off the tip just out of your peripherie, swear you can taste the coppery, metallic tang of it on your tongue as you stare into his deep, brown orbs while you crawl towards him. Hellbent on letting him feel the bite of his own blade for once.

The flash of the camera goes off. He’s snapping pictures of you again. Pictures of you stark naked with his blade caught between your teeth, crawling towards him on your hands and knees. He was wrong before. This is the single greatest photograph he’s ever taken.

He swears it’s the most erotic sight he’s ever laid his eyes on. No playboy he’d ever snuck peeks at as a boy; no pornstar— illustrious or otherwise, holds a candle to how you look crawling towards him right now. Not even Helen of Troy could compare to the sight he holds in his viewfinder at this very moment.

The beating of your heart is so erratic against the cage of your ribs you worry it bulges out from your skin with every beat, your palms sweaty against the nap of the carpet beneath you, trembling as you draw near. You’re an arms length away from him now. Now is the time to strike if there ever was one. You stop in front of him, sitting back on your heels but before you can move he’s reaching out and wrapping one deft hand around the handle of the blade, beating you to the punch.

You stare at each other like that, peering into each other's souls, intentions spread bare for both to see plainly. In fact, you’ve never felt more in tune with the man who now torments your life than you ever have. There’s a real, raw understanding between the two of you. There is no deceiving him. There is no escape from him. This is your life now, that’s just how it is until further notice.

He pulls and you release for fear of the edge and its razor kiss and just like that the opportunity is gone. All the anxiety. All the build up. All for not.

He sets the camera aside for now, seemingly done with it at the moment as he takes the blade into the palm of his left hand and stabs the tip down into the armchair of your couch, resting it there as he peers down at you knelt between his thighs.

He makes the next move, just letting you watch as the hand not wielding the blade falls to his lap and begins to smoothly pull at the end of his thin, black belt. Tugging it through the loop and out of the buckle with one practiced hand. With it undone he resumes his lax position, throwing one arm back to rest leisurely over the back of the couch as he looks to you expectantly.

You know what he wants, it’s pretty obvious but you can’t bring yourself to do it on your own anyway. You just sit there and stare at the prominent tent of his dickies, your eyes wide. He knows you need encouragement so he twists the blade against the fabric of the couch, making a crater in it and capturing your attention with the sound of the steel tip ripping the fibers free.

“Don’t make me make you, doll.” He sounds amused but you know the threat behind the statement is real so you force your shaky hands forward against their will. One hand finding one side of the buttoned garment and curling your fingers overtop the hem to grip it and the other finding a similar purchase on the other side.

His flesh is warm and tight against the backs of your knuckles as you maneuver them deftly to unbutton his pants. With the button undone the individual seams want to part away on either side, held only in place by the zipper still tugged to the top of the junction. You grip it with your left hand and pull it down, the low buzzing of it as it rides the track down and separates is loud in the otherwise quiet of the room.

With them loose, he lifts his hips for you to shimmy them down his thighs a bit, which you do with a dour expression but without fuss. He sits now in just his boxers before you and they barely constrain the bulge of him yearning against the fabric for freedom. You look away from the bulk of him for a second to look up into his eyes and when they land on his you know it’s a mistake.

They hold you enraptured with the intensity of their gaze, the brown orbs darkened so considerably they’re almost black. You have the whole of his attention and you’ve never seen someone look more hungry. You have to look away.

You can’t handle the anticipation any longer, it only doubles by the second so you just reach forward and find the seam at the fold of his fly and pull it to the side, it’s all it takes for his cock to spring free and into view, the rigid pillar of him out in the open now right in front of your face.

Your eyes scale the length of it and you gulp. He’s girthy but not overwhelmingly so, it’s the length of him that has you clutching your pearls. You consider the next logical course of action and approximate you may be able to fit half of him in your mouth realistically, any more than that is going to be a challenge. One you’re unsure you’re ready for.

You had had him last night in all his fulty, but under the bizarre circumstances and with all the adrenaline pumping through you, you were sure now that you hadn’t understood the extent of his glory. You must be projecting your astonishment because he chuckles, a low, deep sound that resonates from his chest and snaps you out of it.

“Is something the matter, doll? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He lilts at you, mockingly. His shitty pun is not lost on you, you’re just still too dumbstruck to react to it. That’s when you feel the tip of his knife under the cleft of your chin, lifting your eyes from his cock to his face so you get the full jist of his words and their weight. All too familiar with its edge, you let it carry your gaze to him, unwilling to feel its bite just yet if you can help it.

“You’re not getting out of this, babygirl.” He reminds you sternly, his tone erring on the more serious side now. You know he means it too so you close your eyes as you feel the tip pull away from your face after one last dangerous caress and try to gather yourself.

When you open them again you turn your attention back to the task at hand and reach forward tentatively to wrap a palm around his length. He’s warm and twitches at your touch. Both of you share a sharp inhale at the contact and you can feel his eyes burning holes into you from above as you scoot up as close as you can until you feel your knees bump the skirting before you’re leaning in. You brace your hands on the curved planes of his thighs, your eyes fixating on his tip as you draw nearer before you draw them closed as your lips part and you pull him into your mouth.

He’s contrastly hard against the soft slide of your tongue, like velvet over hardened steel and he tastes clean as you run your tongue experimentally along the hardened ridge of him. You keep your eyes closed as you go and it helps, you find yourself getting into a kind of rhythm, something you’d thought would be impossible to achieve given the circumstances.

His mouth drops open as your tongue runs along the bottom of his shaft, the feel of it grazing against him has his arm drawing forward from where it rests on the back of the couch to caress the back of your head instinctively.

You squeak out in surprise around him at the unexpected touch and while he knows the vibrations that ring out from the sound are unintentional they feel heavenly all the same, and it pulls a groan from low in his throat that grows into a growl towards the end.

You’ve never heard a man get so vocal from a blowjob before. The men you’d blown in the past weren’t exactly silent during, but it’s like every move you make, every drag of your tongue against him pulls something from him and that kind of knowledge, the kind of power that it instills in you has heat pooling low in your belly. Igniting the low burning embers of your arousal from where he’d had you bent over his knee earlier, and that thought alone has you digging your nails into his thighs as you allow his cock to sink down your throat a little further than you’d been letting it.

He feels the head of his cock hit the back of your throat and tighten down around him reflexively, that paired with the way your nails are digging into the flesh of his thighs threatens to make his eyes roll into the back of his head and he knows he can’t take much more of this.

He thought he’d have more self control but the longer you go the more he feels like he’s slipping. He knows what he needs so the hand that’s been caressing the back of your head pulls away from your crown to cup your cheek, which makes you flinch a bit as you’re pulled from your thoughts, but it also makes you open your eyes and instinctively look up at him.

His brows are furrowed, collected in a pinch set above the piercing, brown orbs of his eyes that bore into you and you freeze. They’re dark as they gaze into yours but they swirl with something not immediately identifiable.

It takes a moment for you to realize that in the vast pools of his abject desire, resonating around the edges of his hunger is the soft glow of adoration, something that almost bridges on love. It holds you there, gazing up at him with his cock socketed in between your lips and you watch as his face contorts with pleasure just at the sight of you.

You find you are at odds with yourself again. You know what this man is capable of, you know the deep evil that festers below his augmented surface. The kind of inexcusable rot that makes you toss out even the most polished of apples but the growing swell of your need has you tempted to sweep the facts you’d read through today in great detail under the rug. It’s where this is so clearly headed anyway, there’s no getting out of it. And with the way he’s looking at you, like you’re the sole object of his desires, like you’re the only woman on the planet, you’re having a hard time not letting that have an effect on you.

Just the intensity of his gaze makes your thighs jump, an unexpected spike of need pierces through your unease and it sets you on edge. You start to move again, as more of a distraction against your own bodies reactions than for his pleasure but the choked moan it pulls from him has the opposite effect on you and you have to mime like you’re readjusting just so you can rub your thighs together discreetly, the sound shooting straight to your core.

He’s not having it, the palm on your cheek stiffens and it stills you. Pulling you off of him with an audible plop as he lifts your face from his lap to look up at him again, though he notes how you won’t look him in the eye this time. Just when you feel your resolve beginning to slip, like he already knows he speaks, like he’s plucked the words right out of your thoughts.

“Are you wet for me, doll?” He asks in a pleasure strained voice, his tone low and overwhelming seductive to your chagrin. Though try as you might, you can’t get anything past him it seems.

You can’t bring yourself to answer him, too mortified by the fact to even process it let alone speak. But he doesn’t need you to. He can see it in the desire emanating from the blown pools of your pupils, the way your thighs shift uncomfortably, the way your hands tense in his lap.

“Show me.” He commanded. And as if you’d been hexed one hand slides off his thigh and down your body to the juncture of your thighs, slipping deftly between them to paw at the slick heat of your sex. You pull it back up to the light and hold it before you, both of you examining it before you feel his hand grip your wrist and lift, pulling you up til you’re kneeling in front of him as he leans down the rest of the way. He’s inches from you now, the space between you just large enough to house his hand gripping yours.

You watch on bated breath as he brings your slick coated fingers up to his face and draws them into his mouth, enveloping your index and pointer fingers between his lips and sucking them clean of you right before your very eyes and the sensation of it paired with his intense eye contact has you stifling a moan in the back of your throat.

When the spell breaks he pulls your fingers free from your mouth to pull you up off your knees. He takes his hand off his blade, the tip stuck down into the turf of the arm of your couch like a planted flag long forgotten for bolder claims as he hoists you up with both arms and up into the seat of his lap.

You feel the hardened length of him against the inner crook of your thighs as he seats you into straddling him. You forget about your revulsion, forget about your punishment, forget about his knife just within arms reach as he braces you, splaying a hand at the small of your back as he grips his cock with the other and positions it at the entrance of your slick pussy, never breaking your eye contact.

If he’d had said anything in that moment, if he would’ve hesitated or made you speak it probably would have snapped you out of the haze and things would have gone down differently, but he didn’t and that made all the difference. He simply lets your body weight drop, spearing you open on his cock and making you both moan out together as he fills you.

Your eyes widen in response to the pain, that first sharp pinch of being split open and he hasn’t even drawn flush against you yet. He grips the swells of your hips in the palm of his hands, noting how they fill them perfectly as he drags you down onto him until he’s finally filling you to the brim. Your cries are tinged with discomfort as those last few inches plunge deep and he stills as you both adjust to the stretch.

You try to catch your breath perched astride him but he fills you so completely there hardly feels room for air, like the very length of him pierces into the bellows of your lungs and fills them too. But then he readjusts his grip on your hips and pulls you back up off him all the way to the tip before he guides you back down onto his length again and the pain gives way to pleasure.

The mind-altering, breath-stealing kind that has your eyes fluttering closed and your mouth falling open, the kind that you have to brace yourself against the intensity of and just take it.

When he gets hold of the reins in regards to his own pleasure he starts to move in earnest, his eyes concentrating on the way your face twists and contorts with each subtle movement. Your hands reach forth and find purchase by way of grabbing bunches of his dress shirt in your fists and cling to him as he rocks his hips up into you from below while the hands on your hips guide you ceaselessly up and down his hardened length.

Your vision blurs around the edges and you can't help the noises he pulls from you now, it’s lost on you to care, let alone try to stifle them. Your world begins and ends with each thrust and while it had seemed before that you’d had the upper hand, now that was clearly not the case as your back now maintains a perpetual arch, your moans never quite cease and since he’d pushed into you, you seemed to have long forgotten anything you’d learned today. Your head empty of all thought, as your focus shifts to the feel of his cock dragging in out of your tight, wet heat. He can’t help but to comment on the fact as he coos up at you from below, mockingly.

“Does that feel good, doll?” He snarks up at you from below as he thrusts up into you with just a fraction more force than before, eliciting a low, almost pained groan from you as you clench down around him.

“It’s ok, babygirl. You don’t have to admit it out loud, I know it’s hard. The way you’re gripping my cock tells me everything I need to know.” He keeps up like that, holding you in a pleasured daze until your eyes start to lose focus and your jaw goes slack, but no matter how much he enjoys watching you lose yourself with him buried deep inside you, this is still a punishment and you’re still meant to be making it up to him.

So while you’re blissfully distracted he pulls the tie from around his collar and loosens the knot until the neck is loose and wide. Reaching up, he throws the loop over the top of your thrown back head and lets the soft silken fabric catch around the column of your neck before pulling it taut by the end and jerking you down until your foreheads touch, forcing you to look at him as he stills and watches you pout as the heavenly sensations cease.

Your pleading eyes peer down into his piercing ones as he commands you with a single word that has you moaning low in your throat and complying instantaneously with the authority behind it.

“Bounce.”

Your hands relax their grip on his shirt to brace against his shoulders as you set to work, picking up where he’d left off and trying to find the rhythm he’d set previously with your own movements. It’s a pale comparison but after a moment you find that mind numbing pleasure again even if it feels drip fed instead of a constant flow.

“You know what, doll?” He quips from below you as he watches you set to work while he lounges back into the cushions. “I think you did this on purpose. I think you wanted this.” He lets the statement linger in the air for a moment, collecting weight before he continues.

“What kind of a girl in the kind of situation you’re in gets a chance to be free, a whole five hours while I was at work and you were all by your lonesome— and instead of calling a friend… or a family member… or even the police, you called me.” He chuckles then, a dark, hearty rumble that you can feel resonate through him where he’s buried deep as it vibrates into you.

“You must like being the victim, doll. You’ve done nothing to get out.” His words get to you, you can’t help it. They penetrate your concentration and reverberate, bouncing back and echoing off the walls of your mind because as much as you loathe to admit it, there’s a ring of truth to them. Why hadn’t you called the police? All those doubts you’d had, all those worries about what would happen if you talked to them, were they really the reason you never pulled the trigger? Or was it something else? Something deeper and darker that you just can’t bring yourself to face.

Your eyes squeeze closed at the thought as you drop your hips down onto him and still, your eyes rolling beneath the lids as his tip nudges a spot inside you that steals the breath directly from your lungs. You hear him growl below you before you feel the all too familiar sting of his hand slapping down on the flank of your ass, making you cry out in pain as your eyes fly open to meet his.

He’s leaned forward again, this close you can really see the way the lust clouds the varying hues of his eyes, muddying them together into a dark rich brown that holds you hostage with their intensity. It lets you feel the heat of his breath against your lips and you feel like you’ve got the answer to your burning questions when you find your eyes shifting down to his plush lips wanting to push forward and close the gap between you to taste them.

“Don’t you dare fucking stop.”

You lift your hips and get to work again as he sits back into the cushions and denies you the pleasure. He holds onto the tail end of the tie like a leash to keep you right where he wants you as you pick up the pace again. With the way his hips are angled now that he’s sat back relaxed, his cock drags along your walls every time you lift your hips up and it punches up into that sweet spot every time you drop down, making you gasp without fail as it stabs into it.

You can feel it, the pit of pleasure that pools low in your belly just behind your navel and you know you’re not gonna last much longer. It swells into a cresting wave, one catastrophic in nature that threatens to decimate all in its path and leave you drowning in its wake. Like a suicidal surfer you chase it out to sea, slamming your hips down against his as you start to reach its peak.

That’s when you feel him jerk on the tie around your neck, tightening it until he’s got your attention again. And when he speaks he sounds utterly unbothered, still completely in control as you teeter towards falling apart all over him. Relishing the cock drunk state he’s reduced you to and being this up close and personal to witness it.

“What’s the matter, babygirl?” He taunts, voice dripping in faux concern. “Are you getting fucking close for me?”

Your brows scrunch even further in frustration at his teasing, wishing to both simultaneously throttle him and grovel for your release. You want to shut your eyes against the effects of him, want to shut him out and regain your composure, want to resist this but he grabs your hips again and takes the helm, thrusting up into you from below in a way that leaves you wide eyed and gasping. Your answer is delayed but it’s dripping with desire, born directly from a place of burning need. “Yes!”

But you should have known he wouldn’t let you off that easily. “I don’t know, doll. You’ve been an awfully naughty girl today. If you wanna come I wanna hear you beg me for it.” He growls out as he feels you clench down around him at the sudden shift in dynamic between you.

Your hands ball into fists that dig into the shelves of his shoulders as he drives into you from below and coaxes you towards your release. He knows you’re close so he slows to a crawl and it makes you throw your head back and whine, a beautiful sight that tugs on the floodgates of his own release.

He uses his thrusts to punctuate his points, driving up into you on each word to express the gravity of them. “Beg. Me.” You moan as each one drives home deep and it breaks you as you quake in his grasp.

“Please!! Fucking please!! Let me come!!” You’re past the point of shame, over the humiliation of the position you’re in, all you care about is the precipice of pleasure you’re just out of reach of. You fucking need it, you’re desperate for it, you have to have it.

“Look me in the fucking eyes then.” Your head falls forward and he can see the desperation burning brightly in them, can see the submission yielding in your blown pupils. When he has your full attention he continues, digging down deep one last time to the heart of the problem, to the root of the cause of this entire predicament.

“You broke a promise to me today. I need to hear you say you’re going to keep them from now on.” There’s a part of you, lost deep below the sea of your pleasure that hears his words and knows this is fucked. Out of everything you’d done today he’s upset that you didn’t keep your promise? A promise made in haste to get him— an intruder who’d broken in and terrorized you out of your home as soon as you possibly could. You’d have said anything in that moment to be rid of him.

And what kind of person in their right mind expects a victim to keep promises made under duress to their captors anyway? A person who doesn’t see the situation under that light. That’s who. You keep forgetting. Somehow you keep forgetting this man is obsessed with you, a violent career criminal who’d singled you out as his next victim and then took it a step even further and decided to not only relinquish you of your life but allow you to keep on living it, worse than death he’d hijacked your existence and made you his pet.

But that part of you, that part submerged at the bottom of your pleasure, drowned out by it— that part didn’t currently have the microphone. That part sat at the bottom of your mind living off a lungful of air while the rest of you crumbled and remolded itself into the docile little thing currently perched on his lap with his cock buried to the hilt and his tie cinched tight around your neck as you begged him for more.

“I-I’ll keep them. I swear. I promise.” You stare down into his eyes from above and hope your voice carries the conviction you need it to as it’s strained from the exertion of your cries, both of immense pleasure and bristling pain. Your pussy twitches around him impatiently while you wait to see if he’s satisfied. You get your answer in the form of his hips starting to move again and it pulls a soft, sweet moan of relief from your chest as you cling to him.

He picks the pace back up in earnest, not holding back and the pleasure that courses through you singes the very walls of your veins and threatens to set you alight. His fingers dig deep into the plush flesh of your hips so hard you have no doubt you’ll still be able to feel them tomorrow. Phantom fingers you’ll relive the bruising grip of when you skim your own over the top for days to come.

He’s ruthless, on a path now to see you fall apart for him and he’s not far behind as he drives his hips flush with yours on every thrust, making you feel every single inch. It’s when you lock eyes with him again and in the softest, sweetest drawl he’s ever heard, plead with him one last time.

“Please, Danny!! Please don’t fucking stop!!” It’s in that moment he knows all is not in vain. Right then he wholeheartedly commits to never letting you go as he wraps the slack of the tie around his fist, dragging you down to smash your lips to his. It’s only a second after that that you both fall apart together, you convulsing hard around him as he thrusts up as deep into you as he possibly can and stills, filling you full.

When your bruised lips pull away from him he keeps a tight leash and waits for your eyes to flutter open again. When they do, he whispers heated promises low against your lips where only you can hear.

“You’re mine, doll. You can keep denying it and keep fighting me and we can keep playing these little games with each other if you want but the end result is always gonna be the same. Whether you choose to accept it or not is your prerogative but I’m not gonna stop cause I know…” He breathes low against your lips, chasing them as you pull away in feigned distaste of his words, even as you pulse around him where he’s still nestled deep inside your walls.

His nose brushes yours softly before he continues. “…I know the truth. I know you want this.” He leaves it at that. Letting you stew on the thought as you straddle him, suspended in the haze of a day that’s left you just as lost at the end as you’d been at the start.

But even later on, as you placidly let him help you cook dinner before ultimately retiring to bed together for another night spent with a man who’d forced himself between your sheets, even as he pulls you close in the dark of your bedroom and into the warmth of his arms you know this has only just begun and it’s not over until it’s over. You’d never been one to go quietly into the night.