“I’m not as mean as I pretended to be,” she whispered through her tears. “I’ve always loved you so much. I just wanted you to love me back and you . . . you wouldn’t.” She placed her brother’s hands in hers and squeezed them tight.
Eyes clouded with tears, she realized she had to leave, and quick. Either go or risk becoming a ward of the state, and she couldn’t let that happen. No one had ever controlled her or told her what to do—and she sure as hell wouldn’t let anyone do it now, especially the government that her brother had hated so much. After all, if he hated it, she hated it.
Scooting away from his body, she ran to pack a bag. Three minutes later, just as she heard the first of the police sirens, she threw open the screen door at the back of the house and disappeared into the woods.
Thirty minutes after that, she was sitting, bloodstained and paralyzed with fear, in the passenger seat of an eighteen-wheeler.
She was headed west on Highway I-10, toward Texas.
CHAPTER 1
Nine Months Later . . .
HE STOOD OUTSIDE Sherwood Foods, a small supermarket in Truro, Louisiana, clutching a paper grocery bag as though he was waiting for someone.
And he was.
Just not in the sense that people might think.
The day was overcast and uncomfortably humid, but he persisted. Since he’d arrived thirty minutes before, there had been heavy foot traffic. Couples and families in and out. Hundreds of screaming, red-faced children.
Most people didn’t seem to notice him. And the ones who did probably forgot about him two seconds after making eye contact. He wasn’t especially memorable, which, of course, worked in his favor.
So far he hadn’t bothered to smile at anyone.
No one had been worth a smile.
He’d managed to stop hunting for years, but like all addicts, it was always on his mind, somewhere, well concealed behind several layers of thoughts. Or, sometimes just barely cloaked, behind one or two. But the desire was always there. Fortunately, he’d managed to keep it in check.
Until now.
He thought about the headlines he’d read of the kid who had killed people in an adjacent town a year earlier and wondered if he and the kid had shared any of the same thoughts. He wondered if the kid felt vindication or remorse after the attacks or if he just went numb. In fact, he thought a lot about the kid. About how alike they might or might not have been. About how awful it was that he ended his life just as it was getting started. It disheartened him just thinking about it.
The newspapers reported the kid had always been a loner. That he’d had weight issues when he was younger. That maybe his desire to kill had been fueled by being bullied at a fragile age . . . which, of course, described him to a T. But who really knew exactly what drove people to the type of madness that made them kill? Was it nature or nurture? Or a combination of the two? Over the years he’d studied the topic relentlessly, but the more he studied, the more confused he became, so he’d decided to stop.
The itch was back. He barely slept, and the rare times he managed to, he woke up in a pool of sweat. And, as always, when he had the itch, the rage flooded in, sickening every cell of his body. The problem was that he only knew of one short-term cure for his itch: hunting. He first discovered this, almost by accident, at the age of sixteen.
When he hunted he abided by three rules: the prey had to be a woman, she had to be a certain type . . . and she had to smile at him. He had learned the hard way that men didn’t satisfy his needs. Nor did just any woman. And the smile did two things: It gave the woman some control over her fate. It also provided more of a challenge, because most people didn’t like to smile at strangers, which meant he often had to work for it.
The new life he was leading had him on edge. He’d been waiting around for months for something big that might not ever happen, something he wasn’t sure about, and it made him tense. He needed the release.
His thoughts snapped back to the foot traffic. Just as long as SHE didn’t find out, he’d be okay. So with HER, he’d been very careful. Out of self-preservation he’d learned how to lie very well to HER over the years. Still, something had changed. SHE was guarded now . . . not nearly as warm. They even argued—something they never did before. He sensed it was because SHE was still suspicious, and that disturbed him . . . and only made the itch worse.
He stared deep into the parking lot, his eyes narrowing as he watched a young, blonde woman step out of her white Honda Civic.
She was cute, but plain.
Not his type.
Plus, she didn’t have that certain attitude he usually went for. That cool, confident, even arrogant one that usually meant trouble but also deeply attracted him. The type other women would call bitchy. The type who made his life miserable when he was a boy. He knew that this woman didn’t fit that profile, so he dismissed her.
He shifted his attention to the next row of cars and he spotted a curvier, more fashionably dressed young woman who had just eased herself out of a Pathfinder. She was a brunette, and he could gauge her attitude in her presentation and movements alone.
His pulse quickened.
The woman’s dark hair was sprayed stiff and she was wearing a sassy little shorts set, tall wedges, and oversized designer sunglasses. Her chin was tilted toward the sky, her spine straight as she fussed with her linen shorts, yanking them lower around her thighs.
Bingo.
But then the Pathfinder’s back passenger door flew open and a young boy jumped out.
He frowned. No, too messy.
Loosening his grip on the grocery bag, he halfheartedly turned his attention back to the plain-Jane blonde as she approached the supermarket’s automatic doors.
On closer inspection, he realized she was much prettier than he’d first thought. In that natural, girl-next-door sort of way. She appeared to be in her early twenties and had a thin, athletic build. Her blonde hair was long and pulled into a high ponytail.
As she drew closer, it was also more obvious that she was very self-conscious.
She would be so easy.