No Darker Place. Debra Webb

the hell did Nick Shade think he was? Damn it, she had every right to want vengeance. She climbed into the shower and let the hot water blast over her. Hard as she tried she could not clear her mind of the voices...the images...the pain.

      She slid down the wall and wrapped her arms around her knees. For the first time in months she sobbed. She sobbed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She never cried for herself. It was pointless. A waste of energy. She cried for all the victims and their families. She cried for her son—her sweet, sweet little boy—and her husband. She cried because she had failed to keep them safe.

      Shade was right...she wanted to get that bastard. She wanted to make him pay... She wanted to watch him scream in agony for hours on end. And then she wanted to watch his body bleed and seize and twitch until he took his last breath.

      She turned her palms up and stared at her scarred wrists.

      But Nick Shade didn’t know everything.

      She couldn’t have what she really wanted just yet.

      What she really wanted was to stop waking up in the morning to face another day without her baby...without the man she had loved with her entire being...without the life that had been stolen from her. What she wanted was to never again dream of what might have been.

      What she wanted above all else...was to die.

      But Gaylon Perry had to die first.

       Three

      “I know what you must be asking yourself right about now,” Gaylon said, a smile stretching across his lips as he tightened the noose he’d made around her slender neck. He draped the short remaining length of nylon rope along her chest. “Did I spend all those grueling hours at the gym for this?”

      Registered Nurse Gwen Adams shivered, her soft green eyes going wider and her nipples peaking into hard points as his gaze raked over her body. Despite the relentless heat, fear caused her body to shake as if she were stretched out spread eagle on a bed of snow rather than the piss-stained mattress he’d picked up on the street in one of Montgomery’s derelict neighborhoods.

      His personal taste leaned toward those who hadn’t spoiled their bodies with tanning beds and pointless body art. No annoying tan lines or wasted ink to disrupt the satiny, white skin stretched smoothly over toned muscles and interrupted only by rosy nipples and a neatly manicured triangle of silky hair. A perfect canvas. The lovely perfection would make any man want to burrow between her creamy thighs and plow into her pussy right this instant.

      But not Gaylon. His ability to restrain his baser desires was far more sophisticated than that of the average male. Besides, it wasn’t time to give her what she deserved just yet. Preparations had to be made first. He sighed. All good things come to those who wait. His loving mother had ensured that adage was deeply ingrained in him during his formative years, and Gaylon had learned his lessons well.

      He’d allowed his baser needs to lead him once, and look at what it had cost him.

      Exiling the memory, he reviewed the essential steps he had taken. He’d placed the mattress on the floor well away from the only window that wasn’t boarded up. A table and a chair, both of which he would need in the coming days, were picked up at a thrift store. In the corner was a five-gallon bucket he’d purchased at the hardware store for waste. If his guest relieved herself anywhere but in the bucket at the appropriately scheduled piss breaks she would clean it up with her hands and mouth. The unpleasant mistake was rarely repeated. His guests were generally quite obedient.

      This morning he’d brought the tools required to finish his work inside and stored them in the other room. The two-room board-and-batten shack had no electricity, and the rusty tin roof leaked. “Off the grid” was an apt description. More important, there were no neighbors. The closest occupied house was more than three miles away. Though ideally he selected a location deeper in the woods to do his work, this abandoned hovel would do quite well.

      He tapped his lips with his fingers, suppressing a knowing smile. A remote location was part of his modus operandi, or so those who profiled him said. His MO and signature were carefully detailed in their haughty reports. What a spectacular waste of human resources.

      All these years those who attempted to dissect and analyze him had gotten so very much wrong. The chances of the FBI catching him with their fancy profiles had been somewhere in the vicinity of zero before he made his one ruinous error. Anger flared inside him. Prior to seven months ago, no one had known his identity. Not one of his victims had survived to tell. Not one body had revealed the first significant clue about the Storyteller. He’d been far too careful...until he allowed a mere impulse—sheer lust—to best him. The relentless need had grown too insistent and too urgent to deny. He’d acted on that irresistible impulse, and it had swallowed him completely, sucking him into an uncontrollable frenzy. He’d become lost to anything but the blinding need until reality had spit him out onto the floor of that desolate cabin, bleeding like a stuck pig and gasping for air like a fish out of water.

      Now his face was plastered all over the internet and in every post office in the country. The anger spread through him like a raging wildfire. Not to worry, that costly error would be rectified as soon as he was finished here. Then he would disappear. A nice tropical island with no extradition treaty. Perhaps he would create a new MO, develop a more intriguing signature, and this time there would be no lapses in judgment...no distractions.

      All good things come to those who wait.

      Gaylon moved to the side of the mattress. He sat down, and his lovely nurse struggled to draw away, but her restraints prevented her from doing so. “I’m going to remove the gag. If you scream, I’ll hurt you like you’ve never been hurt before. Do you understand?”

      She nodded, a fresh wave of tears trickling from her eyes. Pathetic creature.

      He tugged her panties from her mouth. “There. Now, I want you to tell me the story again.”

      Moving her head up and down like a shaken bobblehead doll, she swallowed and then cleared her throat. “Can I have a drink of water?”

      “After the story.” Irritation furrowed his brow. Every time he removed the gag she wanted something. She’d been here barely twenty-four hours. He hadn’t even started preparing her, and all she could do was make requests. She should be pleading for her life—not that pleas for mercy would help. Gwen Adams was going to die.

      As aware of her improbable odds of survival as she might be, it was human nature to cling to hope. The foolish instinct made his work far more interesting and vastly more entertaining.

      “Where...” The word croaked out of her dry throat. She cleared it some more. “Where would you like me to start?”

      “At the beginning. From the moment you saw Detective Gentry in the ER.”

      “It was just over two weeks after she escaped.” Her lips trembled, and she averted her eyes as if she feared her words would anger him. “January 31.”

      He smiled. “She was in very poor condition.”

      The nurse nodded, the movement stiff and uncoordinated. “She had spent two weeks in the hospital in Meridian, Mississippi.”

      Gaylon had held Detective Gentry in an abandoned cabin about twelve miles outside Meridian. Even now, his body hardened at the memory of fucking her...of tasting her blood. He’d never had a cop before. She had been his most challenging and most satisfying prey. If only he’d been able to finish her story. “They had to do surgery while she was in Mississippi,” he prompted, not wanting a single detail left out.

      “Yes.” Adams licked her lips. “The femur was fractured, but the worst was the fibula. It had to be reassembled and stabilized with screws and a rod.”

      His heart raced as his mind replayed him standing over Gentry and crushing those bones in a fit of rage. He rolled his hand so the woman staring at him with such sheer