I borrowed some clothes from Brad’s closet, and took the ballcap he likes to wear after work from his office desk. Before I enter the bar, I lower the bill over my eyes and push through the door. An obnoxious blast of pop music greets me first.

I find the table near the back corner where Kyrie sat for the past half hour. From this viewpoint, I spot her target right away, drunkenly and aggressively flirting with a twenty-something young woman across the dimly lit room.

She likes her victims to be of the womanizing variety.

When a waitress approaches, I order a Scotch and put it on Brad’s credit card. It only takes twenty minutes before I catch Kyrie’s target slipping a crushed pill into the girl’s beer.

The adrenaline for the hunt stirs in my veins.

As the target guides the impaired girl out into the chilly night air, I follow not too far behind, making sure the camera mounted at the top of the display shelves catches Brad’s ballcap on my way out.

The plan fell into place naturally. Brad admitted to Agent Hayes in the initial meeting that Mason brought his concerns directly to him.

Then Mason went missing.

Now, I’m practically handing Agent Hayes a prime suspect with evidence on a silver serving platter.

Although I’d like to claim this is all for Thunderdome, the wild heat sizzling my blood states otherwise. I’ve been denying myself too long, urges building. And the gratification of the kill is only partially what’s making my heart drum inside my chest.

Like me, the target is too eager, and his impulsive nature has his victim lured into an alley only a few blocks from the bar.

I hang back around the corner and prep the syringe. When I hear the telltale sound of a lowering zipper, I attack.

Anchoring my arm around his shoulders, I pull him off the drugged girl and drive the needle into his neck. I have the plunger depressed before he has a chance to fight back. As he sags against my chest, I deposit him on the asphalt, then make quick work of checking the girl’s vitals and moving her out of the alleyway.

From her phone, I send an SOS text to her most recent contacts, but ultimately leave her to chance. I’m already playing a game of risk by hunting with a fed in the vicinity. I can’t chance self-preservation to make sure one girl is safe.

“If I’m going down by the feds,” I say, dragging Kyrie’s victim to the end of the alley by his ankle, “I might as well go out in a bloody blaze of glory.”

I chuckle, feeling a rare euphoria. Or maybe she’s just driven me completely out of my mind. I’m being brought down by a girl with poppy blue eyes and bubbly smile. The sheer weakness of it.

I close the trunk of my car with a rewarding click, sealing the victim inside.

Defleshing methods can vary. Known more accurately as excarnation among my peers, the removal of soft tissue and organs from the skeleton, wherein not to affect or damage the bones, is a delicate process that takes time and patience.

And a lot of bleach.

This is a process I take great pride and pleasure in. The subject is typically deceased when performing the defleshing…but they don’t have to be.

I might not have the time necessary to be as thorough and delicate as required to preserve the bones—but there is a certain appreciation for the more antiquated method.

I look at the naked victim on the steel table as I run the blade of my fillet knife over the sharpening stone. He’s on my slab to serve a purpose. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t take pleasure in my work.

A tube feeds the near-empty contents of a Banana Bag into his arm via an IV drip. The mineral and saline solution will help sober him from the sedative much quicker.

To test the blade’s sharpness, I set the stone aside and lay my gloved hand to his shin, right below the kneecap. His skin is cool to the touch, my personal cold room in my home set five degrees lower than the room at the university.

Positioning the blade at a sixty degree angle, I slice into his flesh, making a clean incision.

Blood pools around the cut and drips bright-red onto the steel surface. My heart rate—which almost always never accelerates above resting—spikes as adrenaline floods my adrenals.

I feel the loss of the moment when he starts to rouse. Groggy, Kyrie’s victim blinks several times as he becomes conscious and attempts to clear his vision. He immediately tries to move his arm, realizing slowly in his inebriated state that he’s strapped down.

Then his gaze locks on me.

“There’s still a good amount of sedative in your system,” I say to him. I wipe the blood off the blade with a clean towelette. “You’ll appreciate that here in a moment.”

As I reach under the slab for my garrote, he stammers the usual tired questions: Who are you. Where am I. What are you going to do to me. Followed by the useless screams and pleas and tears, then finally, threats.

“Good,” I say, stretching the wire out above him. “It’s good to end on a strong note.”

While he continues to threaten my life, I grip the wooden toggles and lower the garrote, resting the wire ligature below the notch of his Adam’s apple on the larynx.

Fighting, he shakes his head back and forth, and I stay right here to savor the moment. The rush, the anticipation. The closest there is to bliss—driving right through the Teflon layer that shrouds me from those elusive feelings.

My gaze settles on the vase of flowers across the steel room. The Himalayan blue poppies frozen in time, the color of the petals preserved at the exact beautiful shade of her eyes.

I imagine her just as she was in the Bass Fields. Mere inches from me, her proximity a heated current against my skin as she rested her finger alongside the trigger. Her reluctant hunter’s gaze homed in on the sick animal.

She loved that coyote.

A fucking coyote, with the inability to reciprocate her feelings, who’d likely maul her face off if she tried to pet it.

And she named it fucking Sunny Bunny.

Since the second she entered my department, I’ve been trying to figure this woman out. Knowing now that we’re kindred should explain the fixation I’ve had on her; that I sensed a killer.

But there’s still something elusive keeping me from wrapping my ligature around her neck.

Her confession burns through my muscles. The pain in her eyes when she pulled the trigger spears beneath my rib cage, her kill felt with every emotion her body couldn’t contain.

The whimper below hauls me out of the memory and, in a fraught effort to regain control, I wrap the ligature around her victim’s neck and pull tight, throttling his scream. The garbled chokes and wheezes for air caress my skin.

When the chorus of sounds die away, I give the wire some slack, allowing him just enough air to do our dance all over again.

I pull the wire taut until my muscles burn. Until the mental image of Kyrie’s smiling face morphs into one of anguish. Her mouth parted, lips pale and trembling. The way she looked at me as I choked her neck in the cold room.

“Dammit…” I release the wire, and the victim gasps. His broken coughs and desperate pleas blend with the sound of Kyrie in my head.

“Get the fuck out—” I snap the wire tight, and his skin splits beneath the ligature. His eyes bulge. Capillaries burst, and a plume of red fills the white.

As I stare into his eyes—my favorite part—waiting to feel the moment his body stops fighting death, her eyes invade my dark soul.

And all I see is her.

Her fucking hard nipples in the freezing cold room…and imagine what noise she’d make as I bit one.

“Christ.” I drop the handles and back away from the table.

Furiously driving a hand through my hair, I bite out another curse. My blood roars inside my ears. I come around the table and grab the knife.