Please don’t be after me, I prayed.

The cop slowed alongside the car, and I started to panic before I realized we were right before the intersection, and they were probably checking to see if anyone was coming from the other direction. I turned my face away as they eased past and then picked up speed again on the other side of the intersection.

“Holy shit,” I wheezed, dropping my forehead onto the steering wheel. Nope. I wasn’t cut out for a life of crime. Blood and gore, I could handle. Constantly worrying about being arrested? Hard pass.

Someone behind me honked, and I jerked upright. Now wasn’t the time to have a breakdown.

I waved to the person and started driving again, careful to keep beneath the speed limit. Yes, the car was clean, and no, there wasn’t any reason for the cops to be after me so soon, but telling myself that didn’t magically erase my paranoia. I had a feeling it’d be weeks, if not months, before I could fully relax again. What would happen to Brad’s body? Could Lucius be trusted? He’d seen my face. He could ID me to the cops if questioned.

Goddammit, I just had to go and piss him off with that Azkaban joke. Maybe I could send him flowers or a new wrench set by way of apology and weasel my way back into his good graces.

Five minutes later, I pulled into Josh and Tyler’s parking lot and rolled into the guest spot next to Tyler’s SUV. Fred was non-stop meowing, so I eased the strap to his carry bag over my shoulder and grabbed his litter box before heading up. I had their entry code but paused to buzz in instead, giving Tyler a heads-up that I was there. It’d be super awkward to walk in on him when he wasn’t expecting it, even though Josh said he was cool.

“Hey, Aly,” his voice crackled through the speaker before he buzzed me up.

He met me at their door a few minutes later, holding it open. “Well, hello.”

His dark blond hair was still wet like he’d just gotten out of the shower, and it looked good slicked back from his face like that. He was shorter than Josh, maybe six feet, and just as muscular, though he appeared more so somehow, without any tattoos to mask his physique. There was no mistaking how handsome he was, but he didn't hold a candle to his roommate in either looks or personality, and I felt nothing for him as I strode past.

“Sorry,” I called over my shoulder, heading toward Josh’s room. “Cat bathroom emergency.”

I saw nothing as I rushed inside the bedroom, too focused on getting the litter box set down and Fred out of his carrier. He bolted straight into the box once free, and I swear I heard an audible kitty sigh before he started peeing. Poor little guy.

I lifted my head and – oh, damn. I was here. On the set of all my favorite videos. There was the couch along the far wall. To my right was a massive bed, complete with hook holes for bondage play. Straight ahead was the wide bank of windows that Josh had stared out of while pretending to be sad.

I was instantly, painfully aroused. My lizard brain expected me to turn around and find the Faceless Man waiting just behind me, chest heaving and covered in blood, and, god, I hoped Josh got home soon. I’d never been so ready for kinky, athletic sex in my life.

Of course, that’s when Tyler knocked on the still-open door. “You want coffee or anything?”

I grimaced, glad my back was to him so he wouldn’t see my expression and misunderstand. “Coffee sounds great, thank you,” I said, my voice two octaves higher than usual.

So awkwaaard.

I waited until I heard him walk away before turning around. Fred was pretty well-behaved, but I didn’t know how Tyler would feel about him having free rein in the apartment, so I closed the door to Josh’s room behind me to keep him sequestered.

“I’m just going to grab the rest of my stuff!” I called as I paced through the entryway.

“You have the code?” Tyler asked.

“Yup.”

“Cool. Just leave the door unlocked then.”

I raced out of there, glad to have the frigid winter air on my too-hot skin once I was back outside. Somehow, I hadn’t paused to think about what staying at Josh’s place would do to me. So far, it was a strange combination of emotions. I had fantasized about doing the darkest, most lascivious things with a man I was obsessed with in one bedroom, while in the other, I’d had real-life, boring sex with a man I had no feelings for.

Josh said Tyler was fine with everything, but now I wondered if I was. Was I adult enough for this situation? Or would the awkwardness of it prove to be too much? I wanted to be chill. Hell, I thought I could be, under normal circumstances, but after the night and morning I’d had, I’d just about reached full mental capacity, and making small talk with a guy I used to get naked with felt like a step too far right now. I’d have to avoid him until I could catch my breath.

I popped the car’s trunk and was just reaching in for my things when my phone rang inside my jacket pocket. I whipped it out.

“Josh? Are you okay?”

“Uh…not Josh,” a woman’s voice said.

I pulled the phone from my ear. It was Veronica, my lab tech friend.

“Shit, sorry, Vern,” I said, grabbing my bags and shutting the trunk. “I thought you were someone else.”

“No worries,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you I finished your bloodwork early.”

“Vern,” I whined, punching in the apartment door code. “I told you not to worry about it.”

“I know,” she said. “And you still shouldn’t feel guilty. No line jumping occurred. I stayed an hour late the past two nights to finish it.”

“Vern!” I yelled, my voice echoing up the stairwell. “That makes me feel just as guilty.”

“You’ll live,” she told me. “Want to know the results?”

“Let me guess: they didn’t match?”

“Ding, ding, ding!” she said. “We have a winner.”

I rolled my eyes and let myself back into the apartment, making a mental note to ask Josh how he’d pulled that off. “I’m sorry I put you through all this for nothing. I feel like a dick.”

Fred was waiting for me at Josh’s door, and I almost tripped over him on my way inside. “Jesus, Fred. Watch out.” I could hear Vern talking, but the phone was away from my ear while I juggled the bags and tried to keep my cat from sprinting past me to freedom. “One second, Vern.”

Finally, I got everything inside, and Fred corralled back where he belonged. I lifted the phone to my ear. “Sorry about that. What did you say?”

“I said I did some more digging.”

Something about her tone had me sinking onto the edge of Josh’s bed. It sounded like she was about to give me the kind of news you should hear sitting down. “Okay?”

“Like I told you the other day, you made me curious, so I decided to look past a simple match and see if I could find anything else.”

“And?”

“Uh, I don’t know a good way to tell you this,” she said.

I gripped the phone, starting to get worried. Was there something wrong with Josh’s blood? “Rip it off like a band-aid,” I told Vern.

She took a deep breath. “I checked the sequencing from the bloody rags against the open DNA database we use, and, well, the contributor shares 50% of their DNA with the Ken Doll Killer.”

I shook my head. “Wait. What are you saying right now?”

“That the man who bled on the rags is the son of a serial killer, Aly.”

The phone slipped from my fingers. I could hear Vern calling my name, but a low buzzing filled my ears that drowned her out. The edges of my vision went fuzzy, and my head spun. I was going to pass out. I’d never fainted in my life, but I knew all the symptoms, and after all the shocks I’d suffered today, this last one had clearly pushed me over the edge.

My nursing kicked in, and I laid back on the bed while the room blurred around me. The man who had stalked me, broken into my house, and killed someone was the son of a serial killer.