Hush

That part hit her. Because she was worried about April. She hated that she was. She hated that she wasn’t worried enough about her to stop. And she was so proud of how far Shelby had come.

“What do you think is going to happen to me, Maddox?” she asked sharply. “Do you think I’m going to go to therapy for the rest of my life, heal my wounds, return to society, get married, have two point five kids and act like those ten years were just a bad nightmare?”

She waited for him to speak. To offer a real, honest answer. A real honest alternative.

He stayed silent.

“Exactly,” she said. “There is no happy ending for me. Not for Jaclyn. Shelby. We’ll never get out of The Cell, not really. So I’m doing what I can to live with that. And it sure as fuck isn’t getting myself a husband and a white picket fence. If it puts me in another cell, then whatever. I’ll sleep at night. So, you going to cuff me?”

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. He also didn’t cuff her.

“You have a choice to make,” she said. “You can lock me up right now. You can take me downtown and fulfill all those oaths you took to get that badge. Or you can take that gun and shoot me in the head. Those are your two options. You don’t ask me to love you or to give anything up for you. Because I won’t. I care about you. I might love you with whatever I have left in me to do so. But I think I’m too broken. Whatever is left of me, whatever pieces I can cobble together, they’re yours. But that’s not enough to make me want to stop. If you ask me to give this up for you, I won’t. This is what keeps me going. But if you ask me to choose, you’ll lose. I’m going to keep doing this because this is all I can do.”

“There have been reports of disappearances from other departments in Missouri lately. Even a cop up in St. Louis. He eyed her suspiciously, an eyebrow arched. “It just so happens all of them were on the Missouri sex offender registry.” He let the words linger in the air.

She grinned at him, just slightly. Shrugged.

“Are you kidding me, Orion? Do you know how much heat that missing cop is bringing?”

“Do they know it was me?”

“They don’t know jack shit, Orion, but that’s not the point.” He shook his head. “What did you do to him? To them?”

“Don’t worry. The cops will never find the bodies. And I covered my tracks well,” she said proudly.

Maddox stared at her. She waited for that disgust. For hatred. But there wasn’t any of that. Not outright, at least. He looked shocked, to be sure. He’d come here with all the fanfare, the anger, but he’d been harboring a hope that he was wrong.

He’d been harboring a hope that he could resurrect Ri and kiss her on the porch again.

But the dead didn’t come back.

“Orion, you can’t do this. You can’t put me in this position,” he said finally. There was no slinging of hatred at the fact she was murdering people. No disgust at all, in fact.

“You’ve put yourself in this position,” Orion replied, happy her voice wasn’t shaking. Something inside her had breathed a sigh of relief the second Maddox pushed through her door. She was not alone in this anymore.

Despite what she’d thought, even monsters got lonely. Even monsters longed for love.

She longed for Maddox. She longed to make him a monster, just like her. Because she loved him. And she loved ruined people.

“There are only two ways this is ending,” Orion continued, her gaze not faltering, electricity shooting through her nerve endings. “Either you try and arrest me now, and I fight back and make you shoot me. Or you keep this between us, and let me continue doing what I’m doing.”

Orion eyed the gun on his hip. Maddox followed her gaze then snapped his back upward.

There it was. The horror she’d been waiting for. “Of course I’m not going to shoot you,” he said, as if it were outside the realm of possibility. As if he wasn’t a homicide cop talking to a murderer. “And I’m certainly not going to be the one throwing you back into a cage. But at some point, you’re gonna mess up, Orion, and someone else is gonna figure you out, and I won’t have a goddamn say in it. And the thought of losing you again, Ri . . . it fucking breaks me. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I couldn’t go on.” Tears shimmered in his eyes, his voice breaking ever so slightly.

Orion held steady. With effort. She’d been so sure she could witness men suffering, and she had. She’d heard them scream for their mothers, plead for their lives, cry out while she tore the life from them. All the while, she’d felt nothing but satisfaction. Now she wanted to rip her insides out rather than see Maddox cry because of her.