Page 176 of What We Burn

I’ve been scrubbing her search history every morning while she’s in the shower. Clearing the cache, wiping the autofill, scrubbing her IP data from server logs. She doesn’t know I know. She thinks she’s been careful, and she has been—for an amateur. But I built my surveillance network from scratch, and there isn’t a device in this house that breathes without me hearing it.

So yeah. I knew about Dale Stine before she stole the folder. I knew she’d been studying his route. I knew tonight was the night because it’s just her and me in the house alone and she made me come so many times I thought she was actually trying to dehydrate me to death before sneaking off to perform a solo murder.

I love her. I love her so much it ruins things that should never have been perfect to begin with.

I sit up in the dark, running my hands through my messed-up hair and stretching out my body. Satisfying kitten is a workout I like to treat like an Olympic sport. And for her, I’m always competing for Gold.

Then I’m up, dressed, and moving. Jeans, black T-shirt, the go-bag I keep under my bed—gloves, bleach wipes, plastic sheeting, zip ties, a change of clothes. The cleanup kit. Every Hangman has one. Mine also has snacks because I’m not an animal.

The note she left on the nightstand makes me smile. Please don’t panic. I love you. The choker sitting on top of it, tracker dark. She thinks she’s off the grid. She’s not—I put a secondary tracker in the lining of her boot three weeks ago, the one she keeps the knife in. She wears those boots everywhere now, and since she said she’d stab me if she found a tracker in the knife, that boot is my insurance policy.

No one knows about it except me.

And I didn’t have to tell kitten because she only made me promise to tell her about any new surveillance going forward and this was already there. I’m not guilty via technicality.

But who am I kidding? I was never going to tell her because she’s a cheeky little minx who pulls stunts like this. And cheeky little minxes need protection from themselves just as much as they need protection from evil cunts like Stephen.

“I hate that guy so bad,” I mutter to myself as I check the app.

Her dot is moving south on the highway, heading for the truck plaza.

Right on schedule, kitten.

Tossing my bag in my truck, I get in and drive the speed limit because the last thing this night needs is a traffic stop with a cleanup kit in the back seat. The highway is empty. Just me and the yellow lines and the low thrum of the engine and the unbridled longing that comes from knowing the woman you love is about to stab a man to death in a motel room and you can’t be there for the opening act.

I’m not worried about her. Not really. Sage with a knife is Sage at her most competent. I watched her turn Brock into abstract art on that beach, and when I took her to Hank’s meatworks, she didn’t hesitate then either. The worry isn’t that she can’t do it. It’s what comes after. The kill is the easy part—it’s the cleanup that separates professionals from people who end up on true-crime podcasts.

The truck plaza is lit up like a sad little Christmas tree. I spot Micah’s hatchback at the far end of the lot. The bar across the road is still open, a few trucks in the lot, the motel squatting beside it with its exterior doors and its vacancy sign buzzing.

I park where I can see the bar door and check the boot tracker. Her dot is stationary, but it’s not at the motel. It’s across the road, inside the bar.

So I wait.

Forty-eight minutes, as it turns out. I sit with the engine off and the window down and I think about what’s going into her drink, because a man like Stine doesn’t take a woman to a motel room and let her arrive sober. I know the pharmacology. I know the onset window. I know, roughly, what it costs.

I don’t go in.

That’s the part I’ll have to say out loud one day. Not that I let her leave the house—that I sat ninety feet away and let a man dose her drink, because walking through that door would take this away from her. And I’m all about giving my kitten everything she wants.

Tonight, kitten wants to kill.

At 11:52 the dot moves. I look up and watch her emerge from the bar, Stine supporting her as she fake stumbles—our girl is quite the actor, but she can’t trick me—across the lot, past the ice machine, and stops in front of a door.

Room nine.

“Okay, kitten. You’ve got five—no, three—minutes to gut that guy then I’m coming in.”

I set the timer on my watch and wait, bouncing my leg and chewing my thumbnail to the quick the entire time. I mean, I’m all for supporting Sage’s murder dreams, but as one of her many boyfriends, I’m freaking the fuck out here.

Kitten’s got this. She needs it.

The moment the timer beeps, I let out a whoosh of breath and open my door.

“Ready or not, kitten. Here I come,” I singsong, before chuckling because I already did come tonight. Four times. And I’m pretty fucking hard thinking about seeing her right now, so I’m hoping for five.

I grab the go-bag and cross the lot. The motel is a criminal’s wet dream. Shitty lights. Broken cameras.

When I reach room nine, I stop and take a slow breath. I feel like a teenager about to pick up his date for prom. But instead of a corsage, I come bearing bleach.