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Such an extravagant name for someone so precise, so controlled. She was another Adam had met and in whom he had instantly seen the potential to kill others. The difference was that she had already done so, several times, with a skill and precision that Adam actually found admirable. They weren’t friends, exactly, because people like them didn’t have friends, but they both saw something of interest and use in one another.
“I think you’ll be fine,” the doctor said as if he knew anything. “Nothing a little pain medication won’t fix. I’ll be back in a moment. Wait here.”
His idea of a joke, presumably, with Adam strapped down. On another day, Adam might have found a way to hurt him for it, but mindless violence wasn’t what he did. He acted with purpose and with planning.
The way he had acted to get put in here.
Getting out of the restraints the moment the doctor left was easy enough. It was just a matter of picking one of the locks on the handcuffs holding him to the bed using a length of metal he’d secreted in his hand for just that purpose.
Once he was free, he made his way over to the spot where he’d hidden a phone. It was too difficult to keep one in his cell, but he’d managed to hide others around the facility. He picked out one of the stored numbers.
Paige needed to pay for what she’d done to him, but he didn’t want her dead at someone else’s hands, and he didn’t want her deadyet. No, she was his, and only his, preferably at a point after he’d shown her what she truly was, so that she would die knowing that if she’d taken him up on his offer when he’d presented her mother to her for her to kill, then she could have had a wonderful life free from all the restrictions of the world.
He would kill her when the time came, but that FBI partner of hers . . .
A voice picked up at the other end. A woman’s voice. “Yes?”
“It’s me.” There was no need for names. They each knew who the other was, probably better than anyone else in the world. “I see from the news that you’ve started a new cycle.”
Three victims and done, that was her way. Three victims, with a note left by the first to remind the authorities that they were helpless, and to make it clear that this was her work.
“And you had your own run of victims quite recently,” she said. “Each beautifully presented. I take it their last gasps were memorable?”
That was one point of connection between them: they were both watchers. They both liked slow methods that let them observe the struggles of their victims, the slow slide towards death. Adam tied people in ways that would slowly asphyxiate them, she drugged them, tied them down, and opened their veins to watch them bleed out. Often, she took large, strong men, presumably just to prove that she could. Adam preferred to work with those who had slighted him.
“Memorable, but it led to complications. Paige King was not as receptive as I hoped.”
“You always were an optimist.”
The closest thing to a joke that could exist between them. They each knew that the other was ultimately a realist, seeing the world as it truly was—a place of predators and prey, with themselves as the predators.
“I still think she has potential.”
“Ah, you think that I broke exactly the right things in her. Perhaps.”
“I’m sure of it,” Adam said.
Her voice was more serious then. “But you didn’t call me to chat about her. As much as I would like to believe that this is a social call, that isn’t really the kind of thing we do, and in your current situation, such a thing would be a risk. For both of us.”
Her way of letting him know that she knew this was business, that he only called her when he needed something. Not that she would mind. Using people was what they did too.
“You’re right,” Adam said. “There’s something I need you to do. A change I was hoping you might make to your cycle. Paige had been prying into things she shouldn’t.”
“So . . . her?”
“No,” Adam said hurriedly. The last thing he wanted was the Exsanguination Killer killing Paige before Adam could. That was the kind of thing that would see the two of them have a fatal falling out. “But there’s someone else close to her . . . her partner.”
“You want him dead?”
“Oh no, I think there’s somethingmuchmore painful you could do to him.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Paige hurried into the building that housed the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, rushing up the stairs to the floor that housed her department while trying to work out what could be so urgent that Sauer had called her in like that.
The answer was obvious. There was an active case that needed her and Agent Christopher Marriott’s skills.
Paige felt a moment of tension at that thought—not just because the cases they had worked in the past had featured the kind of killers who had been terrifying to go up against and who had been more than willing to try to add Paige to their list of victims.
