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I’d been fascinated by them, so I’d focused a lot of my attention on researching them and their histories.
Which meant I’d kind of neglected other sorts of crimes going on in or around the area. I was too busy researching the criminals with moral codes to focus on the ones without them.
Like the man who’d attacked me.
A man who had clearly done so before.
My fingers were slow and clumsy on my phone screen, typing in random search words over and over until I finally got news reports.
Her picture was right there by the headline, brown hair, green eyes, with a very smart, almost studious look to her. Madison Silvo.
Victim of the Silent Sadist?
That was the headline.
The Silent Sadist?
If he had a nickname, this was not the first time he’d struck.
Madison, I had to notice, looked a lot like me. Short, slight, almost girllike, with dark hair.
She lived alone.
Like me.
She’d been attacked at night.
Like me.
But unlike me, she’d been horrifically tortured, raped, and murdered.
Was that what I’d avoided?
So, so narrowly?
The articles I found didn’t exactly have a lot of details, but that might have been because the detectives didn’t want to have that information getting out. Or because they just… had nothing to go on.
It didn’t take long to find the information on the other victim.
Ashley Moore. Twenty-eight. Same height and build. Same brown hair. Lived alone. Like poor Madison, she had also been tortured and raped before she’d been killed.
That wasn’t all.
Madison had been killed on October 5thof last year. Ashley, the 5thof October the year before that.
And me?
I’d been attacked on the fifth.
I’d been the survivor of the Silent Sadist.
“Oh, God,” I said, jumping up as my stomach rolled, sure I was going to lose the coffee and muffin. “Okay. Alright,” I cooed to myself, pressing a hand to my belly as I paced the small hotel room. “It’s alright,” I said, hoping I might start to believe it.
But nothing felt alright.
The whole world felt tilted on its axis, and I was slipping off inch by inch.
I threw out my hand, pressing it into the wall to ease the dizziness, to feel more stable.
