Black Sheep

I press the hidden button for the floor panels and hum a tune as the gears below my feet whir to life. Slabs of concrete drop and roll beneath the floor on the tracks that Samuel built. The headboard of the bed pulls closer to the wall and that end of the mattress raises up within the frame to expose the square hole to the level below. Tristan’s body tumbles down the mattress with the pillows, that stubby dick flopping like a gummy worm as he rolls into my pit, which I affectionately call my “Deconstruction Chamber.” He lands on the floor below with a satisfying thud, and then I pull the sheets and the mattress protector off the bed and throw them down too, watching as they flutter away, white flags drifting into the darkness. After searching his pockets, I toss his clothes into the pit, then I press the button again. The pieces roll back into place, locking with a final click of gears.

I place Tristan’s glass into the dishwasher and start the cycle before taking my own with me back to the bathroom where I remove my honey-blonde wig and have a short, hot shower. I feel quieter inside now that this need has been sated, like there’s a gentle hum where there was once a scratching beast, its talons so sharp it could scar my ribs trying to get out.

When I’m dried off, I clean the bathroom, wiping down any trace of Tristan’s fingerprints. Drink in hand, I drift through the bedroom and toward the bookcase, shifting the sliding wooden panel to access the hidden lock. It scans my fingerprint and the bookcase opens into my security room and the stairway to my pit. I sit in the chair and check the monitors that divide the feeds of thirty-two cameras around my house and hidden at various junctions of neighboring streets. The only movement of interest is a doe and her twin fawns from last season, their tawny colors muted to a static gray against the black backdrop of night.

I lay Tristan’s belongings out on the desk and pick each one up. Keys for his home and the Audi A5 Sportback parked in his garage. His Piaget Polo watch. I got rid of his phone at the bar, and shockingly he didn’t put up much fuss when he realized it was missing on the drive here. I think he was too eager to bury that little cock of his into my pussy. Rifling through his wallet unveils the usual smattering of credit cards and business contacts and two hundred in cash. I set the bills aside. And then I notice a slit in the wallet.

A black card is hidden inside.

Sleek. Embossed in gold.

1294 Tropane Avenue.

That’s it. No name. No phone number. Not even a city. Not that it would matter. There could be a thousand Tropane Avenues in the world and I would check every one if I had to. If that’s what it would take to find Caron Berger.

I stare at the card and then close my eyes.

One deep breath in, counting to five, then one out.

Another.

I clear my mind of everything but those numbers and letters.

I imagine myself walking through the gate of my memory palace, the card stiff between my fingers. My footsteps are just a whisper on the cobblestone walkway that leads to the glass door of the mansion. When I enter, I turn immediately to the left where a carved ebony box rests on a marble table. I keep details about Legio Agni closest to the door.From NôvelDrama.Org.

I open the box and look at the image of the card in my mind. 1294 Tropane Avenue. I lay the card inside the dark interior.

My focus is fused to those letters until the lid of the box closes, burning the details into memory. Then I turn and leave my palace.

When I open my eyes, I slide the physical card back into the wallet. I take Tristan’s belongings down the winding metal staircase, descending into my Deconstruction Chamber to burn them.

The furnace is already running, its complicated hidden ductwork built by Samuel to merge seamlessly into the chimney of the fireplace on the main floor. I open the cast-iron door and toss all of Tristan’s belongings into it, along with the bedding and his clothes. Once that’s closed up and raging with flame, I turn back to Tristan’s cooling body. Blood seeps from his mouth and nose, his mandible and zygomatic bone clearly fractured from the impact of the fall. I briefly consider slicing off his skin so I can see what else is broken, how many cracks and fissures mar the ivory scaffolding beneath his flesh. But I’m tired, and I have an early start tomorrow if I’m going to visit Samuel. It will have to wait until his flesh dissolves.

I back away from the body and press the first in a row of buttons along the wall. The section of concrete where Tristan’s body lies begins lowering into the floor. Once it bottoms out at a depth of 1.25 meters, I press the second button to begin filling the pool with heated 6 percent sodium hypochlorite solution. After pressing the third button, a layer of false flooring covers the pool which vents out far into the woods behind the house, monitored by a camera. I watch until the floor closes and seals, leaving only the faint smell of bleach behind as the quiet fans suck the gases away into the night.

With one last check of the cameras, I finish cleaning and remake the bed, and sleep soundly with the body dissolving in the pit below my dreams.

I wake the next morning before my alarm and start my routine, which first involves opening the random number-picker app on my phone to have it choose a number between one and five. It picks four.

Makeup.

I breathe a sigh of relief. I hate when it picks one or two, breakfast or workout. I don’t enjoy deviating from those preferences in my routine. Samuel forced me to find a way to include the element of chance into my daily rituals when he saw me becoming too wedded to precise schedules. “Normal people don’t do that,” he said. “Adapt to that which is beyond your control. Be ruthlessly meticulous in killing. Learn to be flexible in living.”

I think about those early years with Samuel as I progress through my treadmill and yoga workouts. I was a fledgling when we met in the desert. A first kill under my belt. No experience living in the real world. Not even a last name. I wonder if I would have kept killing if I’d survived the wilds, if he hadn’t found me and taken me in. Probably. But I likely would have been caught.

I clear all those thoughts from my mind as I meditate, the one non-negotiable step in my morning routine. It’s sometimes the only chance I have to look at my trophies, and I just collected a new one for my memory palace. It’s the image of Tristan’s jugular vein surging against the wire of my garrote, his pulse growing weaker and weaker until it stops. I place this image in a frame where it plays on a loop, and lay it on the middle shelf of my trophy cabinet, marveling at this collection that lives only in my mind.

I pick up my favorite trophy so far, the voice of a man named Nick Hutchinson whom I killed last year. I’ve stored it in a pink conch shell. I raise the shell to my ear and listen.

“Please…please no, I’ll give you anything…anything you want, it’s yours…” and then the gurgling rush of blood as I sliced his throat.

I enjoy the sound of his begging.

When I’m done reminiscing, I leave my memory palace and my meditation behind, then shower and have breakfast, a half grapefruit and an avocado on toast. I find a TikTok tutorial for smoky eyes to shake up my makeup routine. When I’m happy with the result, I get dressed in my usual uniform of jeans and a black sweater, and head out with my coffee to drive to Cedar Ridge to see Samuel.

Cedar Ridge is the best nursing home facility in Montana. Unsurprisingly, it’s also the most expensive, not that it matters to Samuel or me. I didn’t want Samuel to go to a nursing home, I wanted to care for him myself after he finished rehab for his stroke, but he refused. “My legacy can’t be trapped by my broken body,” he’d said when I tried to convince him to stay. “You have to be out in the world, free to hunt.”

So even though he’s fully regained the ability to talk and has good use of his left side, he’s elected to stay at Cedar Ridge.

Really, I think because it’s easy pickings to kill the other old folks. He literally gets away with murder with the least amount of effort required to cover his shuffling tracks. I doubt he even gets up from his wheelchair.

“Hello, Uncle Samuel,” I say when I arrive in the common room, two cups of tea in hand from the sprawling kitchen. His watery blue eyes snap up from his book. He doesn’t bother feigning any emotion when he sees me; there’s no one to watch us as the nurses busy themselves with less mobile patients.

“Bria,” he says gruffly as I kiss both his cheeks.

“Backgammon?”

“Yes.”

I set our tea down before wheeling Samuel over to the table by the window. I open the velvet-covered case, setting up the game between us. He’s always white, I’m always black. We each roll a single die, and he beats my three with a six, then starts the game.

“Four?” he asks, referring to my smoky eye.

“Yes. Do you like it?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Samuel gives a little grunt. “How’s Kane?”

“The usual. Shedding white fur on all the furniture, bringing in mice. Living his best middle-aged feline life.”

“And school?”

“Good, I have a meeting with a potential thesis advisor tomorrow.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Kaplan.”

Samuel either already knows or has been researching all of my professors in the run-up to starting my doctorate at Berkshire University. He’s read their most prestigious papers, ripping several of them to shreds for weak analytical methods or shoddy statistical findings or reaching recommendations. But he nods at Dr. Kaplan’s name.

“Time?”

“Two thirty.”

Samuel nods again. I see some flashing lights filter through the white lace curtains of the common room window and turn as an ambulance pulls up to the front doors. The EMTs unload a gurney and wheel it into the lobby, heading toward the residents’ rooms. I pivot back to Samuel slowly, one eyebrow raised in question, and he gives me a noncommittal shrug.

We finish the rest of the first game in silence, which he wins.

“Are you going to tell me about it?” he asks as we set up the second game. I smile sweetly across the board and his eyes narrow.

“Whatever do you mean, Uncle Sammy?”

His scowl darkens as I smile and take a sip of my tea. He hates when I call him Sammy. But I won’t push him too far. I might wind up with poison in my tea the next time I come around.

“Ahh, my date,” I say. “Yes.” We each roll a single die and he wins again, starting the second match. “It was fine. Short. Underwhelming.”

Samuel snorts.

“Gary called, so it was over before I had much chance to play. But I was tired, so I didn’t really mind.” A spark lights beneath Samuel’s cataracts. “Gary the Garrote.” Samuel enjoys this game of speaking in code about killing. It’s one of the very few things he truly does enjoy, aside from doing the killing himself.

“What did Gary have to say?”

“Not much. It was a pretty one-sided conversation. Katie was on the line too.”

Samuel nods his head approvingly. “Katie Ketamine.” I know better than to subdue a man like Tristan on my own, even if his only exercise was playing golf twice a week while I work out a minimum of two hours a day. Samuel taught me well about mitigating risk.

“Any flooding in the basement?” he asks after a sip of tea.

“The usual. It’ll all be just fine. I’ll give it a few days.”

We exchange a dark little smile.

“Any future dates lined up?”

I shrug, moving my pieces on the board. “Maybe. I got a new number yesterday.”

Samuel eyes me, his gaze cataloging the details of my expressionless face. When he’s done searching my skin, he zeroes in on my eyes, burrowing into my brain like a twisting blade. “Don’t spread yourself too thin. You have time. You do too much, you’ll make mistakes.”

Samuel pauses the movement of his hand over the board. This is no game, no code. And I will not let him down. “Of course, Uncle. I’ll take my time. The semester is about to start up, and if Kaplan is willing to be my advisor, I’ll ensure that I prioritize my thesis work. I promise.”

He holds his hand aloft for another breath before giving a grunt of approval, knowing I’m good for my word. After all, I am not just his protégé. I owe my life to Samuel. I am his one moment of mercy. In one hundred and seventy-two killings, I am the only person he ever saved.

The gurney squeaks behind me. I twist around to watch the EMTs rolling out a body covered with a sheet.

I turn back to Samuel and he smiles.

One hundred and seventy-three.