Page 13 of Deranged and Obsessed Omnibus: Vol 1

I waited several moments, but there was no movement, no sound. There was nothing but the heavy beat of my heart as I stood in the alley, drenched in blood, clutching the paper bag that held a severed hand.

The feeling of excitement slammed into me. Whoever followed me, they were good if I hadn’t been able to spot them. I left the alley and kept walking, even though my instincts roaredat me to hunt the one who’d been hunting me. I would have found them, eventually.

With a low growl, I pushed down the hardcore sensation to stalk, burying it in the cold, soulless pit that was my heart. I had bigger things to focus on.

I had a gift to deliver.

Chapter Six

Isla

Iwoke to the soft morning light filtering through the thin curtains over my bedroom window. I could hear the hum of the much bigger city in the distance, knowing it had never slept.

For a moment, if I just lay here not thinking about my life or what I was doing with it, everything was normal—comforting, if I could actually pretend.

I closed my eyes and rolled onto my back. The ache in my muscles from yesterday’s long shift was a familiar feeling. I started a new serving job last night. It was in an even shitter diner than the previous one. But it stayed busy, and although the tips weren’t great, I was scheduled full time, so I couldn’t complain.

When I finally forced myself to get out of bed, I felt the chill in the air of the weather changing. I sat there a moment, my feet dangling over the edge of the bed, and just listened to the creaking of my shitty old apartment. I stared out the window, rubbed my eyes to wake up, then glanced at my dresser.

And everything in my froze.

Sitting atop my dresser was a brown paper bag, the small kind that parents packed their kids’ lunches in. But the wet stain on the bottom of the bag, and the knowledge that it was clearly blood seeping out of it, had my muscles clenching and panic welling within me.

I should have called the authorities instead of getting up and walking toward it.

I shouldn’t have opened the bag with shaky fingers and peered inside.

But that’s exactly what I did.

My body jerked on its own like I was shocked with electricity, my thighs hitting the dresser and causing the bag to fall off and land on the floor.

Causing the severed hand wrapped in a bloodstained ribbon to bust through where the bag had been saturated.

The stark white of the ribbon was marred with streaks of dark red that had long since dried. The hand was discolored, the fingers curled in a grotesque half-clench, as if whoever it belonged to had been trying to grasp onto the life that was fading from them.

My breath hitched in my throat. My first instinct was to scream, to recoil, to be horrified at the sight of it lying there. A macabre gift. My pulse hammered in my ears, drowning out everything else until it made way for a ringing that had pain pounding inside my head.

But the longer I stared at that hand, I felt something in me shift.

My fear and disgust altered and warped into this strange curiosity. It unfurled in the pit of my stomach and spread outward, covering every inch of me. My fingers trembled, not from terror but from... something else, as I moved closer to the hand and crouched over it.

I had tunnel vision as I reached for the ribbon, gripping one end and pulling, gently untying the bow. The ribbon, once silky, was now slightly stiff from the dried blood. I pulled it loose, careful and slow. And then I stared at that hand for long seconds. Before I knew what was happening, my arm was moving on its own, and I was touching the cold, lifeless flesh.

I lifted the hand from the bed. The weight of it, heavier than I expected, didn’t repulse me. How fucking strange that reality was. This weird curiosity filled me as I sat on the edge of the bedand held the hand in the palm of my own. I could tell it belonged to a male just from the sheer size of it.

The knuckles were hairy, the fingernails long, yellow, and unkempt, with dirt underneath them.

I traced the lines of the hand, wondering briefly what the man had done to deserve this.

What have I done to deserve this as a gift?

I felt a peculiar, dark satisfaction blooming in my chest.

Somehow, I just knew.

Whoever the man was who assaulted me at the diner—this belonged to him.

He used these very fingers to touch me, hurt me—hardly physically, but emotionally—and made me lose my job.

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