Page 27 of Serial Killer Games

I cough. “We have a job to do,” I remind her.

But she’s not listening. She’s finally sniffed out my secrets. She crouches at the foot of my bed, and I’m across the room in an instant—

“What’s in it?” she asks when her fingers touch the cardboard banker’s box.

“Let go.”

I yank the box away, but she leaps to her feet and hooks herfingers into the handle hole nearest her and pulls. We’re toe-to-toe, the box between us.

“It’s your sewing project,” she says. “Do you still need some skin for your skin suit? Is that why I’m here?”

She tugs, and the bathrobe slips down one shoulder to expose her tattoos. I tear my eyes away. “I don’t wear bright colors or bold patterns.”

She bites her lip. “It’s a stack of photos with the eyes cut out.”

I look in her eyes, so darktheycould be holes cut out of her face.

“No…” she says thoughtfully. “It’s your cannibal recipe cards.”

Now I’m looking at her mouth. She worries her lower lip with her teeth again, like she’s trying not to smile. I know what those teeth feel like on my own lower lip.

“I know,” she purrs. “They’re trophies from your sex doll kills.”

We’ve been pulling the box in opposite directions, and now she suddenly shoves it toward me. I topple backward onto the bed, the box lid spilling off, the contents scattering. I close my eyes.

“Paper,” she sighs. “How disappointing.”

I reach out and swipe up the papers. Important documents, a few letters I’ve read a hundred times—dull things. Less interesting than a pickled human head, but they’remyboring secrets.

I start to scramble off the bed, but then she kneels on the coverlet next to me, one bare knee slipping through the front of the bathrobe, and I…well. I stay put. She plucks up a handwritten letter at random. Does she seeJacobsigned at the bottom? A date from thirty years ago at the top? No. Sheglances at it without reading it and tosses it back in the box. Her eyes connect with mine, and there’s an electric pulse in my stomach.

Dolores dela Cruz is in my bed.

Her hair is still wet, her makeup wrecked, and my bathrobe swallows her up and makes her dimensions and angles mysterious. A shoulder peeks out, a knee, two hands. She leans in until I feel her breath on my cheek. I close my eyes.

“We’ve let ourselves get derailed. Where did we leave off, before the pepper spray?”

She tugs on my tie, but I don’t think that’s the reason I can’t breathe.

“I think we were about to do something awful together in the shower,” she breathes into my ear. “Do you still want to do that?”

There’s a moth tattooed on her bare shoulder. A stud earring smolders dimly in her ear. Her perfume still clings to her—I notice all of these things. I notice everything about her. And I notice she loves this—me noticing her. Me…wantingher. I do want her.

She wants to toy with me, like a cat. I have to be cleverer and more interesting than the other mice.

“Maybe,” I say. I turn my head so my lips are by her ear. “I just have one question for you.” She turns her head to look at me.

“Saw or knife?”

Her lips twist into a beastly little smile.

12

Secret Santa

Jake

Hand, foot, shin, forearm…Doloresand I dismantle her piece by piece. I’ve never done it this way before. The knife works but requires force. The fret saw is easier but messy. We make a few bad cuts before we find our groove, amputating exactly where the joints bend so the bolts in her titanium skeleton can be unscrewed. We stack her bits up like firewood, and then I vacuum the bathroom floor of silicone crumbs while Dolores spreads out wrapping paper on the plush carpet of the bedroom.

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