I inhale sharply, and Willow turns around, cooing as her arms wrap around my neck. “No more crying. You know Dad hated to see us cry, and I physically think I can’t cry anymore.”
“I don’t know how to stop,” I say, a light chuckle comes through the thick line of tears.. “It just… it won’t stop.”
I swallow against the lump rising fast in my throat and press my mouth to Willow’s hair.
“He would’ve been proud of you,” I whisper. “You hear me? Tommy would’ve been so fucking proud of you.”
Willow shudders in my arms, and I feel the breath stutter out of her. Not a sob. Just a fragile, broken kind of exhale. Like she’s been holding in something sharp for too long.
I hold her tighter, and for a long while we don’t cry, or talk. We just hold each other, two daughters mourning the death of their father.My father. God, I never thought I would say that -- my father.
25
CONNER
“Midterm season is rough for everyone,”I announce, voice flat, as students file into the lecture hall with the grace of the damned. “That said, there will be no extensions. No exceptions. Unless you—or an immediate loved one—is actively dying, your paper is due in two days at 11:59 PM.”
A groan rolls through the classroom like thunder—expected, uninspired, and entirely unoriginal.
“Excellent,” I murmur, brushing chalk dust from my palms. “A chorus of mediocrity. Just what I needed to start the day.”
The projector hums to life behind me, the title of today’s lecture glowing across the screen in stark serif text:
“Deviant Psychology: Understanding Compulsion, Control, and the Making of a Killer.”
I let it hang there for a moment, watching as a few heads pop up, eyes narrowing with interest. The rest still look mildly concussed from lack of sleep or too much caffeine. A boy in the back opens a Monster. He’s already lost.
“I trust you’ve all read the assigned profiles. Bundy, Dahmer, Gaskins, and the McDonald Triad framework. If you didn’t, pretend you did and try to keep up. I won’t slow down for you.”
Someone coughs nervously. Another student mutters something under his breath. I ignore it. My attention is already shifting toward the seating chart, mentally tracking who showed up today—and who has been steadily slipping. There’s an empty seat where Jasmine Rivera usually sits. She hasn’t sat there in about a month. Normally, she would be manually dropped from my class, and I wouldn’t entertain the idea of her passing, but for some ridiculous reason that I can’t seem to get rid of, I want to see her again.
I mean, she is still completing all the work online, and she is ridiculously brilliant in a way that makes me want to listen to her for hours. I am not holding on well with the distance, and it has only been a week since she reached for me—and like the cold animal I am, I turned my back on her. I am a fucking monster, and not for the reasons I am comfortable with. Killing men who I believe deserve to die. Hunting killers who are sloppy enough to warrant attention. Doing what I had to survive after the death of my mother. I am a monster for those things, yes.
But for what I did to Jasmine—well, even most monsters have a limit on what type of beast they will be.
I clear my throat and turn back to the room. “Today, we’re going to discuss what separates the fantasist from the actor. What turns obsession into action. What makes someone... break.”
I pause long enough for the silence to take root. This is the part of the semester most students are fighting to get to. What they think this class is really about -- serial killers. Such a romanticized idiotic thing. If anyone in this room was a truemonster hunter they’d wonder about the killers we haven’t caught and not about the ones we have. They’d wonder about me.
“Despite what the public thinks, killers don’t wake up one day andsnap.They build to it. Layer by layer. Thought by thought. Most of them don’t want blood. Not at first. They want control. And they find it, more often than not, by studying people who never see them coming.”
I clear my throat and turn to my first file on Ted Bundy. “Here is your trigger warning for the people who need it.” I announce, before turning to the class with a smile that feels as unnatural and unsettling as I bet it looks. “Now what is Bundy’s victim profile?”
Hands shoot up across the room, and just as I am about to call on a redhead who keeps flashing her bare pussy at me from underneath her desk, the door to the classroom creaks open, and I am staring at perfect storm grey eyes.
“Miss Rivera, late again.” I comment, quirking an eyebrow at her.
She looks better than she did the last time I saw her. The side of her head is freshly shaved, the red highlights in her hair have faded into a soft pink again, and she’s wearing knee-length jean shorts with an oversized black hoodie I’d bet all the money I have belongs to Landon. Her socks are thick, and her Birkenstock sandals look too new to be anything but recently purchased. She’s dressed to be inconspicuous—but to me, she rings like a breath of fresh air.
“Sorry, Professor Kilgore,” she calls out as she slides into the seat right by the door, like she’s planning to make a quick exit the moment the clock hits the end of class. “Traffic.”
I pause, lips pressed into a thin line. I can’t confront her the way I want to in a room full of students, but did my little sunshine just lie to me? Her apartment is a twenty-minute walk from campus. Traffic, my fucking ass.
“Well, most students know it’s proper to prepare for traffic,” I say, voice clipped as I move behind the podium. “I take it you’re also not prepared for class?”
I hear her bag thump to the floor and the soft, annoyed exhale that follows. The audacity.
“I never said that, Professor Kilgore,” she bites out, putting unnecessary emphasis on my title like it’s something vulgar. I grip the edges of the podium, lean forward just slightly, enough to angle past the projector’s glare and catch her face in the glow. She’s glaring at me. Good. I missed that fire.
