She’d been young when this started. It had been animals, then - whatever her grubby little eight year old hands could catch while her parents were doting on her brother and ignoring her. There had been birds, neighborhood cats, rats, bodies all buried behind the tree in her backyard. It had continued like that well into high school, gone from blood beneath her fingernails to papercuts littering her fingers as she read whatever she could on the topic of death, about human anatomy, about people with massive numbers of deaths under their belt. The fascination didn’t fade once she was in college as she’d almost hoped it would, though. She was nineteen the first time she put a knife through someone’s ribs, sloppy and uncoordinated and lucky that the air had rushed from his lung so quickly. Her heart had raced long past the point where she’d gotten home, and even after she’d scrubbed her hands clean, she’d been unable to forget the feel of blood spilling over her skin.
And that was how she’d come to stand outside a shitty motel more than three hours from home eight years later. She had someone bound, gagged, in that motel room, the pulse of some song she wasn’t even sure she knew all that would have covered the sound when she ducked out to the store for a few essentials. “You block everybody’s door, or am I just lucky?”