by K. J. Dahlen
Table of Contents
Title Page
CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
LOOK FOR
ABOUT K. J. DAHLEN
Lucifer’s Woman
Book One
Whiskey Bend MC Series
K.J. Dahlen
Copyright© K.J. Dahlen, 2018
CREDITS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, businesses and incidents are from the author’s imagination, or they are used fictitiously and are definitely fictionalized. Any trademarks or pictures herein are not authorized by the trademark owners and do not in any way mean the work is sponsored by or associated with the trademark owners. Any trademarks or pictures used are specifically in a descriptive capacity.
K.J. Dahlen
Lucifer’s Woman
Whiskey Bend MC Series
Editor: Leanore Elliott
Book Design & Formatting: Wicked Muse
Cover Art Provided By: Talia’s Book Covers
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to acknowledge Leanore Elliott for all her hard work with edits and calming panic attacks
I would also like to acknowledge my friend and fellow author Nicole Newman just because I can. Nicole and I have worked hard on other books together and bounce ideas off each other all the time.
Love both these women and couldn’t do what I do without them-they are the best support team I could ever have.
Chapter One
Jessie Grant stood at the window of the River Bend Bed and Breakfast she was staying at and watched the sun rise over the eastern peak of the bluffs near the city of Whiskey Bend, Wisconsin. Her heart was pounding in her chest a little harder than normal and nothing she did would calm her fears of being here in the first place. This was her new normal ever since she found those damn books. She didn’t know why she was here but she had to come. The last few months had been hard for her. She was twenty three years old and while her life hadn’t been easy growing up, the last few months had been horrible.
First, she lost her mom to cancer two and a half months ago. It’d been a short battle, they had found out she had the horrible disease too late to try any treatment but she’d been with her mom every day since that damn doctor’s appointment. Every day she watched her mother slip further away but this wasn’t the first time in her young life she really had to think of her mortality.
Jessie knew the weakness of the human body. One moment you could be breathing the air so vital to life and the next, you could simply be gone. Her father had died that quickly. Eleven years ago, they’d been on a family outing, going out to celebrate her bringing in a straight A report card.
They were laughing and talking about her future in either medical or law school when BAM—their car was hit by a drunk driver. They never saw the other car barreling toward them before it slammed into their car on the driver’s side.
Her father died on impact, her mother had been trapped within the metal surrounding her, her left leg smashed beyond any medical treatment available. Her terrifying scream abruptly cut off when she lost consciousness, just seconds after impact.
Her younger brother Boone had almost been beheaded by flying debris and died just moments after their father. She herself had been flung around the backseat when her seatbelt broke from the impact. When she woke up from her coma nine days later, the doctors told her she was lucky to even wake up at all.
The driver of the other car had walked away without a scratch. He was more upset that his truck was wrecked than the accident that took two lives. He spent three months in jail and her world was changed forever.
Now her mother was gone and she thought she was alone in the world. Not even a week after she buried her mother, she received a letter from an attorney. Not knowing what to expect she opened the letter and found that she had inherited a small farm from her mother’s parents.
Confused, she had called the attorney only to find out a strange tale of something that happened before she was born. Her grandparents had disowned her mother when she ran off with Jesse’s father at a young age. They told her to never return if she chose him over them. It was all in the will, the attorney had said. Which eventually, led her to being here in Whiskey Bend, Wisconsin.
So, she’d gone to visit her grandparent’s farm and was surprised to find a nice, but uncared for farm. It was three hours away from Whiskey Bend near another small town called Colten Edge. It was 150 acres of prime farm land but over the last decade, since her grandfather passed away, it had fallen into disrepair. The original farmhouse was huge and had been divided into several individual apartments in recent years.
The attorney had told her that her grandfather died over a decade ago and her grandmother, Emma Bennish had rented out her home and land in order to continue to live there. She’d been told the last of the renters had moved out three years ago.
Jessie had found there was a buyer for the land but she wanted to see the place her mother had grown up in before she sold the farm. As she walked through her grandmother’s home, she could almost hear the laughter and tears from her mother’s childhood.
While she was staying there, she began going through each of the rooms, digging into corners and finding all kinds of hidey holes. In one of the back bedrooms, she found something she never expected. It was a set of journals. Intrigued, she hoped it would be something historical, maybe even her grandmother’s words from years ago. She wanted to know what kind of people she’d come from.
What she found was totally different. At first, she didn’t know what she was reading then the horror seeped through her brain and she recoiled from it. She would never forget his words…
“I came to her like a lover, at least that’s what she thought. Me, I knew what I had to do.
Before this night was over, her life would end and mine would go on much like before except for one thing. I would relish her memory like a fine wine.
Her memory would be full and robust, pleasing to the palette, bursting with energy as it slides down the throat. Her body reminds me of alabaster marble, carved lovingly into a work of art. The perfect model of womanhood. Her face frozen in death, her blood cooling in her veins. Seeing her like that was better than making love to her in the heat of passion. As I could feel myself reaching the point of no return, I reached for the knife to slit her throat. I knew I would climax again when I saw her, as she would be later, cold in death.
Jessie’s eyes widened in horror as she took in the words from the journal. Slowly, she closed the book as the meaning of the passage sank in. She shivered violently, as the words seared into her brain then pushed the book away from her. She looked at the book on the bed in dreaded amazement for a few moments, then leaned forward to retrieve it.
With her hands shaking, she once more opened the book and read the words, this time hoping her mind had played tricks on her earlier and she had simply misread the words.
A few minutes later, she knew she hadn’t. Very carefully, she closed the book and sat on her bed wondering what to do. She found the journals quite by accident.
When she first found the books, she had opened the journal thinking it was the ramblings of a young woman of years gone by. Instead, she found herself reading the words of a killer.
As much as
the words terrified her, she couldn’t stop herself from reading them. The journal belonged to a man named Michael. No last name, just the name Michael. His thoughts, his words, his actions were written in vivid detail. What was written here weren’t words to live by or to ponder life’s mysteries, but they described how someone had died a violent death by his own hand.
Jessie’s hands shook and her heart beat a little faster as she finally understood what was written in the book. He told in sickening detail how it felt to take a life but the way he told it, it almost seemed to bring him pleasure. As if somehow, it was the most natural thing in the world. He told how it felt to watch the life drain from their bodies, not just one, but as she read the journal, she counted nine in all. It wasn’t so much the killing he craved, but the feelings he inspired in his victims just before they died that he relished, almost as if he needed it, like he would a sexual release.
As frightened as she was, she felt compelled to finish reading the journal. After the first few pages, Jessie paused long enough to check her windows and doors to make sure they were locked and secure. As illogical as this seemed at the time, she couldn’t stop herself from doing it.
On her way back to the bedroom, she grabbed a blanket. Wrapping it around herself, she got comfortable as she picked up the book and began reading again.
The entries started about ten years ago. There were nine separate entries in the book. Each one of them told their own story. Each entry told of a young woman’s life as he met her, then as he killed her. The fear and the terror he wrote about in each entry was a tribute to his victim.
She caught her breath as she read the entry from just over four years ago. Her body shivered despite the blanket. It was the most painful for her. The woman Michael wrote about was one she knew very well. She hadn’t thought about it until now but four years ago, her best friend had disappeared. Like her father and brother, one moment she was there and the next she was just gone. No one knew what happened to her. Her friend had been excited about going on vacation but it was one she never returned from. The police had no answers and after so long, her family stopped asking questions. So, it was too hard to believe but Jessie had found the real reason for her friend’s disappearance, here on a farm she know owned.
It was unbelievable.
Jessie’s heart broke as she relived her friends last moments. She had to close the book as tears ran down her face at the horror Michael described putting her friend through. The others were bad enough, but this one really brought home to her how these women suffered. For a moment, she hated him, like she’d never hated any other human being in her life.
After that entry, she had to force herself to finish reading the books. She read the words he’d written, but her heart was closed to any more pain. She’d become numb and she also wanted justice.
By the time Jessie had finished reading the journals, the sun was coming up in the eastern sky. She glanced out the window expecting to see the darkness of the night but instead was greeted by the sun shining in her window. Her world had changed overnight but the real world hadn’t. The darkness of night had passed into the light of a new day and now, she needed to face a whole new reality.
She hadn’t been able to put the journals down all night. She should have been tired, but adrenaline coursed through her veins. She should have felt drained, but instead she felt like running. She wanted to run away from the fear growing inside her.
She quickly changed her clothes and went running. When she hit the dirt road and started jogging, her mind returned to the words Michael had written. His words were almost poetic, his touch almost caressing, that is until it turned murderous. His acts of violence were, in his mind, acts of love.
As she ran the along the dirt path, she wondered what kind of man Michael was. He did what few others ever dreamed about. He dared what most would never think about. He scared her more than any other person ever had, or would. His words were never meant to be shared with anyone else; they were his and his alone. She knew that, but curiosity compelled her to read them, and she knew deep down in her heart, he would see this as a betrayal. His mind was warped beyond anything Jesse had ever thought of.
While she’d worked with vets who’d come back from tours of duty injured, she’d seen some that were pretty messed up, emotionally and mentally. But she’d never encountered anyone who was so full of twisted hate and filled with the lust to kill like this Michael.
While she worked as a physical therapist, her true love was understanding the human psyche. She’d read hundreds of case files, each detailing a different type of personality. Every file detailed an abnormal twist in the human brain and was unique in its own right and each was interesting.
After about a half an hour, Jessie felt her strength fading, so she turned around and headed back. By the time she got home, she could barely get up the steps. Her foot was throbbing, she hadn’t been watching where she was running then while on uneven ground, she’d turned her ankle about the half way point in her run and she knew she needed to rest it. As she opened the door to the house, the adrenaline high she was on before left her feeling completely washed out. Her body cried out for sleep, and she felt compelled to obey.
Just before she flopped down on her bed, she couldn’t help stop thinking about what Michael had written. Not exactly words to fall asleep to, but she was so tired nothing would keep her awake now. As she lay in her bed, she couldn’t help but wonder about Michael. It was almost as if she understood him. He wasn’t an uneducated man. In fact, if she were to do a profile on him, she would have to say he was a highly intelligent person.
His words were so eloquent, his meaning almost poetic, yet what his words represented was so abhorrent, their implication made her shiver in horror. When sleep finally overtook her, it wasn’t the restful sleep of regeneration; it was a fitful, nightmarish sleep, full of bogeymen and unknown shadows.
When she woke up several hours later, her eyes felt like sandpaper, her head felt fuzzy, worse than a hangover, and her stomach threatened to revolt. She sat up in bed only to groan and flop back down.
She reached up to shade her aching eyes. She wanted to close her eyes and go back to sleep for several hours, but sleep wouldn’t come. She’d tossed and turned as her mind raced with thoughts of death and dying. She felt truly ill from being immersed in such hate and cold from the words in those journals. It made her feel like she herself had been diseased in some way while reading his innermost thoughts.
Finally, Jessie gave up and forced herself to get out of bed. Stumbling to the bathroom, she went through the ritual of starting her day. She felt the need to shower and try to wash away this feeling. It was like her skin was crawling and she felt jittery and weak.
As she made her way to the kitchen to make coffee, her eyes caught sight of the journal. She tried to ignore it, but it didn’t work. Taking her drink into the living room, she sat down on the sofa and sipped the hot beverage. All the while, her eyes never left the book. She wasn’t quite sure what she would do about it yet, but she couldn’t just turn it over to the police.
Today, in the cold light of day, she read the words again. They hadn’t changed overnight. Even though they had made her feel ill the day before. She just couldn’t believe it was real. She paused. Sydney was real. She had died at the hands of this monster.
Jessie then wondered how long the journal had been hidden inside the floor.
The first entry in the book was nine years ago. The last entry was about a year and a half ago, but her grandmother’s attorney told her no one lived in the house for the last three years. He must have been wrong. Michael had been living here a year and a half ago. The books told her of a place he put his women in. He always went back to the same place, an abandoned farm on the top of a bluff near Whiskey Bend. He spoke about it being near where he lived and as no one was living there at the time, he knew the women would never be found. They would be forever safe and he could visit them whenever he wanted.
The
fact he went back to them disturbed her greatly. Then she wondered what Michael would do if the bodies he’d hidden for so many years began turning up. She knew these women deserved to be found.
Suddenly, she remembered something. She got up and went back into the bedroom. Reaching down on the bed, she picked up the small box she had overlooked before. She found herself hesitating. She felt she was violating someone’s privacy.
Carefully, she opened the little box and looked inside. Seeing what was inside almost made her cry. There were several pieces of jewelry, rings and a couple pair of earrings and even a little girl’s barrette. At the very bottom of the box was a little brass key. It didn’t look as if it belonged with the rest of the items. She stared hard at the jewelry then noticed a necklace. It wasn’t worth a whole lot, but as she picked it up, she felt tears running down her face. This necklace belonged to her friend Sydney. As the gemstone caught the sunlight, it sparkled. Jessie closed her eyes against the pain. It matched the one Jessie owned. She’d gotten the pair of them as a token of her friendship with Sydney.
She carefully placed it back and set the container on the coffee table. Going back to her place on the sofa, she sat and stared at the box for a few minutes. Jessie knew she should just turn the journal and the box over to the police, but for some reason she couldn’t. She almost felt sorry for Michael. Maybe that was wrong, but she couldn’t help herself. She could relate to the loneliness in his words and the bleakness of his soul.
His feelings, his emotions, were all laid out in the journal. The words and emotions he wrote about were never meant to be read by anyone else. He wrote so freely because of that ideal. There was an underlying pain in his words, something unspoken yet she could feel it. At some point in his life something very bad had happened, something he couldn’t live with. She didn’t know what it meant, but it was there all the same.