Leave Me Breathless: The Black Rose Collection

by Dakota Willink

  I have my first mandatory session; he insists on couple’s counseling. “No amount of therapy will ever fix me, Kace.”

  He slides into the seat beside me. “You don’t need to be fixed, Ellie. You’re grieving and angry … and pissed off. I am too. Someone took our baby from us, but you can’t do this to yourself anymore.” He points to the soggy cereal and untouched spoon. “You barely eat or talk or function. Ever since the captain sent you home, you’ve been…”

  “Different? Depressed? Emotional?” I spit out words to finish his sentence. “Did you expect me to be the same?” My forehead, right above my left brow aches. My migraines always seem to start there.

  “I expected you to be more resilient.”

  “Resilient?” The throbbing vein doesn’t ease, so I cradle my head on my hands and rest my elbows on the table. Resilience is for people who have hope.

  “I mean…” He stops and shakes his head. “Babe, I don’t even know what to say anymore. Nothing I say is something you want to hear.”

  Then. Stop. Talking.

  “You walk around here like a ghost. You wear sweats all day, and how long has it been since you combed your hair? I’m worried about you.”

  My gaze cuts to him, warning him to shut the hell up. I look better than I feel, that’s for damn sure.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Ellie. That’s what I’m trying to say.” His ordinarily strong voice is softer and needier than usual, but my heart is too hurt to give a shit. “I miss you. Don’t you miss me?”

  Three months ago, I would’ve run my fingers through his dark hair and touched my forehead to his before placing a soft kiss on his lips. Today, I glance over my shoulder, through the open space, at the unmade sofa bed and visualize the separation between the two of us. Ever since getting back from the hospital, I couldn’t sleep with him beside me. I blamed him, and us, and it no longer felt right to fall asleep in his arms.

  “Babe?”

  I sigh and exhale the air between my teeth. “I don’t know, Kace.” Maybe a part of me deep down longed for Kace’s touch—to feel the warmth of his skin touching mine—but that part of me is buried under hours of wishing for life to rewind. No matter how much I miss the feeling of being loved, I miss my baby more. “I don’t know how to exist without him.”

  “Exist with me, Elle.” He puts both hands on my thighs and turns me toward him, locking my legs in between his knees. “We were us before him.”

  I hate Kace for being able to move on. For seeing life without our child—without Tyler—in it. “It’s not the same anymore.”

  His finger slides under my chin, and he tilts my head up to meet his gaze. “It can be. We can rebuild. I want to be us again, Ellie.”

  It hurts to hear the hope in his voice, especially when I don’t find anything to be hopeful for. “I’m not the same person.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He doesn’t know what he’s saying. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always wanted children. Lots of children that I can no longer carry for him. He doesn’t understand the ache in my bones—the need for revenge that flows through me with every passing moment.

  “I don’t want to be those people anymore, Kace.”

  He doesn’t release me, but a glimmer of shock flickers over his face before he says, “You don’t mean that, or you wouldn’t still be wearing this ring.” He brings my hand up in the air and thumbs the diamond.

  “You’re right.” I remove my hand and slide my ring off. I hold the engraved side up and read the inscription. Three become one. Before he can say anything, I remind him, “We’re not going to be three ever again.” I don’t have a uterus anymore, and adoption requires someone financially and emotionally stable, and that’s not me.

  “So, let’s work on being two first. Then figure out the rest.” Though his tone has become harsher, he’s still trying.

  Something I’m no longer willing to do. “The only thing I want to do is find who killed our son.”

  “Then let me help you find who is responsible.”

  “They took you off the case.” It’s low priority since it’s not considered a homicide. Last time I was in the precinct, they were chasing down a killer known as the Bullet Man. It took forever for the cases to be connected, and only recently did they realize they were searching for a proxy killer. “Any leads?” I switch the subject to something I’m more comfortable talking about—murderers.

  “No, and we are up to eight victims now. He’s escalating, and we have no leads.”

  “Eight murderers, you mean.”

  “They are still victims. He solves cold cases and gives the grieving families a bullet with the name of the murderer on it. We’ve looked into every private investigator, cops, lab techs, and gun shops. Nothing turns up. We don’t know how he’s choosing his victims, or how he’s solving the cases we couldn’t.”

  “There’s no interaction between the people who receive the bullets and the sender?” I ask.

  Kace smiles softly. “It’s dropped off through couriers. None trace back to the same person. We’ve hit the pavement, tracing leads, and have nothing except more bodies and more solved cases.”

  “Have you pulled out all the cold cases and tried to find similarities?” Hope finds a way to embed itself in my tone.

  Kace picks up on it and smirks. “There’s the girl I fell in love with. I can pull a few strings. Maybe if we play our cards right, we can get you back to work, or I can talk to Cap about bringing you in to consult. Your expertise could come in handy.”

  I slip my ring back on and force a tiny smile, playing the part. “Maybe this is what I need? A case to distract me.”

  But I don’t want to arrest him, I want to hire the Bullet Man.

  2

  Subjects

  Dr. Nolan Mills

  I have a theory about a bullet and a tortured heart. When both items exist, the only variable is opportunity.

  That’s where I come in. I solve the unsolved cases and provide the survivors with the chance to get their justice. Of course, choosing my test subjects requires time and a bit of social interaction. Being a cognitive neuroscientist with an emphasis on psychiatry, who specializes in grief counseling, gives me an in. With the right questions, I pinpoint key details of the investigation and find ideal candidates. An emotional scorecard, which I fill out during my first few sessions with the patient, is crucial in my selection process.

  Priors, registered weapons, level of education, forms of abuse during childhood, relationship status, intelligence quotient, medical history, trauma, and much more become data points in my study. Quantifying the quality of a patient’s past and present provides a solemn hypothesis on his or her future. I have three groups based on scores: those I presume will not seek revenge, those who I’m quite positive will, and those who I’m unsure of.

  Despite my initial assumptions, I’m very strict about hindering my own investigation by adding bias, so I never sway results. Patients come to me for support, and I help them through their emotional process, never pointing them in a particular direction or dwelling on revenge. Exploring their feelings is the ultimate goal, not finding test subjects.

  I confess to finding it much more enjoyable when the two overlap. It’s my only sense of entertainment.

  As a survivor of crime, I understand grief. My first opportunity to help someone through their ache and guilt came in college.

  Then, six years ago, I was recruited to help with the exclusive Kaleigh University’s Forensic Program. They reached out to me after reading one of my less famous papers on quantifying neuronal processes via mapping and image analysis. They wanted my cognitive behaviorist perspective in order to help attribute a number to each member of society—the criminal probability.

  Awarded a billion-dollar, renewable ten-year funding by the government, the goal of IQ3, Intelligent Quantum Quality Quantification, is to create nation-wide ballistic fingerprinting database that can assess for wear, use, and batc
h similarities of weapons, and combine this information with psychological profiles of people within the vicinity and pinpoint likely assailants. It gives me access to everything I need to solve the unsolvable cases, including access to The Tank— the place where State’s evidence goes to be forgotten.

  One of those cases should be solved within the hour.

  Yesterday, I slipped the evidence from Elijah R. Bitten’s unsolved case to the top of the queue, and if everything comes back the way I expect, I’ll have a bullet to engrave tonight.

  Bitten Senior survived his son, who was shot twenty-six times in multiple parts of his body. Before this, or more likely during—according to the coroner—Elijah had been tied to a chair and burned. His torture lasted over three hours until a final, fatal shot pierced his main artery.

  It had been a brutal murder, televised all over the state, and believed to be gang-related. Elijah’s best friend, who was the main suspect at the time, had recently involved himself with one of the deadlier crime syndicates in the neighborhood.

  I watched hours of interrogation footage, and the police overlooked a vital piece of information given by their prime suspect: Elijah had been dating someone who ‘didn’t fit the life,’ as he put it. Despite the insistence of the best friend, no one followed the lead. Pressure to resolve these media-picked trickles from the mayor and chief, putting political pressure on the departments. Coining it as a gang-related crime, unfortunately, assuages all elements involved, except the survivors of the crime.

  With IQ3, I have access to prisons in order to conduct interviews with the criminals. It’s not often that petty crimes are of importance, but just this morning, I interviewed and assessed Elijah’s friend. We started with the interviewee’s drug-related incarceration and his past, and the conversation naturally transgressed to the Bitten case. The death of his best friend, who died three years ago, weighed heavy on his conscious.

  His theory pointed toward the girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Previously, I looked into this wealthy boyfriend; not only did he own a gun, but so did three members of his family, and those were the registered weapons. I doubted the grandfather and father, who were both dead, had something to do with it. This leads me to believe, the name on the bullet will most likely belong to Aaron Borshin, who had been implicated and arrested for armed robbery with multiple arson charges, but none stuck. Money can buy a lot of things in this city, especially freedom.

  The police, with a modicum of diligence, will connect the evidence and realize Borshin had staged the scene to resemble a gang shooting by using multiple guns, one of which will most likely tie to the weapon he used in the armed robbery, and the others, to the ones belonging to his family. If my speculation is right, Borshin was smart in a stupid kind of way. In three hours, that gave him seven minutes per shot and plenty of time to enjoy Elijah’s suffering. Given the scene of the crime, no one would have heard Elijah screaming.

  This is what I like to call, Good foundation, poor execution. Psychoanalysis will no doubt shine a light on Borshin’s lack of guilt for his kill.

  Why would it? Eliminating Bitten got him what he wanted. According to his social media, Borshin is married to his ex-girlfriend, who had leaned on him through the heartbreaking time.

  While Bitten Senior, now divorced and estranged from his other children, continually seeks justice for his son. He doesn’t believe Elijah’s friend killed him, so he has spent countless hours spying on the gang he thought did.

  He’s been shot twice and is still relentless.

  IQ3 will no doubt match Borshin to the guns, and then I’ll happily engrave his name and send it off. I’m not quite sure whether Elijah Senior will take revenge into his own hands, take the evidence to the police, or sit with the information, like many before him did.

  Either way, I’m always excited to see what happens when people are given the opportunity of retribution.

  My computer pings with a calendar notification, distracting me from my afternoon endeavors.

  My ten o’clock appointment will be here in the next fifteen minutes. Prior to our first encounter, my patients are required to send all the necessary paperwork, complete with bloodwork, permissions, insurance information, and medical history. Pulling up the file annexed to her name, I prepare for the meeting.

  The first sheet tells me very little about her: female, engaged, age twenty-six, drinks coffee three times a day, and doesn’t smoke.

  The next page tells me a bit more.

  She’s a cop. Interesting. I skim over the details of her specific situation and dial my receptionist, Cara.

  The older woman in her late forties picks up immediately. “Hello, Doctor. What can I do for you?”

  “Morning, Cara. How was your night?”

  “Boring as usual.” She sighs softly, but mostly for comfort—my concern eases her mind. Cara’s family lives seven hours away, and after her divorce, I’m the closest thing she has to a sort of friend. “And your night?”

  “Busy.” I chuckle softly to pique her curiosity.

  “How so?”

  Never fails. “I had a date that ended poorly.” Mostly, I’m asexual, meaning I don’t feel sexually attracted to women or men. Sex, with either gender, is tedious—a chore than anything else, but I do enjoy the release that comes with an orgasm.

  Luckily, I don’t need a partner to achieve this, and therefore, am not dependent on anyone. A little lie about dating both assuages the people around me and provides a decent alibi.

  “You need to stop finding me-wo—” She stops stuttering for a moment and exhales before continuing, “You’re a handsome man, Doctor Mills. You need to stop using those teenage dating phone apps to meet people who use fake names.”

  Her flustered concern amuses me; I lean back on my executive leather chair and smile. “I assure you, Cara. It is not teenagers I meet.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know,” I soothe before she insists on explaining. “One of these days, I’m going to work less and actually make it to happy hour.”

  “I do not understand why you need to run group sessions or work at the university. You make plenty of money here, and you’re turning away patients.”

  I made more money working on the IQ3, but that’s a secret project, and requires security clearance for information. “I don’t do well with idle time, you know that. Now, tell me about my next patient. Why does it say police referral?”

  “Oh, poor thing.” The tone of Cara’s voice dips low and grows hoarse, almost strained as she explains, “Do you remember three months ago? The cop who was shot?”

  “No,” I answer, honestly.

  “They didn’t give it much attention because it was around the time that girl’s body washed up on the shore, you remember? Oh, what’s her name? Her mother is one of our patients … Mitchell!” she shouts.

  Ah. Yes. Test Subject number forty-seven. That one is almost done too. She’s checked off as a revenge-seeker, and will no doubt produce a body. So far, with over fifty bullets delivered, the death rate of the study is just over fifteen percent.

  “So sad … Anyway, Ms. Devero was pregnant before being shot.” The woman who knows everything about everyone, but doesn’t have friends, goes onto explain a variety of different things about those occurrences until someone chimes in on the other line. “Got to go, Doc.”

  “When she arrives, please bring her in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As soon as the call ends, I run a search on Eleanor Devero. Immediately, the headlines from three months ago fill my screen. The one titled “Unborn Baby Murdered on the Streets of New York” catches my attention because a murder conviction can’t be achieved on an unborn person in the city. At least not yet.

  After ten minutes, I know enough about her to be intrigued by my new patient. Despite having ten nearly solved, or solved cases, I had considered taking a break until the media died down a bit.

  Ever since the police have linked past cases and deemed me a s
erial killer—which I most certainly am not—they have taken every wretched murder and analyzed the evidence, looking for something to tie me to it. Everyone in this damn city seems to be The Bullet Man’s victim until proven otherwise.

  It’s hindering and a tad bit annoying, but cases with mothers are my weakness. Losing mine at such a young age marked me forever, just like losing these people have marked my subjects. If I had been able to identify my mother’s killer, he wouldn’t have killed again. How different my life would’ve been had the killer been caught.

  Knock. Knock.

  She’s here!

  I straighten myself and adjust the mouse pad, aligning it with my keyboard and ensuring it’s parallel to the edge of my desk, before standing up and answering the door.

  Three people stand on the other side. Cara, and I assume by the pictures on the Internet, Eleanor and Kace.

  “Hello,” I say warmly, as I’ve been trained to do.

  Cara quickly introduces us before handing me a paper file in a green manila file. It means they’ve consented to be used in a study as long as their names and details are removed.

  Even better. I use the file to point toward the two empty chairs in front of my desk. “Please, take a seat.”

  “Doctor Mills?” Eleanor begins before stepping forward.

  “Please, call me Nolan.”

  She nods and quickly glances at the floor; her fiancé places a hand on the curve of her back and guides Eleanor to the chair.

  “Ellie!” he whispers a bit too harshly. When he realizes he’s caught my attention, he addresses me to offer an explanation. “Eleanor doesn’t believe in therapy.”

  “Oh?” Once they’ve seated, I take a seat as well and pop open the file. “Why not?”

  Eleanor’s eyes hit the roof, and she shuts them before Kace notices.

  Kace, again, answers for her. “We’ve been going through a rough patch since our son, Tyler, died.”