I sat up in bed, eyes tacked shut, clutching my head. The pain felt like nails being driven into my temples. I concentrated on every stab, counting back from ten, as I’d been instructed to do by a former doc.

Ten, nine, eight, seven …

I breathed.

Six, five, four, three, two, one.

Breathed again.

My mind drifted back to the final minutes of my nightmare—the same one that’d plagued me on a weekly basis since I was a kid. Of lying in a cramped space with the scent of pine and roses filling my nose, and heat radiating across my body, warm at first, until it got hot, the pain intense. Like every time, I’d endured the ice-cold numbness, until I’d finally snapped awake, trembling in a cold sweat.

I lifted my head from my cupped palms and searched the room—the small, cramped space I’d called home for the last few months. Only a stack of weights sat beside a black acoustic guitar and a chair, beneath which, sat my shoes. My bed was nothing more than a mattress on the floor, with a sheet and a couple pillows. I’d been left a decent amount of money, more than I’d ever need, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend it so frivolously as to make a fancy home.

Especially when I had no intentions of staying.

I trailed my gaze toward the window to the right of me, where a thin translucent curtain fluttered on the cold breath of night. When my eyes scanned left again, I found what I’d been looking for. In the chair across from me sat a boy, a teenager, with ruffled black hair, his eyes nothing more than inky pools, devoid of life. His body carried the bruises of a beating in the big purple plums he wore on his cheekbones and legs. Welts and cuts marred his skin, so pale, he glowed in the darkness. His swollen, cracked lips bore the dryness of thirst, while his sharp, protruding bones professed starvation.

There’d once been a time that he’d scream and claw at me, like a monster out to consume me. As of late, he merely sat quietly in the corner, staring at me, with the same condemning expression as always.

I knew what he wanted, why he came to me every night, haunting me with his sad, sunken eyes and cries of pain. It’d become clear what he needed from me nearly two years ago, when I’d killed the Joker.

My mind pulled me into flashbacks of that night.

The coppery scent of blood in the air, the tearing of flesh beneath my blade, the taste of charred meat with every breath I inhaled.

The blur of the room sharpened back into focus as the memory dissolved, and I looked up to find the chair empty of the boy who’d sat there moments before.

A therapist once told me the boy was a hallucination—a manifestation of guilt. She’d suggested that the boy was a younger version of me, but I knew better. According to her, in order to make the hallucination disappear, I needed to address whatever it was that brought it on in the first place. To purge the suffering I hadn’t allowed for myself, and confront the issues that’d festered in my head for so many years.

Therefore, I credited her with my unflinching drive for revenge. Because although that first kill was sloppy and terrifying, there was also something deeply satisfying about silencing the screams.

The ones inside my head, anyway.

For months after, I’d become paranoid, certain someone would find some spec of evidence. After all, it’d been a rushed and careless kill—I’d literally had to scrape the bastard’s charred flesh off the metal prongs of the bed where I’d burned him.

I’d hidden myself away in a shitty apartment on the East side and avoided anywhere I might’ve run into a cop, or someone who could’ve seen me that night at the airport.

No one had come forward to report him missing, though. Not a boss, a friend, not even the bartender who’d poured his drinks once a week at the airport bar. As if the asshole hadn’t even existed in the time he was alive, no one gave a shit about his death.

I guess in the end, the joke was on The Joker.

When it seemed I’d gotten away with it, I vowed never again. I’d never take a life again, and would do everything in my power to stay on the straight and narrow.

But the boy had returned.

The screams returned.

The nightmares had become so intense that I dreaded closing my eyes, and my job quickly turned into a dangerous playground as I traversed beams hundreds of feet in the air with the ache of insomnia setting me off-balance.

I got on sleeping pills. Then got hooked on them. Yet, still the voices and hallucinations wouldn’t relent their torment.

So I’d made the decision to silence the voices for good. To make good on another promise I’d made years before. But in order to do that, I’d have to get better at hiding the evidence.

I’d begun to study crime scene investigation. Every book. Every TV show. For hours, I’d surfed the web, venturing into the darkest places where most feared to look. The website Joker had mentioned just before I’d killed him.

That was where I’d found my practice subject—a man looking to meet up with a thirteen-year-old, preferably.

I’d spent the next few months studying him, the way he groomed girls on popular teen sites, posing as a fifteen-year-old kid. All the while trading graphic images of prepubescent girls getting raped and beaten on the same dark websites that’d advertised hitmen and arms dealing.

After months of observation, I’d decided to approach him online, pretending to be the teenage daughter of parents who just didn’t get me, while he’d posed as a teenage boy who did. I’d found it both amusing and sickening, the way he’d feigned care and concern, weaving fantasies of running away together, completely oblivious to how deeply into shit he’d fallen.

We’d agreed to meet at an old hotel on the East side. Outdated, without cameras, that rented rooms by the hour. It was there he’d made the terrifying discovery that the girl he’d been chatting with happened to be a healthy adult male with an appetite for justice, so I’d drugged him and brought him to an abandoned house, where I’d spent the next few hours field dressing him, the same way my uncle had taught me while hunting deer. Shoulder-length gloves over a plastic tarp made it so much cleaner, before I’d eventually burned all of it, including his body.

Not leaving so much as a single intact tooth behind.

When it was clear I’d gotten away with his murder, as well, I’d pulled my list once more and set to work.

Starting with The Pawn.