Oh my God, no no no! No, this can't be happening!

I held my head in my hands and paced back and forth between the kitchen and my bedroom, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I couldn't believe how much I'd fucked up. First of all, I didn't understand how the hell she got in the house? Did I leave the back door open somehow? Seriously, I never leave any doors or windows open. Ever. And the one day I did Avery got in here somehow and saw everything. Everything!

What the hell was she doing in here? She fucking saw the girl in the basement. I can't believe she fucking saw the goddamned bloody girl in the basement.

I swear to God I paced back and forth for an hour but I couldn't stop shaking and I was nowhere near figuring out what I was going to do. I seriously thought that somehow I was going to stop doing all this. I really believed that things would mellow out and I would clean this place up, get rid of the heads and any traces of all this shit I'd been doing for years, and then Avery and I would meet again and she would see me for who I really was and everything would be perfect. She would never have to have known about any of this.

The girl I had in the basement was going to be it. I was going to get rid of everything. The girl, the cage, the bunk beds, the wig heads and all the junk in this goddamned house. I was going to clean and dust and open the curtains so that this place wasn't so dark and dismal. I was going to do all of that. But what the hell was I going to do now? There was no way Avery was going to want me now. Not after what she saw. She wouldn't want to look me in the face ever again.

Oh, and when she wakes up she'll be in my mother's bed surrounded by all of my fucking wig heads and she's going to freak the fuck out even more. Great.

But I didn't even know what the hell I was going to do with her even after I got rid of the girl. I still had to go to work at the salon, and she had seen everything so I couldn't just let her go. It wasn't even that I was afraid of her going to the police. I just didn't want her to leave. If she left, I'd never see her again.

Jesus Christ, I'm going to have to put her in the basement.

I didn't want it to be like this. I really, really didn't want it to be like this.

But I knew what I had to do, and I had to do it while Avery was asleep. I had to get rid of the girl in the basement. Then I would figure out the rest.

I'll just get rid of the body, even the parts that I already removed, and then I'll just dump her, I thought as I made my way to my mother's room.

I opened the door and Avery was still asleep right where I'd left her. She was so incredibly beautiful and looked so peaceful sleeping there on my mother's bed and I wanted so badly for her to stay that way. But I knew that as soon as she opened her eyes she would look at me like the monster that I was.

I bent down and moved her hair back off of her face. I wanted to kiss her, I wanted to touch her face and her hair and feel her lips pressed up against mine. I wanted to but I couldn't. I couldn't take that away from her.

But I decided what I would do was move her to my own bed while I was taking care of the girl in the basement. The thought of Avery waking up in here all alone in this dark, dusty room surrounded by my collection made me sick. I didn't want that for her. I wanted her to be happy here, and to feel safe with me, even though I knew that wasn't going to be possible after what she saw. And I knew there was probably no way I was going to be able to convince her that I didn't want that for her, that I had no intention of doing anything like that to her, ever.

I picked her up off the bed and her head fell backward over my arm. I had never held a girl like this before and it made me feel like I was in some kind of fairy tale. But I wasn't the prince in the fairy tale, I was the evil troll under the bridge. The one that no one wanted to run into.

As I stared down at her I was hypnotized by the curve of her neck and the sharp line of her collarbone and as my eyes traveled further down her body I saw what it was that she had been burning into her forearm that night.

I carried her into my room and laid her out on my bed, then pulled up her sleeve and what I saw was breathtaking. There were swirls and concentric circles of different shades of brown that had been made by the heated head of a perfectly round pin. It looked like some of the scars were fading and some were darker, so I assumed it was an ongoing work of art. And it was a work of art. I had never seen anything as beautiful as what Avery had done to her own skin.

As I ran my fingers over the raised dots I thought about what Landen said to me the other night, about him seeing what I do as art. There was no way what I had hidden in that other room could compare to the work of art that Avery had accomplished on her arm, but it was another undeniable coincidence that I just couldn't ignore.

As much as I didn't want to, I decided it would probably be best to tie her up. I was going to be gone for quite some time while I was getting rid of the girl in the basement and I didn't want her to do something crazy like jump off the balcony. I found some ties that I hardly ever wore in the closet and used them to secure her hands in front of her then did the same with her feet. I stood there and stared at her for a little while longer because I knew that when I got back she would most likely be awake and probably wouldn't have that peaceful look on her face. I didn't even want to think about the way she would be looking at me when she woke up.

I headed down to the basement and when I opened the door the girl was still there at the top of the stairs. I grabbed a towel and wiped off the blood that had pooled up on the stairs, then I picked her up and carried her the rest of the way down. She was unconscious and I could barely feel her pulse so I knew that it would be easy to finish her off. I wrapped my hands around her neck and watched her face as she made small jerking movements and then it was all over. And I didn't feel a thing.

This is the last time. I swear to God, this is last time, I thought as I squeezed my eyes shut.

I put her body into one of the old laundry bags from the salon, as well as the towel I had used to clean up the blood and the parts I had cut off of her. Then I hoisted her over my shoulder and headed out into the tunnel, locking the basement door behind me. In the past, it had always taken me at least a half hour to get to the old pier where the tunnel came out, but I was in a hurry and I hoped I could get this whole thing taken care of in less time than that.

There used to be a loading dock entrance into the tunnel system at every street that lead down to the river but most of them had collapsed or had been bricked up at some point. But I knew of one entrance that still existed and I knew exactly how to get there. And because there were so many fences and walls and obstacles down at the old docks to keep people from accessing the tunnels, I never had to worry about anyone seeing me dump a body off the loading dock.

What used to be a bustling pier with merchants buying goods directly from the ship crews was now a wasteland of rotted wood, cesspools of muck and garbage and the occasional patch of quicksand and was the perfect hiding place for the bodies I needed to get rid of.

It was surprising to me that the police had never searched this area for any of the hundreds of people that had gone missing in the last century, and I was sure that I wasn't the only one dumping bodies here. I had actually seen Landen for the first time, way before we met, dumping a bag over this dock. I was still a kid and I just happened to be checking out one of the abandoned buildings right on the docks one night and I looked out of one of the busted windows just behind him. As soon as he dropped the bag he turned around and looked right at me, then disappeared into the tunnel. I saw a glint of the moon in his eyes and even though I only saw him for a few seconds I never forgot his face or stopped wondering what was in the bag.

I watched the girl's body sink into the thick murky cesspool thirty feet below me, then made my way back to the house as quickly as possible.

When I got back I set to work immediately cleaning the basement. I still wasn't sure that I was going to be able to put Avery down there, especially after all of the horrible memories that still played out in my dreams of the cage and the bed and my mother, but I didn't know what other choice I had.

I turned all the lights in the basement on, including the old lighted makeup mirror that my mother had put down there a long time ago, because those lights were the brightest, and I could actually see the entire basement for the first time in my life. The basement was divided into two halves and the section towards the front half of the house was filled with old furniture and stacks of boxes that lined the walls from the days when the basement was still used as a storeroom for the grocery store. I didn't like going into that part of the basement and it had just become a big pile of furniture and boxes that were impossible to navigate through.

The back half of the basement, the section with the cage and the door that led out to the tunnels, was also filled with a lot of junk, but it wasn't nearly as bad. I had hoped that this would all be cleaned out someday, but I guess I hadn't really thought about how that was going to happen. How this house was going to go from being a dusty, musty prison of painful memories to being the clean brightly lit space it always appeared as in my fantasies. Like when I imagined what it would be like the first time Avery and I kissed. I was starting to realize that more of my life went on in my imagination than I was willing to admit.

Since I didn't really have time to clean out all the junk I decided to just leave it there and focus on cleaning the floor and the space inside the cage and that took me about an hour. Then I took the sheets off the mattress on the lower bunk and switched the mattresses around so that she wouldn't have to sleep on a bunch of old bloodstains. Not that she would be able to see them through the sheets, but I felt better knowing she wouldn't be lying on top of them.

I went upstairs to get some new sheets but when I got to the top of the stairs I noticed that the door to my bedroom was open. I looked in the room and panicked when I saw that she wasn't on the bed, then I ran to the closet and out onto the balcony but she wasn't there either.

Suddenly, I heard a loud clattering sound coming from the kitchen and when I ran in I found Avery, her hands and feet still tied, holding a kitchen knife towards me.