Lights Out: A Dark Stalker Rom-Com

The blaring of an alarm jarred me out of sleep. I shot up in bed, and for a second, I couldn’t see anything. Fear punched through me. Had the contacts rolled into the back of my eyes while I slept and severed my optic nerves? Was that even possible?

Aly groaned somewhere nearby. “What is that sound?”

“I don’t know. I’ve gone blind,” I said, voice laced with panic. Fuck, that was the second time I’d forgotten to disguise it.

“What?” she yelped, and the mattress shifted with her movement.

“Help me,” I whimpered, Batman-style, and yes, it was just as pathetic as it sounds.

“Oh my god,” she said with a shaky laugh. “You’re not blind. Your dumb baklava slid sideways.”

I flopped backward, so relieved that I was shaking. Aly’s frowning face appeared, rising over me as I tugged the mask into place. It was so dark in the room that we must have slept through the entire day, and now it was night again. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten so much uninterrupted sleep, but after we filled up on the breakfast she insisted on making, we’d curled around each other in her too-small bed, and I was out the second my head hit the pillow.

“It’s called a balaclava,” I told her.

“And what did I say?” she asked.

“Baklava. One is a mask. The other a delicious desert.”

“Whatever.” She reached over me, and I had to fight the urge to wrap my arms around her and tug her onto my chest. “You must have forgotten to turn your alarm off.”

I went still, the sound finally registering. My phone had many alarms, but this one, which was loud and particularly blaring, was tied to Aly’s security system – specifically, her back door camera. I’d tweaked the settings so it would only go off if someone was within a foot of the sensor and stayed there for several seconds, which would rule out animals passing beneath it.

Suddenly, I was wide awake, anxiety and adrenaline warring for dominance as I snagged my phone from the nightstand before Aly could reach it. I silenced the alarm and unlocked the screen. The sight that greeted me sent ice sluicing through my veins. The camera was dark. And not the dark of night, but the kind of dark that only came from being covered.

I swore.

“What’s wrong?” Aly said.

“Someone’s at your back door.”

She smirked. “No, that was last night.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “I think someone’s trying to break into your house.”

“What?” she whisper-squeaked.

I jumped out of bed, clad only in my boxers. Where the fuck was Fred? My eyes snagged on his black and white form, curled on the nearby armchair. I grabbed him and handed him to his mother.

“Protect the baby,” I told her.

“What do you mean?” she said, clutching Fred close. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going out there.”

“No way,” she said. “We need to call the cops.”

I froze halfway into the too-small sweats she’d lent me. “No cops. I can’t explain it right now, but…no cops. Where’s the nearest loaded gun?”

“Bottom drawer of the dresser,” she said. “And we are absolutely going to circle back to what you just said later.”

“I figured as much.”

With a final tug, I got the sweatpants up, then paced to the bureau. Aly’s gun was right where she said, and I snatched it out of the drawer and chambered a round. By the time I turned back to the room, she was out of bed, pulling on her pajama bottoms.

“You’re staying in here,” I said.

“Nope,” she fired back, heading toward me.

I angled the gun toward the floor and grabbed her shoulder with my other hand, halting her mid-step as I bent down to look her in the eyes. The thought of her leaving this bedroom was even more panic-inducing than someone breaking into her house, and no, the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me.

“You are a fucking badass,” I told her. “And I don’t doubt you could handle this alone if you had to. But I beg you, for my sanity, please stay here.” I shook her to drive the point home, my ears strained as I wondered how much time we had until whoever was outside tried to kick down the door. “Please, Aly.”

“I don’t like this,” she said, frowning at me in open worry.

“I know, baby, but if you’re out there with me, I’ll be too distracted, and all my focus needs to be on whoever might be outside.”

She bit her bottom lip, brows pinched together. Fuck it. If I were about to die, it wouldn’t be before I felt her sweet lips on mine. I’d denied her last night, wanting to delay the moment we finally kissed until she was begging for it, but now it was me who was desperate.

I jerked my mask up to expose my mouth and crashed my lips into hers. She met me hungrily, greedily, her hands gripping my shoulders as she hauled me closer. My head spun, blood rushing straight to my dick when she parted her lips, welcoming me in, and our tongues brushed.

Maybe I was already dead because kissing Aly felt a lot like heaven. Her body molded so perfectly to mine that it was like we were a matched set, made for each other. Our mouths worked in tandem like we had already done this a hundred times and knew exactly how the other liked it. It was the best kiss of my goddamn life, and it made me even more determined to make sure I got a thousand more from her, just like it. No, a million.

I broke away, both of us gasping, my world tilting on its axis as my true north realigned, pointing straight toward the woman in my arms.

I pressed a final kiss to her lips. “Lock this door behind me and get that other gun out of your nightstand in case anything happens to me.”

She blinked, eyes as wide as saucers. “It might just be a raccoon.”

I forced myself away from her. “Last I checked, raccoons don’t know how to cover cameras.” She sucked in a breath as I strode toward the open doorway. I paused to take what might be my last look at her, memorizing the sight of her standing there in her rumpled pajamas, hair falling loose around her, lips swollen from my kiss. “Get the gun, Aly.”

“I’m not even going to ask how you know where all my weapons are.” She paused halfway to her nightstand and turned to point at me. “And don’t you dare get hurt.”

“I’ll try not to,” I said. “But just so we’re clear, I’m the only masked man you asked to break into your house, right? I wouldn’t want to go kick the shit out of some innocent guy over a misunderstanding.”

She looked past me, expression contemplative. “Masked men? No. There was that shirtless jump roper and a firefighter or two, though.”

My spine stiffened. “Woman, you better be joking, or we are about to have our second fight.”

She threw a pillow at me. “I’m kidding. Get out of here, psycho, before I change my mind and go with you.”

I turned and shut the door on her whispered, “Please be careful.”

For you, always, I thought.

The Christmas tree Aly still hadn’t taken down lit my path through the living room. I briefly debated unplugging it but discarded the idea; the person outside might notice the light cut off and know someone was awake and waiting for them. My best chance to avoid injury was catching them off guard.

I moved closer to the far wall, out of sight from the back door, and slowly made my way toward the kitchen where it was located. The sound of the knob rattling was the death knell of any hope that this was an animal. Someone was outside Aly’s house in the dead of night, picking her lock.

The rage that burned through me was so intense I started shaking. I was going to fucking murder them. No. Wait. That could end with me in jail, and then I’d only get to see Aly during visiting hours.

Not if you don’t get caught, a helpful little voice offered.

I shook my head. Now wasn’t the time to have an internal debate with my intrusive thoughts. There was nothing to say this wasn’t just a simple home invasion. Crime rates were average in this part of the city – not as high as some parts but not as safe as others. Aly’s car wasn’t in the driveway because she’d taken an Uber home. The person on the other side of the door probably thought the house was empty. It was only my catastrophizing brand of generalized anxiety that made me immediately assume it was something more nefarious.

I focused on the door, plastering myself to the wall as I neared it. Once the potential burglar got the knob unlocked, they’d realize there was still a deadbolt, and I didn’t want them to break Aly’s door and rouse the whole neighborhood with the noise. Slowly, silently, I reached out and painstakingly slid the bolt free.

Now I just had to decide what to do when they tried to enter. Stand here with a gun pointed right in their face, or hide somewhere nearby and jump out at them from –

The door flew open.

I reacted instinctually, all thoughts gone from my head, my body moving on its own thanks to the years I’d spent practicing martial arts. My fist pistoned out as a man wearing a balaclava like mine stepped into view. I threw my full weight behind the punch, picturing my knuckles moving through his head like my first karate teacher taught me all those years ago.

My fist crunched into his face as I cold-cocked him, and he collapsed in the open doorway like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

To ensure he was out, I hauled him up by the shirt front and shook him. His head bounced around in a boneless way that was hard to fake. I lowered him carefully to the floor and shut the door behind him, relocking the deadbolt in case he had a partner waiting nearby. Between the balaclava and the large backpack he wore, this was looking more and more like a home invasion.

The sound of an indrawn breath drew me up short.

No. She. Didn’t.

I clenched my jaw and turned to see Aly standing not five feet away with her gun pointed at the intruder. Of course, she hadn’t listened and stayed put in her room.

I narrowed my eyes at her, but she was lasered in on the unconscious man and didn’t see the censure in my gaze. “We are 100% about to have our second fight.”

Her face was pale in the darkness, her expression drawn with what looked like genuine fear. Instead of some snarky response, she motioned at the man with her gun. “Take his mask off.”

“Aly,” I said, wariness snaking up my spine.

“Do it,” she bit out.

I reached down and yanked the man’s balaclava free.

God. Fucking. Damnit.

It was Bradley Bluhm.

His face was still swollen from his previous beating, and his nose was now ruined, too, blood gushing down his mouth and chin, but there was no mistaking the rapist – and most likely murderer if the cops were correct in their suspicions – that Aly had a run-in with last night.

The implications of him being here were horrifying. Aly had pissed him off, called him a coward, and he’d tracked her down to do what? Get revenge? Make her his next victim? If not for the alarm I’d set, we might have woken to the sound of him kicking in the back door. He could have caught us off guard and done something to Aly before I realized what was happening.

The sound of her chambering a round snapped me out of it. I wheeled toward her, my arms outspread in front of Brad’s prone form. “You can’t shoot him.”

She immediately pointed the gun toward the floor but still motioned at me with it. “Move.”

“No. Aly, listen to me,” I said in my normal voice. Talking like Batman was giving me a sore throat, and I’d already slipped up enough that it felt foolish to keep the charade going. “If you shoot him, you’ll wake the whole neighborhood, and then someone will call the cops.”

She flicked the safety into position and set the gun on the nearby table. “Fine. We’ll beat him to death. Quietly. I know people who can dispose of the body.” The look on her face as she strode forward told me she was dead serious.

I held my hands up to stall her. “Think for a second. He has a backpack.”

She stopped at Brad’s feet, fingers curling into fists, her face a thundercloud. “So, what?”

“So, he might have a phone in there,” I said. “And if he does and then goes missing, it will get traced straight to your house. Grab me a pair of those latex gloves so I can check.”

Her expression turned mutinous, but after a tense moment, she stomped away from me toward a kitchen drawer and produced the requested gloves.

I tugged them on and riffled through Brad’s backpack, my rage returning tenfold as I realized I was looking at a kill kit: zip ties, rope, a bottle of chloroform, trash bags, a serrated knife, bleach, rags – everything you would need to murder someone and then clean a crime scene. It made me certain that Brad had killed before. You didn’t get this bold unless you’d gotten away with it a few times.

I knew that better than most. When I was six, I found one of Dad’s victims in our basement freezer. He said it was a mannequin and he was going to play a prank on Mom with it, and if I told her, he would beat me, so I kept my mouth shut and only realized when he got caught what I’d really seen.

I moved on to the smaller pockets, but there wasn’t a phone in them either, so I set the bag down and flipped Brad over, checking his jeans and jacket. Nada. He wasn’t as sloppy as I thought, which was as relieving as it was concerning. On the one hand, I might get the chance to enact my plan to end him; on the other, there was still a risk that his phone was somewhere nearby, most likely left in a parked car.

“No phone?” Aly said.

I sat back on my heels. “No phone.”

She stepped forward and hammer-stomped Brad’s crotch so hard that his legs lifted off the ground. He wheezed and curled in on himself like he was starting to come out of it. I might have been planning the man’s death, but I still wanted to puke, thinking of how much that must have hurt. Before I could stop her, Aly stomped on his ribs next. A crack ricocheted through the room, and then a low, tortured moan as the pain pulled Brad back to reality.

“No, you don’t,” she said, leaning down and punching him in the temple so hard it snapped his head around. He went boneless again, and Aly straightened, shaking her arm out. “Fuck, that hurt.”

I took her hand, inspecting her knuckles in the dim light. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “Did I see rope and a knife in his bag?”

I pulled her into a hug, both of us trembling with unspent adrenaline and more than a little fear. “Yeah.”

“He came here to rape and kill me,” she said.

“Most likely.”

I tugged her closer, petrified on her behalf, on behalf of all women, because men like Brad were something they had to worry about constantly.

God, I was a fucking asshole. Brad and I might not have had the same intentions, but we’d both broken into Aly’s house, and I hated the idea that I’d caused her similar distress. What had I thought to myself less than two weeks ago? That I would never regret what I’d done? I wanted to go back in time and kick the shit out of my past self for it now. This kind of violation was unforgivable, and I couldn’t believe Aly had given me a chance instead of shooting me in the face like I deserved. If I had to spend the rest of our time together making it up to her, I would, happily.

“Brad needs to die,” she said, her voice muffled from how tight I held her to me.

“He does,” I agreed. “But I can’t be the one to do it, and I don’t want that for you either.”

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“First, we need to hogtie him and figure out whether or not he has a phone or a vehicle stashed nearby,” I said. “If he doesn’t, we’ll drop him off at his last victim’s house. Her extended family lives outside the city on a big farm, and between her ex-army father and her ex-marine husband, I’m sure they’ll do the rest of the work for us.”

“What if they call the cops instead?” she asked.

“So far, Brad hasn’t seen either of us, so he can’t identify us if he survives. And it’s not like he could tell the cops the last thing he remembered before getting knocked out because “I was breaking into a woman’s house with a bag full of weapons” wouldn’t do him any favors. Afterward, we’ll find another way to get him.”

She pushed back from me enough to meet my eyes. “You’ve thought this through.”

I didn’t bother lying. “Yes.” Here it was, the moment she realized how disturbed I was.

Instead of looking horrified, she nodded. “Good. I would have made a rash decision and probably ended up in jail.”

“Hey,” I told her, lifting her chin as I gathered my courage.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I did this to you.”

She frowned. “You didn’t do this to me.”

“I literally did,” I said. “Or are you forgetting that Brad’s not the only man in this kitchen who broke into your house?”

She released a shaky breath and tugged her chin out of my grip. “I haven’t forgotten. Trust me, that first time, I was just as ready to shoot you as I was Brad. But,” she looked away, worrying her lower lip between her teeth, “after that, I never felt like you wanted to hurt me. I can’t explain it, and I know it sounds stupid and illogical and dangerous, and, god, it is, but something in my gut told me to trust you.”

I leaned down and bumped my forehead against hers. “It was the snacks, wasn’t it?”

She huffed out a laugh. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for homemade trail mix.”

I pulled her into another hug, wanting to hold her right there for the rest of her life, shielding her from this terrible world with my body if that’s what it took to keep her safe from it. Unfortunately, the unconscious man at our feet would only stay that way for so long, and the sooner we got him out of there, the better.

I unwound my arms from Aly and dropped down beside Brad’s backpack. “I think tying him up with his own rope has a kind of poetic justice, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Now probably wasn’t the time for those two little words to make my stomach somersault, but hearing Aly say them warmed my heart in a way that made me want to hear them from her again, preferably while standing in front of an altar of some kind, or on a tropical beach, just the two of us – whichever she preferred.

She grabbed a pair of gloves and squatted beside me as I unzipped the bag.

“Son of a bitch,” she said when she got an up-close look at its contents. Her fingers shook as she reached in, flicked aside the knife, and pulled out the rope. “He’s done this before, hasn’t he?”

“Based on the police files I read, yes,” I told her.

“How has he gotten away with so much?”

“Money, and he’s not an idiot,” I said. “Most of the evidence tying him to his recent crimes is circumstantial. His only conviction happened when he was still a teen, and it got expunged from his record. He must have gotten complacent the other night.”

Together, we tied him up, with me hauling his arms and legs tight as I talked Aly through the motions. It would have gone faster if I had done it, but this was the kind of skill everyone should learn, and after such a close call, I was desperate to teach her everything I knew about self-defense and survivalism.

“Do I want to know how you know how to do this?” she asked halfway through.

“Probably not,” I told her. “No, not like that. That part of the rope goes under instead of over.”

She corrected her mistake. “Does it have something to do with why you didn’t want me to call the cops?”

“Surprisingly, no,” I said, and she shook her head.

Once Brad was trussed up, I made Aly double-check her knots, tugging as hard as she could to prove he couldn’t get free. We put his balaclava back in place and, inspired by my earlier freakout, dragged it over his eyes like a blindfold. Then we gagged him, and I went to grab my laptop from my bag.

An hour later, we had all the answers I could find in such a short amount of time. Brad’s phone was still at his house in a wealthy suburb north of the city. He’d disabled the GPS location services on his vehicle, so it might have been parked nearby, but if we couldn’t find it, the cops would have a hard time, too. Even if it got found, it’d be difficult to prove how it had gotten where it was or where Brad had gone after ditching it, so I felt confident that Aly would be in the clear.

“You should stay here,” I told her as I closed my laptop and met her gaze over the dining room table.

She shook her head, her expression turning mulish. “Absolutely not. This is a two-person job, and I’m not letting you shoulder the burden of it on your own. We’re doing this together, or not at all.”

I let out a heavy breath, knowing when I was beaten. Lowering my voice, I pulled her from her chair onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her waist. “We are talking about kidnapping and complicity in a potential murder.”

She gazed toward the sound of Brad struggling against his restraints just out of sight in the kitchen. “I’m well aware, but that son of a bitch broke in here planning to do unforgivable things to me, and I’m not a very forgiving person as it is. I’m not exaggerating when I say I could kill him myself and not lose any sleep over it.”

She turned to look at me then, and the absence of her usual light drew me up short. No, she wasn’t exaggerating. Right now, I was staring into the eyes of a dangerous woman. And to think I’d been worried about being too fucked up for her. What had she said the first time I watched her through her computer? That Fred only liked me because cats were sociopaths, and he recognized one of his own? I should have picked up on the subtext then: Fred liked two people, Aly and me, making us two peas in a pod.

She blinked, and life returned to her expression, her lips tugging up as she shook her head at me. “I can feel you getting hard right now.”

I met her gaze, uncaring, embracing the fucked up for the first time in my life because at least I wasn’t alone anymore. “And I bet if I reached into your panties, you’d be soaked.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled free from my embrace, standing. “I never should have told you what you do to me.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s chalk it up to that.”

She glared at me.

I booped her nose and was just about to pull her back into my lap when Brad tried to scream through his gag.

Twenty minutes later, we’d changed into real clothes – thank fuck I’d washed and dried my jeans before we fell asleep – I’d dosed Brad with his own chloroform, slapped duct tape over his gag, and shoved him into Aly’s snowboard bag.

While she made us coffee for the road, I left to get my car, keeping the lights off as I backed into her driveway to avoid unwanted attention. It was two a.m. on a Saturday, which meant the risk of someone still being up was greater than on a weekday night. Aly’s front lights were off, and thankfully, her Christmas ones were on a timer, so they’d gone dark hours ago.

This section of her block didn’t have a streetlight, but I still wasn’t taking any chances. I had another mini-blackout waiting to go, and I triggered it right before opening my car door. As the neighborhood plunged into darkness, I popped the trunk and sprinted toward Aly’s front porch. She threw the door open when I reached it, and together, we hauled the Bag o’ Brad up and shuffle-carried him outside, dropping him into the trunk with little ceremony and quietly shutting him in. That done, Aly doubled back for the coffee while I climbed into the driver’s seat.

The neighborhood lights flashed back to life right after I eased out of the driveway, and Aly and I shared a relieved look over the fact that we’d pulled our escape off.

“Here’s your coffee,” she said, passing over a travel mug. “Black with a little sugar, right?”

I raised my brows at her as I took it. “Yeah.”

She flashed me a pleased grin and turned forward in her seat. “I pay attention, too.”

The woman was down for kinky sex, knew how I liked my coffee, and was more than willing to aid in the murder of a rapist. What had I done to get so lucky?

I returned my focus to the road as I pulled out of her sleepy neighborhood onto the busier throughway. There were still cars out and about, but the further we got from the city, the fewer we passed, and in less than an hour, we were the only vehicle on pitch-dark country roads that wound through snow-covered cornfields.

Aly and I barely talked during the drive, both of us stuck in our heads over what we were doing and how much worse this night could have gone if Brad succeeded in breaking in. What little we did speak revolved around me catching her up on everything I’d learned while she was still on shift last night.

The police and hospital had done an excellent job trying to protect the name of Brad’s latest victim, but I’d managed to find Macy Harold, a twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher who’d been in Chicago the night of the attack to celebrate a college friend’s bachelorette party. From what I’d pieced together, they’d run into Brad and his friends during their bar crawl, and at some point during the night, he’d honed in on Macy, buying her and her friends rounds of drinks even after they tried to decline them politely. One of the last things Macy remembered was finally accepting a shot because she didn’t want to seem rude, and less than an hour later, someone heard Brad assaulting her in a bathroom stall and kicked the door open.

Macy and her husband lived in a small cottage adjacent to her parents’ house on a hundred-acre farm. The brother who had already gone after Brad lived in a similar place nearby. I hoped that even if Macy’s dad and husband failed to hurt Brad, her brother would step in and get the job done.

I relayed all this still using my regular voice, wondering if she recognized it. My time for hiding from her was drawing to an end, and I had a feeling that if we managed to pull this stunt off, one of the first discussions we’d have when we got back to her house would revolve around confirming my identity and digging into why I’d avoided admitting who I was for so long.

I was dreading that conversation. Aly had already forgiven me for so much, put up with so much. How could I possibly ask her to continue trusting me after she found out who my dad was and started questioning why the son of a notorious serial killer would cover himself in blood and film knife-wielding thirst traps? She’d probably assume I idolized him when nothing could be further from the truth.

I cut the car lights and turned down a dirt road that bisected two corn fields, driving until I reached a narrow band of trees that sprung up around a small brook. The satellite images I’d poured over online showed a narrow footpath leading through them to the main house. I’d hacked into Macy’s parents’ Wi-Fi and couldn’t find any evidence of security cameras, but even so, Aly would stay in the car while I dragged Brad onto their back porch, ready to gun it out of there if shit went sideways and I came sprinting back.

“Are you ready?” I asked, putting the car in park and turning toward Aly.

Her expression was troubled. “Yes?”

“Would it make you feel better if I told you that I’m so scared I feel like I might puke?”

She released a shaky breath. “Oh, good. I’ve been fighting the urge to hurl this entire drive.”

“We’ll have to hold it in,” I told her. “Wouldn’t want to leave behind gross little piles of DNA for someone to find.”

She huffed a laugh. “Let’s do it then.”

I popped the trunk, and we got out of the car.

Aly unzipped her snowboard bag but stopped after exposing Brad’s face, her eyes wide. Had she finally hit her limit? Did it just now occur to her how fucked up this all was, and she was having second thoughts?

We’d come too far to turn back now, so I reached forward and was about to finish unzipping the bag when she grabbed my arm.

“Don’t,” she said.

I turned toward her, frowning. “I can do it without you if you want to wait in the car.”

She shook her head and released my arm. “We’re going to have to go with my backup plan.”

“Backup plan?” I said, starting to get confused. She hadn’t mentioned a backup plan.

She nodded and leaned forward, placing her gloved fingers on Brad’s neck. It looked like she was checking his pulse.

Wait. Why the fuck was she checking his pulse?

She turned toward me, sympathy written across her face. “You put the duct tape over both his mouth and nose. He’s dead.”

I snapped my focus to Brad, and, oh, fuck, she was right. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and his skin already had a pale sheen that seemed unnaturally bloodless in the moonlight.

My guts heaved.

I ripped the balaclava off and ran to the nearby bushes, dropping to my hands and knees as my stomach tried to expel everything I’d ever eaten. So much for not leaving piles of DNA behind.

Aly squatted next to me, rubbing my back and making soothing noises as I retched. “This is probably a bad time to gloat over the fact that I was right about your identity, isn’t it?”

Reader, I puke-laughed.

And, no. I do not recommend it.

I’d just killed a man, and my unhinged partner in crime was cracking jokes. “Fuck me,” I muttered.

“Kind of a weird time to offer,” Aly said without missing a beat. “Can I take a raincheck until after we’ve disposed of the body and you get a chance to brush your teeth?”