The Rake (Boston Belles #4) by L.J. Shen

I know Locken doesn’t see his sons often. That he started working at a local school in Rhode Island, and that he has a girlfriend named Yamima.

And I know that he is still sexually abusing young girls.

This is what obsessive people do. They dig and dig and dig. Until their fingernails are gone and their flesh is raw.

I sniff around. Get into the social media sites of some of the girls on his team.

They post about him.

They share pictures of him.

They have secret groups about him.

One even bragged to her friends that she jerked him off after assembly one day, in broad daylight, they were so horny for each other.

In other words: my conscience is clear. Steve Locken doesn’t deserve to live.

This is where it gets a little dicey. I’ve never killed a person before. But I spent the last three years of my life going to Krav Maga classes three times a week, and I take my dad’s Glock 22 to the woods, where I shoot tin cans lined up on logs. Massachusetts has crazy gun laws, but my dad used to work in law enforcement before he got his office job.

The Glock sits in my purse right now as I drive down to Rhode Island.

It’s a nice summer day. Only days before I head off to college. I know Yamima, Steve’s girlfriend, is out of town at a conference. She’s a realtor and while at the conference, she is sharing a room with her colleague, Brad, who is dumb enough to elude to this on his Facebook profile.

What comes around goes around.

Steve is alone at home. He drinks two beers every night in front of the sports channel. I’ve watched him carefully all summer break, hiding behind the bushes of his beautifully restored craftsman house after telling my parents I was pulling double shifts at a burger shack to save for college.

Steve has no cameras installed anywhere around the house. One day, I overheard him telling Yamima that all of those cameras are connected to the internet, and he doesn’t want anyone hijacking tapes of what’s going on in his house.

Steve gets up every morning at five-forty-five and is out the door for an eight mile run by six.

So today, when he slips out, I slither in. When his garage door rolls shut, after he leaves the neighborhood in his car on the way to the trail where he runs, I sneak in. I open each Corona Premium bottle in his garage fridge and pour crushed Ambiens and a little rat poison into them, screwing a bottle capper I brought with me to make them appear new and turning them upside down.

When I get to Steve’s suburban neighborhood again, it’s almost midnight.

I round the craftsman house, trudging through the thick bushes circling his pool. I can see him through the double glass doors of his living room, passed out, from the drinks and the Ambien. I carefully pick at the lock of the door, my gloves and balaclava intact, watching him intently, in case he wakes up.

He doesn’t.

I push the door open and head straight to him. He is sprawled on a maroon couch, a football game rerun playing in front of him. I snap a glove off and place an index finger under his nose. Feel the heavy breeze of his breathing.

Not dead yet. Shame.

I’m not going to use the gun if I don’t have to. Too messy, and I don’t want to get in trouble. Instead, I’m going to make it look like an accident.

Steve always said that a bad attitude was like a flat tire. One can’t get super far before changing it. So I put my big girl pants on, think about it from all angles, and come up with a plan.

I squat down, picking up Steve’s head. It is heavy and hard in my hands. Of course I want to do it like in the movies. Tie him to a chair and throw our past between us. Spit in his face and punch him. Make him cry, and beg, and piss his pants, all while swaggering off in five-inch stilettos.

But I cannot afford to get caught. Not when I’m trying to piece my life back together. I may never forgive men for being men—that ship has sailed. I will never marry, never fall in love, never give another person with a dick a chance—but I can still carry on.

With his head firmly in my hands, I angle his body to a slumped position and calculate what it’d look like if he accidentally fell on the glass coffee table in front of him. The next few minutes is a lot of me moving his limp body back and forth on the couch and turning the coffee table slightly to ensure his head meets its sharp edge.

Then I walk behind the sofa, grab Steve by the shoulders, and hurl his body forward with force. His head smashes on the edge of the coffee table.

Glass shatters.

His face is all cut up, but I can’t see it, because he is lying there facedown.

There’s blood everywhere.

So much blood.

He still doesn’t move, not even a flinch, and I suspect he wasn’t aware of dying, he was so deeply unconscious. My heart twists in disappointment, so I tell myself that even if he didn’t know he paid for what he did, at least he won’t be able to do it to anyone else.

“Goodbye, bastard. Hope Satan gets you.”

I slide out unnoticed and make my way back to Boston.

To my new life.

To the new me.





“Mr. Whitehall, your vehicle awaits.”

I fell into the backseat of the eye-catching vehicle and continued barking at Sam Brennan during our transatlantic phone call.

“You said Simon came highly recommended.” I was aware I sounded one, accusatory … two, clipped … and three, utterly deranged. “He is a fucking joke, period. Where was he when Belle got attacked? When she was followed?”