Montana Falls (Red Diamonds #5)

Chapter One, Laundry Sucks

I knew stalkers were supposed to be terrifying, but it was hard to be scared when mine did my laundry. Yes, I knew I should have called the cops last year when I finally realized I wasn’t going insane; someone was breaking into my apartment and following me. But honestly, aside from the fact the police in Cherry Hill were terrible, and would never have believed me, gangs ran them. Gangs like the Reapers who owned the club I worked in, and ruled the city with a brutality that even the biggest of monsters feared. So yeah, I should have been scared - I was a little scared at first - but considering my stalker had been nothing but helpful and there were far worse monsters roaming the streets, it seemed more convenient to let the little wraith stay and do what they wanted.

Seeing as nobody had been around to teach me, I never learned a lot of basic skills. So now I hated laundry. But whoever was obsessed with me did such a good job, especially for a man. I only knew he was a man because one time he’d carried me home drunk from a party, and after that I’d spotted him frequently in the shadows of an alleyway on my walk to and from work. So yeah, for a man, he was great. He separated everything into lights, darks and colors. He used fancy detergent and even those extra scent boosting pearls that made me smell like a fresh summer’s day for weeks. Plus, he ironed and folded and everything. Then put it away in a really organized manner in my crappy drawers and closet. So, with all that, and the rest of the sweet stuff he did for me, I kind of just… let him carry on.

I let him stalk me. Break into my home. I allowed him to follow me around town and watch me live my life. God, I let him do anything he wanted because it was honestly the only reason my cheap apartment stayed spotless, and I lived some semblance of a stress-free life. Especially the past year, since everything went to hell for me more than it ever had before.

He was the only way I felt like I was being a real adult woman, and not an irresponsible mess, whose life sucked hard enough that she let it stop her being human far too often. He was the reason I bothered to shower and get up and continue living my life six out of seven days of the week. So he could stay. He could stay and I would be happy about it.

Right now, I knew he’d been over within the last hour and instead of being anxious; I was grateful. I’d come in straight from finishing my shift at Bella’s around seven in the morning, ditched my stripper heels right beside the front door and practically collapsed on my rundown dark purple couch. The couch came off Craigslist two years ago (for free, baby) and it was still comfy, even if it was probably a murder couch. Normally I left it in a mess, but now the cushions had been fluffed, the mismatched colorful blankets were folded, and there was a vanilla candle burning on the coffee table that hadn’t even melted the entire top yet.

Everywhere else I looked shined like it had been freshly cleaned, too. If that wasn’t enough the slightest smell of garlic permeated throughout the air, and my nose twitched with the urge to find it as I hurried back to my sore feet before my body refused to cooperate.

“Come to mommy, sweet food. Where are you?” Two seconds of searching around the kitchen later, my grubby paws were holding a still warm bowl of tomato soup, and a foil wrapped grilled cheese that was all gooey in the middle, and warm from the oven.

I hadn’t made a single meal for myself in a year. Not even once.

I hadn’t done the laundry. Even my thongs or stripper costumes that were more imaginary than material.

I also hadn’t been alone. That was the biggest factor. I hated being alone and with my stalker; I wasn’t. So yeah. He could stay.

Kicking my tired feet up onto my walnut coffee table, I groaned around each spoonful of delight. I usually wasn’t a heathen who put her feet on furniture. But it was an ancient table from a thrift store that was missing one leg and covered in scratches from what I presumed had been a cat. The damn thing only stayed upright because I’d used a stack of old dark romance books to keep it sturdy, so a bit of feet on it was hardly the end of the world. Plus, my brother was the only one who would have scolded me for it, and he was in jail for the rest of his life, so fuck it. It was fine.

More than fine, seeing as I wasn’t coming home ever again in a handful of hours, so had a friend donating half of my stuff for me.

Counting down to the potential last day of my life, I whipped out my phone from my bra, opening up one of my two best friends chats so I could eat my meal without silence. I would have switched the TV on if I had one, but it had broken last month. As much as I missed watching reruns of SpongeBob on something other than my phone, I had more important things to buy with my dollar bills.

“Hey, gorgeous.” I spoke around a mouthful of grilled cheese like the classy lady I was. “Work sucked as per, but I made almost two hundred in tips from that hot kinda goth guy again. You know the one with an adorable baby face. Plus, the grabby bastard with the eyepatch wasn’t in, so my ass stayed hands free.” Three more bites of sandwich and I was almost done with it. “To celebrate, I was thinking we could go out, so do you wanna get coffee on the weekend before I’m broke again?”

I wasn’t bad with money. I budgeted everything and even counted pennies. But the last year had required me to funnel most of my paycheck into a little hobby I had going on, and so most days I had just enough left to survive. Seeing as I’d been tipped extra on my last shift, I figured I might as well spend a little of it making myself feel better, and catching up with a friend. It was that or groceries, gas and other boring life bullshit just to keep myself breathing.

Two sips of soup later, Ruby replied, her southern twang echoing around my almost empty apartment, filled with nothing but boxes and poisoned memories. Oh, and the cool red Persian rug I got on a marketplace online that some pervy old man had offered me for thirty bucks in exchange for flashing him my tits. I totally hadn’t done it. I for sure had paid the full price because I was a dignified girl.

“Darlin’, I already told you that you gotta carry a knife and stab the men like that.” She scoffed in her voice note as I wondered why she was awake so early when she no longer stripped for a living and did a regular nine-to-five. “I can get you a fun little switchblade. It’s all lilac and glittery and screams you. But I’m not around next weekend, I’m workin’. I will let you know the minute this job chills out and we can meet, but we can put it on my new sugar daddy’s card. He’s totally good for it and you should save your money for a vacation to the Maldives or somethin’”

Ruby babbled on with her life update for another ten minutes, and I eagerly listened to every single word. Her life was far more interesting than mine right now and seeing as she was having the time of her life with her fancy new gangster boyfriend - and his boyfriend too - I was more than happy to live vicariously through her. It wasn’t like I had anything else of interest going on.

Not today anyway.

Almost forty minutes later, when I was done with voice notes, soup and doom scrolling my social media before I deleted my profile forever, I dragged myself to my feet, knowing I had to shower now or else I wouldn’t do it in the morning. I might have worn wigs when dancing, but my natural dirty blonde hair was a little curly, and if I didn’t tame it down, then it made shoving my gigantic head into a wig a bit too difficult.

And sure, I had enough time to get ready before work - I didn’t even start until nine tonight - but I had no patience for it. Not when there were more important things to be doing, like finding the will to live, making sure my vagina was tucked safely away in my skimpy clothes, and triple checking that the amount of date rape drugs I carried in my old purse was definitely the right amount to knock someone unconscious.

I had no intention of fucking anyone without consent, and I sure as hell wasn’t normally the kind of twenty-six-year-old teenage girl who drugged people. But I had no choice. There was a mission I needed to embark on, and part of that meant I had to know which strengths and weaknesses I had. In this case I lacked strength. Sure, I could bend my ass and tits around a pole, but that was the gist of it. I couldn’t fight - couldn’t take on men twice my size. I was average height and midsize at best, with a soft tummy and thighs designed to suffocate a man’s pretty little head. So I knew I had no choice but to use drugs - to sneak them into the drink of the person I needed to be just a little… unconscious, for a while.

Humming a tune to myself, I showered at ten times my normal speed in my tiny shower cubicle, even using leave in conditioner so I didn’t have to bother washing it out. The song only I could hear kept going around in circles, bouncing through my empty brain as I let all thoughts drain from me until I was sure that I was numb. Only then did I step out from under the scalding water, hurry into an oversized band T-shirt, and shuffle my way to my bedroom.

My apartment wasn’t huge. Everything was in one room, aside from the bathroom and bedroom. Even calling it a bedroom was a stretch. My double bed was pushed against one wall, my closet was barely big enough to hang my clothes in, and the rickety wooden drawers I’d found on the side of the street a few months after moving in could just about squeeze at the foot of my bed. The cream wallpaper was peeling off, there was mold on the ceiling, and the window hadn’t opened in months. But it was mine - it was mine, and I had worked hard for it, and it was better than being on the street. So the fact I was having to say goodbye to it when I woke up made me a little sad in my heart, even if I was hopefully heading on to better places.

“We’re movin’ on up, da, da, da.” Continuing singing under my breath, I chucked my phone onto the crate I used as a side table, yanked back my big green comforter and snuggled in like a burrito.

My hand slid under my pillow like it did every night, finding exactly what I hoped would be there waiting for me within a second of wiggling my fingers and wishing upon a star that I didn’t wind up dead until my mission was done.

Bolting upright, I snatched my phone into my hand, flicking on the torch. There was a note left for me. A little scrap of paper with the neat, looping handwriting I knew belonged to my stalker because he enjoyed leaving me compliments and promises almost every night. Again, I probably ought to have worried about him being in my bedroom and potentially still lurking around, but for some reason my face erupted into a stupid big smile instead of yelling as I read it.

Just like that, with a single piece of paper, I felt no qualms about my plan. Not because I was arrogant or confident enough in my own abilities that I was sure I wouldn’t mess up. But because I wasn’t alone. I had someone watching my back, even if it was from the shadows he never really left.

His lurking and watching were another reason I didn’t mind having a stalker. One that seemed far more important than his cleaning and the mundane day to day of life being more interesting with him. I had a plan that started right at the stroke of midnight. A plan so great and wicked that I just knew I’d need the tiniest smidgen of help. The sort of help a masked man who clearly didn’t mind breaking the law could offer.

I was going to be getting revenge for my best friend’s death last year.

Revenge for Missy, the girl I’d grown up with since we were five and loved like a sister.

I was going to hunt down the man responsible for killing her as I hovered a handful of feet away, no clue about the danger she was in, and I was going to make him suffer. At least until he confessed all his sins and then I could kill him the same way he killed her. With a bullet in his head and then his corpse left to rot in a dumpster for a few days until someone found him.

Like he was trash.

Sure, murder and kidnapping and all of that needed a dark touch from a pair of deviant hands. But that wasn’t the bit that concerned me or made me think I needed someone to aid me. Oh no. I didn’t need my stalker for all of that because I reckoned with how angry and heartbroken I was, I could kill the guilty party on my own.

No. I wanted my stalker for something bigger; not just his ability to supply me with drugs and death.

The one I wanted to kidnap and kill was the local mafia boss. He was the leader of the Reapers, specifically. A beast of a man that I knew there was no chance of me taking without a fight. So yeah. I needed my stalker’s help.

I needed a wicked monster on my side to make sure my mission went without a hitch.

Continue the rest of the story here and find out what happens …