• •
  The first time Lucien Sable threatened to kill Dorian Wren, he did it with a smile.

The second time, he brought him flowers.

By the third, Dorian had stopped sleeping.

It had been twenty-three days since the journalist began investigating the man the newspapers called the Blackthorn Killer. Twenty-three days since the first anonymous photograph arrived at his office, depicting a dead man in a darkened room. Twenty-three days since Dorian received a message from an unknown number.

YOU HAVE SUCH BEAUTIFUL HANDWRITING. I WONDER IF YOU’LL STILL WRITE SO NEATLY WHEN YOU’RE FRIGHTENED, LITTLE SAINT.

He had dismissed it as a sick joke.

Then came the second photograph.

It was of Dorian.

Sitting at his desk. Reading the first photograph. His face illuminated by the glow of his computer screen.

Taken from inside his office.

The police told him to be careful. His editor told him to stop being dramatic. His colleagues told him he was becoming obsessed.

They were all right.

But none of them understood the worst part.

Dorian was beginning to look forward to the messages.

Not because he wanted to die.

Because, for the first time in his miserable, meticulously controlled life, someone was paying attention to him with a devotion so absolute it bordered on the divine.

Someone was watching him eat, sleep, work. Someone knew which fingers he worried between his teeth when he was nervous. Someone knew he took his whiskey neat, hated thunderstorms, and still checked the locks on his childhood bedroom when he visited his mother.

Someone had noticed that he cried silently.

And that someone had decided to make a game of it.

Lucien Sable had given him a nickname.

Little Saint.*