There was a bare writing desk in the room, a squatty black table, and a few thick pillows upon the tired concrete floor. A computer screen from a notebook added a faint blue glow and he considered logging on. He communicated with them over the Internet; on pirated wireless connections throughout the city they knew him by several screen names, but he called himself Vlad. Not particularly clever but fitting for his purposes, he decided. What was the quote from Shakespeare? “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.” Well, Vlad smelled sweet and tasted even better, he thought. So, for the purposes of this, his mission, he would be known as Vlad the Impaler. And was he not? Did he not impale each of the ones he chose?

Oh, irony.

Lighting a candle, Vlad sat cross-legged at the stubby Japanese table, opened a drawer within it and drew out the pictures, snapshots taken for student ID cards. He set the first four onto the glossy surface of the table.

Sisters, he thought, though not genetically related.

He touched each photo with the tip of his index finger, in the order in which he’d taken them.

Dionne, sweet and supple, her rich dark skin soft as silk. Oh, she’d been ripe and so hot…so damned hot and wet…Crying out her unwillingness, but her body responding to him as he made her ready, made that perfect body want him. His throat tightened at the memory of taking her, from behind, his hands kneading her abdomen, making her come just before he did.

He swallowed hard.

And Tara, the thin one with her gorgeous breasts. Full and white, with pale rose-colored nipples the size of half-dollars. He felt his prick twitch at the thought of those glorious tits. He remembered suckling them, teasing them, biting them, scraping them with his teeth as she cried out in heated torment…again his blood began to sing. He touched Tara’s photo, then looked to the next girl.

Monique. Tall and lean, an athlete’s body. Muscles that had strained against him as he’d sculpted her with his palms, fingers exploring all her intimate, sweet crevices. He licked his lips as his cock stood at attention.

He glanced to the next photo. Rylee. Small. Frightened. But oh, so delicious. Her pale yellow hair had caught his attention and when she was stripped bare, her white skin had been luminous, her veins visible beneath the surface, her beating heart apparent in the fluttering, frightened pulse throbbing so perfectly within the circle of bones at her throat.