But there was more prey to be killed. More vengeance to be done. I stood motionless in the darkness behind the trailer door, and I waited patiently. How long did I stand there? An hour? Two? I could have waited for days if I’d needed to. Then, finally, I heard footsteps crunching in the dirt outside. The door opened, and Kip was back. He had only a split second to see the gory scene that was waiting for him before I struck. My knife rained down on him like a hailstorm, and the more blood that drained out of him, the wilder I became. Until he was dead, too. Until all that was left to do was sign my name on the wall.

To let everyone know who I was.

To make them tremble in fear.

Outside, afterward, I marched into the woods. I made my way to the lake and purified myself in the cold water. When I emerged naked onto the shore, I was Rebecca Colder again. The beast had left me. I barely even remembered what I’d done. I found my way back to the place where I’d parked my car, and I drove home. I had no guilt. No regret. There was nothing to tie me to the murder scene. No one had known where I was going. No one had known I was gone.

It was only when I awoke from a dreamless sleep that I remembered my camera.

The thought of it panicked me. If someone found the camera, the pictures I’d taken would show the world who the Ursulina really was. So I went back to the killing ground to search. Norm hadn’t found the bodies yet, and when I saw the trailer again, I felt a wave of horror knowing what was inside, as if the ghosts of the corpses would rise up and surround me. I wasted no time. I looked everywhere, I spent hours, but I had no idea where I’d dropped the camera. There was simply too much ground to cover.

So I sweated out the next few weeks, terrified that someone else would find it and that my secret would be revealed. But no. The knock on my door never came. Even after deputies went through the woods. Even after Ben’s Ursulina hunt with all his volunteers. No one showed up to arrest me. As the time went by, I began to believe I was safe.

I never dreamed when I met Ricky that he’d already found the camera, developed the film, and decided to collect me like a rare breed of carnivorous butterfly. He found me at a time when I needed to pretend that I was still an ordinary woman, not a killer, not a beast. I needed to punish myself for what I’d done. So no matter what Ricky did or said to me, I kept the Ursulina locked away as the sentence for my crime.