Christiana King. That was the name on her driver’s license.

It had already been added to the box. There was no going back now.

There were six licenses already in the box. This would be lucky number seven.

He’d seen her on his Sunday morning run. He preferred going on runs in the city. The suburbs were nice enough and smelled a lot better than the city, but there was something Chanyeol Park enjoyed about the challenge of jogging through Manhattan. There were people to dodge, cars to contend with, obstacles on the sidewalks. Anybody could run on the smooth, well-maintained paths of Flower Hill but taking it directly to the heart of the city? That was a challenge.

Besides, Chanyeol liked the looks he got. He was tall, handsome, muscular, aloof. Women stared at him, lustful. Men stared at him, envious. The attention made him run faster. Historically, a nice of his ego had always been the best motivator.  

It was cold that day – it had been cold lately. Growing up, Chanyeol hadn’t cared for the cold. He’d been a scrawny kid, not exactly sickly but definitely not the active, robust, apple-cheeked kid who played football and rode bikes when the weather got cold. He was prone to colds, prone to injuries. Until 10^th grade, he’d been simultaneously the tallest and the skinniest kid in class. It wasn’t until he’d turned sixteen that he quit feeling sorry for himself and hit the gym.

Now he was strong. Now he was attractive. Now he was capable.

Maybe he’d always been capable. In a lot of ways, money equaled capability. Chanyeol had grown up wealthy. Not just wealthy. Rich, really. He’d been filthy stinking rich. Still was. Some of that was a trust fund but the rest was money that he’d earned himself. He’d gone to school for marketing and nabbed a high-paying job in advertising right out of college. The power of networking and an impressive GPA, he figured. That and the CEO knew his mother.

He’d been thinking about all this as he ran that day, the cold biting at his ears, and when he thought of his mother, his fists clenched tightly at his sides.

Mommy dearest.

He thought of her and ran faster, the tight burn in his chest a reminder that he was doing something right. He grimaced, just for a second, and smiled.

Maybe he was a masochist.

Maybe he liked pain even more than he thought.

He’d been jogging down 5th Avenue at the time. He liked 5th Avenue, liked people-watching there. What was that phrase his professor liked to use? A target-rich environment.

He’d been running hard, totally in the zone, loud rap music blasting in his ears, adrenaline coursing through his veins.

And that was when he saw her.

She didn’t see him, at least not at first. She was busy screaming. Chanyeol could tell everything he needed to know about her just from what she had on – big fur coat, tight designer jeans, high-heeled boots that made no real sense given the weather and the conditions of the sidewalk. The bag she held on the crook of her arm cost more than most people made in a week, and Chanyeol knew that with a good deal of certainty since his mother was biased towards that particular brand.

He hadn’t seen the beginning of the altercation, having been distracted by his workout, but he caught more than enough of the latter half to help him make up his mind. The woman, blonde and Botoxed, was screaming so loudly that other people had stopped to watch. And the recipient of her anger? A middle-aged Hispanic woman with a baby in her arms and a school-aged child holding her hand.

The blonde – Chanyeol now knew her as Christiana – was in this woman’s face, fuming and spitting and carrying on. Again, Chanyeol had missed the first act but from the context, he pieced it together. The Hispanic woman had been walking down the sidewalk at the same time as Christiana. Somehow, they’d bumped into each other, the Hispanic woman spilling her bodega coffee onto Christiana’s blouse.

Chanyeol hadn’t seen it at first. He’d been too far away, too preoccupied. Plus, Christiana’s jacket had been covering it. But, lo and behold, there was a wet, brown stain on the front of her shirt. And so explained the screaming.

The blonde’s racially charged, expletive-laced tirade was directed mostly at the mother but that didn’t stop her from letting a few child-aimed insults fly.

She called her a Mexican. She called her a spick. She insulted her face and her clothes and her shoes. She called her kids illegals before calling them anchor babies. She demanded that this woman reimburse her for the shirt, demanded that her kids work it off in “some sweatshop” and then told all of them to go back where they came from.

Chanyeol took deep, even breaths despite the fact that his fingers were twitching at his sides and a knot of tension was forming in the center of his back.

People had stopped what they were doing so that they could watch this atrocity. Some were filming it on their phones. Some were whispering to each other, appalled. But none of them were doing anything about it.

He took another deep breath, trying to remind himself that there was nothing he could do about them. People were inherently weak. It was in their DNA. They were stupid and weak, slaves to anything remotely salacious, but always had and always would remain completely and utterly spineless.

So was the nature of humanity.

You can’t save the world, Chanyeol. You can’t change people. Focus on what you can do and leave out all the rest.

Another deep breath and he refocused himself. He turned his attention to the Hispanic woman.

She didn’t have money. Like with Christiana, Chanyeol could tell a lot just by looking at her clothes. His mother always said that clothes made the man, and since then, Chanyeol had learned how to read people’s visage, mentally leafing through each article of clothing like pages in a book.

The three of them were wearing K-Mart clothes, the type of stuff you’d see in the bargain bin. Solid colors, uneven stitching, plastic zippers. The older child, a little girl, had a dirty pink jacket and stretch pants that were too thin for the weather. The baby was bundled in blankets, probably because its clothes were insufficient for the temperature. Mom wore a grey, zip-up hoodie, ill-fitting jeans and sneakers that were so worn, they were holey and frayed.

This woman, Christiana, likely had more money in her bank account than this family would ever see in their entire lives and she was still willing to humiliate them over one minor and entirely accidental inconvenience.

The Hispanic woman was close to tears. More than once, she tried to walk away, pulling her young daughter with her, but Christiana blocked her path.

She was a spoiled woman, cruel and entitled. Her capacity for empathy was low, as was her self-image, and she didn’t care if other people witnessed her brutality. She was shameless. If anything, she probably liked the fact that people were staring. In her deluded mind, they agreed with her. They were applauding her. They were proud of her for doing what they couldn’t.

That wasn’t true, of course. They were disgusted by her, embarrassed for her, wounded on behalf of the woman who couldn’t speak up to defend herself or her children. They were taking videos so that they could vilify her later, memorializing this moment so that they could upload it to Facebook and said, “Can you believe this loud-mouth bigot?”

But women like Christiana always thought that they were in the right.

Chanyeol should know – he was raised by one.

He remembered the way the mother treated the help. She scolded them, chastised them, humiliated them. In front of her friends, in front of their kids, in front of Chanyeol. It didn’t matter who was around. She shouted at them, belittled them, threatened to call immigration. On more than one occasion, she hit them, threw things. Chanyeol had seen his favorite employee, a maid named Lupe, cry dozens of times at the hands of his mother.

What could he do? He was young, weak, helpless against mommy dearest. When Chanyeol found Lupe crying in the guest bathroom, he sat with her and held her hand. Lupe would his hair and say something in Spanish. He didn’t know what it meant but he knew it made both of them feel better. He liked Lupe. She was gentle, generous. She cared about him.

One day, when Chanyeol was twelve, he came home and asked his mom where Lupe was. He’d been assigned a project in Spanish class and he needed help. It was true that most of the staff spoke Spanish but no one was as helpful as Lupe. No one cared as much about Chanyeol’s grade or his amateur grasp on the language.

“She’s gone,” his mother said, not looking up from the paper. “She was stealing again. I just know she was. Anyway, I called immigration and they have her now.”

Chanyeol went pale. He felt sick. Lupe had three kids and a husband on disability. She’d never stolen. Not once. She was a person with thoughts and feelings and goals and dreams and now she was gone. Just like that. His mother didn’t care. Not one bit.

They never spoke of Lupe again.

Now, Chanyeol had to pick his battles. The Hispanic woman and her children had finally broken free of the cruel woman’s clutches. Someone who’d been standing behind Christiana, a friend, maybe, or a shopping buddy, had finally intervened. The Hispanic family was slinking away, their tails between their legs, tears beginning to stream down mom’s face.

Chanyeol wanted to follow them, wanted to find out where Mom worked so that he could leave an anonymous donation that would help soften the blow of that horrible woman’s horrible words. But he couldn’t. He had to stay focused. As they neared the corner, Chanyeol noticed that the little girl was carrying a backpack. It had the name of her elementary school on it.

It was a longshot but Chanyeol figured it was worth a try. Pulling his phone from his jacket pocket, he snapped a few pictures of the girl and her mom. He was just one of a dozen people with their phones out so nobody really noticed. But with the combination of a school name and a photo, maybe his hacker friend Baekhyun could find out who the little girl was. Through school and DMV records, maybe he could even find out where the mother worked.

But Christiana was on the move, now, which meant Chanyeol needed to be, too.

It was pure luck that he’d been on a run, but now he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why he was darting down the street. These things were a lot harder to maintain when he was dressed for work or buying groceries.

Maybe seven really was his lucky number.

He did his usual surveillance, using the standard buzz of Manhattan as a cover. Christiana was so wrapped up in herself that she didn’t even think about checking her surroundings. If she had, she would’ve noticed a tall, handsome man in active wear following her for twelve blocks.

But that was not the case.

In Chanyeol’s experience, that was never the case. Women he was after, women like Christiana, made the game all-too-easy by being too caught up in their own bull to take a look around every once in a while. It almost took the fun out of the hunt.

Almost.

She lived in a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side, doorman and all. That was fine. Chanyeol didn’t need to know which apartment was hers (and if he did, it really wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out). He just needed to know her schedule. That, too, was a piece of cake.

To Chanyeol, though, everything was a piece of cake. That was the way it had always been.

School? Easy. Sports? Easy. Work? Easy. Killing? Easy.

His life was easy. If you took his wicked witch mother out of the equation, nearly every facet of his life had been easy. Now, as a charming, attractive man, the good times just kept rolling. With the right thinking, Chanyeol could get just about anything he ever wanted.

It would be very easy to charm information out of the doorman. He’d done it before but the last time he had, the police had questioned the guy. Lucky for Chanyeol, the man was old and couldn’t remember what Chanyeol looked like. (“He had big ears,” was the only thing he’d told the cops and Chanyeol had laughed when he read it in the paper. His biggest weakness, now and forever. All the money in the world and six dead women under his belt and he still couldn’t escape his big ears.)

It didn’t seem worth the risk that day. It was Sunday and if Chanyeol played his cards right, he could blow off work for the next few days without raising any questions. That would allow him the freedom to stake out Christiana’s apartment and, therefore, learn her schedule. A coffee shop across the street would provide a near perfect hideout. He’d bring his computer, sit by the window and pretend to be working on some hipster screenplay, all the while watching the door and planning his next move.

It took even less time than he expected. This woman was a creature of habit. Coffee with friends at nine, a run at eleven, home by twelve-thirty, back out to go he-didn’t-care-where a little after two, then home for the night by five-fifteen.

It would be so easy that it almost wouldn’t be fun.

Almost.

He made his move on Wednesday morning. Of course, he had to abandon his post at East Side Java and go back to his home in Tribeca to get his car. That was always the hard part. In some cases, the only hard part. Chanyeol lived in a brownstone and parked on the street right outside his building. Getting girls from the car to the house without incident, while only a few-foot journey, always made his heart beat out of his chest.

There were a few ways that he could circumvent those issues. One would be to incapacitate these women. He could knock them out, employee a little handy, dandy chloroform. But that proved its own struggles. He’d need to carry them from his car to his front door and that in itself would be next to impossible. He could just charm the pants off of them, seduce them and bring them back to his place, but that would require him to actually get near these women, befriend them, treat them like people, and he wasn’t willing to do that.

No, his way was easier. Threats were simpler. He owned a knife (several, in fact) and a gun and he knew his way around dark alleys.

Once he knew her jogging route, it was child’s play. He’d park his car, pocket his pocketknife and bide his time until she came around the corner. He’d use some ploy to distract her, yelling for help or asking her for the time or telling her she dropped her keys, and he’d draw her just out of sight from the street.

Then he showed her his weapon and the real fun began.

The last six times he’d done this, the women had complied quietly, all of them expecting a robbery or a ual assault, assuming that they’d be able to submit temporarily and walk away with their lives. But Chanyeol didn’t need them for money or . He did just fine in both of those departments all on his own.

Christiana followed the same formula as all the others. She raised her hands defensively, showing her willingness to comply, and with wide eyes and a shaky voice, she asked what he wanted. Smirking, he told her to get in the car. There, he bound her wrist with zip ties and buckled her in the passenger’s seat. Traffic cops had really been buckling down lately and it wouldn’t much help him to get a ticket on the way back to Tribeca.

“If you scream,” he said, waving the knife dramatically before her eyes, “I’ll kill you. If you try to draw attention to anyone on the street while we drive, I’ll kill you. If you try anything while driving, I’ll kill you. If you say a word from now until we arrive at our destination, I’ll kill you. You get it?”

Frantic, the woman nodded.

Chanyeol sighed contently. The fear on her face, the humiliation, the helplessness, it reminded him of the Hispanic woman and her children. Christiana had victimized them for no real reason, stripping them of their power, of their dignity because she felt she was somehow above them. And now he would do the same to her.

All was fair in love and retribution.

The ride home to Tribeca was uneventful, Christiana falsely concluding that her compliance and submission would somehow spare her life.

Chanyeol parked in his usual spot and then pulled his knife again. Christiana recoiled and whimpered but didn’t scream. He wasn’t going to stab her, anyway. Using the tip of the blade to cut off the zip-ties, he said, “Now you’re going to walk inside, quickly and quietly. Keep your head down. And if you don’t,” he looked down at his blade, “I’ll gut you like a deer. You with me?”

Another frenzied nod, then Chanyeol smiled.

It would be a fun night.

Christiana followed his orders, walking calmly but briskly beside him. He unlocked the door, let her inside, did a quick scan of the area to rule out any nosy neighbors and then ducked into his home. He locked the door behind them (he had an advanced security system but he always liked using good, old fashioned deadbolts) and then pointed to the second door on his right.

He opened it and Christiana held her breath, anticipating the worst.

But behind that door was, simply, another door.

Chanyeol grinned.

“Bet you didn’t expect that, huh?” he asked.

But then, Chanyeol opened the second door and Christiana got a glimpse of the brownstone’s real treasure – a soundproof, escape-proof, everything-the--else-proof panic room that Chanyeol had spent ten-thousand dollars transforming into his perfect torture chamber and killing space.

He was beaming now. This was, after all, his point of pride. This room symbolized everything he was and everything he could be, while simultaneously smashing everything he hated about himself in the past. The stainless-steel appliances, the tools on the wall, the adjustable lighting, the drain in the floor, the table in the middle of the room, all the straps and whips… It had been worth every cent.

And the look on each woman’s face as she saw what the next ten to twelve hours had in store for her?

You couldn’t put a price on that.

That all had been a few hours ago. Once he got the girls, he liked to let them sit for a while and think about their lives. He wanted to think they had a chance, wanted to think they’d be able to bargain and bribe their way out of it. He strapped Christiana to the table, gagged her, and went to make himself some lunch. (Gags were essential. He didn’t want to hear these women speak, didn’t want to hear anything they had to say. He wanted them to think they had hope but he didn’t want to hear about it. Besides, loud, shrill noises made his head hurt. Those giant ears weren’t just for show – they were really sensitive.)

While he sat in the kitchen and ate his sandwich, though, his mind started to wander. He couldn’t help it. Before long, he had his computer out, his fingers typing ‘the East-Side Assassin’ into Google before his brain could register what he was doing.

He didn’t care for the moniker. If people hated serial killers so much, why did they treat them like celebrities? Why did they sensationalize them? Why did they put them on such pedestals?

Not that he thought of himself as a serial killer. That would be ridiculous. Serial killers killed innocent people. Chanyeol considered himself a street cleaner. The city was better off without women like Christiana, even if the NYPD might not see it that way.

Besides, the East-Side Assassin? Assassins killed important people – activists, politicians. He killed scum-of-the-earth women who didn’t deserve what they had and took their insecurities out on the less fortunate. Strangling rich es in his panic-room-turned-torture-chamber was a far cry from assassinating people.

Maybe someday, when he stopped or got caught, he’d request a better nickname. Was he allowed to name himself? Was that something people did? Had any killer ever gotten to name himself?

Whatever. It was neither here nor there for Chanyeol. He didn’t plan on stopping or getting caught anytime soon so what did it matter?

He ran a search of his ridiculous new nickname and read some of the articles about himself. When those got boring, he read tweets and Facebook statuses. And when that got old, he looked at his fan art.

There were cartoon renderings of what people thought he might look like, some hyper-realistic sketches done in pencil, other comic-esque animations. People wrote poems, love letters, all addressed to the East-Side Assassin. He even had two websites devoted to him. They weren’t dedicated to catching or stopping him, nor were they being used to discover his identity. They were straight up fan clubs. One even had a message board that specialized in user’s ual fantasies about him.

Some people were really twisted.

And then, because he’d run out of new things to read and because his food was still digesting, he navigated to a familiar news site and found one of his favorites – a press conference held by the family of his last victim.

Her name had been Delilah Stanton and Chanyeol had taken his time with her. Having witnessed her being especially nasty to a homeless man who’d just come inside a coffee shop to get out of the cold, Chanyeol decided that she needed an extra special punishment. But because she’d been away from her family for three whole days before her body was found, her family had reached out to the media, hoping they’d somehow be able to speak to Delilah’s captor through them and appeal to his empathy.

They certainly reached Chanyeol but they’d miscalculated one thing – Chanyeol didn’t have empathy. Not for people like Christiana and Delilah. Did he have empathy for the Hispanic woman and the homeless man? Absolutely. But for rich bullies and abusers? No, he didn’t feel a thing.

Still, he enjoyed the press conference. Diane, Deliah’s younger sister, went to the podium, paper in her hand, tears in her eyes, and begged Chanyeol to let her sister go.

“Delilah is an amazing woman,” Diane said. “She’s warm, funny, smart, talented. She really cares about people, you know?” That had made Chanyeol laugh out loud. He lived alone but still, he looked around like he wanted to know if anyone else was hearing this bull. “We just want her back safe. We promise, we’ll never come find you. We won’t prosecute you. Just give her back.”

Chanyeol smiled throughout the entire press conference.

Diane didn’t realize it at the time – none of the families did – but Chanyeol was doing her a favor. He was helping her. Rich people like Delilah and Christiana and their families needed a dose of reality. They were horrible to people below them because they’d forgotten what it was like to struggle. Maybe they never had. Maybe they’d never worked a day in their whole lives. They didn’t know suffering, they didn’t know strife. Their lives were too comfortable, too pain-free.

But Chanyeol showed them the light. He murdered their sisters, their nieces, their mothers, their wives, and he reminded them what it meant to feel pain. Money couldn’t buy everything. It certainly couldn’t save their loved ones once he took them. And now they knew adversity. Now they knew anguish and agony. Their lives were no longer sheltered and privileged. They’d lost something they could never get back and they were better for it. Now they could live their lives. Now they could grow a little character. Now they could take stock in their own lives, recognize their own mortality, learn to appreciate the little things.

It was a win-win situation. Delilah and Christiana and others like them were wiped from the face of the earth, and their friends and family were much better people because of it.

When his ego had been sufficiently and his purpose in life had been gainfully restored, Chanyeol closed his computer, washed his plate and changed his clothes. (He couldn’t very well get blood on his Under Armor. Even with his salary, that was expensive.)

What would he do today?

The endgame was always the same. He was big on strangulation, both as a realistic means to an end and as a concept. Something about using your hands, seeing the light fade from someone’s eyes, feeling the life leave their body… anything else seemed cheap in comparison.

Still, he did have that panic room and it was filled with all sorts of goodies.

He wasn’t a sadist in a traditional sense. He wasn’t a sociopath. He had sympathy, empathy, compassion. Nothing about what he did was ual. He didn’t get off on blood, gore or violence and he’d never once gotten aroused while hurting someone. That just wasn’t who he was.

This was about justice, not money or power or . It wasn’t even about the torture. That, more than anything, was curiosity. (The physical act itself, anyway. The pain it inflicted was entirely about retribution. He wanted to hurt these women the way they hurt others. An eye for an eye. He didn’t care if it made the whole damn world blind. At least then people couldn’t bear witness and stand idly by while their fellow man was mistreated and abused.)

He had things – drills and lighters and knives and tools – because they interested him. He wanted to see what they did to the body, to the flesh, to the soul. He’d always been a curious boy. He’d grown up taking things apart and putting them back together. And while his particular brand of torture wasn’t all that violent (comparatively speaking, anyway), it did enough to satisfy that scientific itch in his brain. He had so many toys, in fact, that he’d never used the same thing twice. He limited his ministrations to three-per-victim and then, when he’d had his fill, he wrapped his fingers around her neck and squeezed.

It was easy.

The cops had figured out a pattern based solely on victimology. The fact that they’d been strangled? That was hardly unique. And the torture patterns? Those were entirely new and untraceable. Chanyeol took a strange sort of pride in that. His style was fresh, innovative, distinctly him. People on his fan sites had talked about that, and, frankly, he was glad they noticed. It made him feel good about his skill and the stylistic choices he’d made.

He figured he should get to work. Dressed in a brown t-shirt and basketball shorts that his heart had outgrown (he preferred running to sports now anyway), he opened one door, and then the other, stepping into the dark panic room with heavy footsteps. Christiana, still bound and gagged on the table, froze like someone had suddenly removed her batteries.

He hit the lights and smiled.

“Good,” Chanyeol teased, his deep voice booming off the insulated walls. “You’re still here.” He laughed at his own joke, the way he had the last six times, and walked over to the far wall. That’s where his toys lay, hanging against the wall in a completely unspectacular way. Out of context, it looked like any other toolkit – hammers, saws, wrenches, drills. In any other life, he could have been a carpenter or a dime-a-dozen, stay-at-home handyman.

But not in this one.

What would he use? He’d purchased a set of screwdrivers, five of them in various sizes, and they seemed to call to him like a siren’s song. As his fingers ghosted over the metal, he decided. Those would do. He opened his mouth to make another hilarious comment but something buzzed against his thigh. His phone, he realized after a beat. A text.

Putting his golden commentary on hold, he reached into his pocket and fished out his iPhone, reading a message from Baekhyun, his friend and in-house tech god. Baekhyun, smart as he was, knew absolutely nothing of Chanyeol’s other life, of his real life. As far as Baekhyun knew, Chanyeol was an advertising executive whose hobbies included red wine, running and HBO documentaries.

Found that kid and her mom, the text read. Little girl’s name is Ingrid Delgado. You were correct. She goes to school in Washington Heights. Mom’s name is Lupe. She’s a cleaning lady.

Chanyeol laughed to himself, nostalgic.

Lupe.

Just like the maid his mother had sent away.

Smiling, he said, “Small world, isn’t it?”

He grabbed the thickest screwdriver from the wall and put it in his pocket, leaving his iPhone on the counter. Then, because he felt like, he grabbed a small saw and a claw hammer.

Slowly, he walked around the other side of the table, grinning as he looked Christiana up and down. He thought of Lupe and Ingrid Delgado, then about Lupe his former maid, then about mommy dearest.

By the time he reached the doors, he was smiling like a maniac.

If Christiana hadn’t been scared before, she was now.

“You’re going to learn a lot today,” Chanyeol said, watching her. “You’re going to learn a lesson in humility and social class and empathy. Most importantly, your family is going to learn a very valuable lesson about priorities and appreciating life.” He reached down and ran the smooth, blunt end of the hammer up Christiana’s bare leg. Leaning in and enjoying the way she flinched, he whispered, “I bet you wish you hadn’t screamed at a mother and her children over an ugly Gucci blouse, huh?” He threw his head back and laughed, relishing in the new spark of fear in her eyes, then he turned to close both doors. He felt a familiar rush of adrenaline and excitement course through him as the second door clicked shut, then he looked over his shoulder at the woman strapped to his table and said, “Let’s have some fun.”