Prey
The holding cell smelled like sweat and something that bleach or even some flowery fragrance couldnβt fix no matter how many times they tried. I sat on the metal bench with my back against the wall and my wrist were sore where the handcuffs had been, and I stared at the crack running along the ceiling like it was the most interesting thing in the room. It wasnβt. Nothing in this room was interesting.
It was somewhere around 2:00am. I didnβt have a watch and my phone was in a clear plastic bag sitting somewhere behind a front desk, so I was guessing based on how quiet the building had gotten. The officers whoβd brought me in had stopped walking past the cell.
The drunk guy two cells down to the right had finally stopped crying. Even the fluorescent light above me had settled into a steady hum instead of that flickering nonsense it had been doing when I first arrived, and the hum felt appropriate, like the whole building had decided to hold its breath along with me. I wasnβt tired.
That surprised me, honestly. I thought Iβd be wrecked after everything, the way my body always crashed when something big happened. The way it used to crash when Dela was done with me and the apartment went quiet and Iβd lie there feeling like Iβd been hit by something heavy and slow.
I thought Iβd fold in half on this bench and lose consciousness out of sheer necessity. I didnβt. I sat straight and breathed slowly and even, and I felt something I hadnβt felt in so long that it took me a few minutes to put a name to it, because I wasnβt used to it. I felt clear.
It wasnβt happiness and it wasnβt relief. It wasnβt anything soft or comfortable like that. It was just clarity, cold and steady, the way the air feels after a storm has stripped everything down to the bone. Like someone had finally wiped the glass Iβd been trying to see through for twelve years and I could suddenly make out every line and edge of the world without having to squint through the grime of it.
I knew they had the footage. Detective Arlen had made a point of telling me that when he sat across from me in the interrogation room with his coffee going cold on the table between his hands. Heβd leaned forward and told me they had it all, the whole thing, crystal clear from three different angles, and heβd watched my face while he said it like he was waiting for me to crack open. He wanted tears or begging or the fast, stumbling explanations that guilty people give because they canβt stand what the silence says about them.
I hadnβt given him any of that.
Iβd looked at him steadily and thought, good. Watch it again. Watch it a third time if you want. Watch it until your eyes go dry and then go home and sit with what you didnβt see. Think about what no camera in that apartment ever recorded. Think about what twelve years looks like when thereβs nobody standing around with a lens pointed at it.
The footage showed me killing Dela Miles and I wasnβt going to pretend otherwise. It showed exactly what I did and exactly how I did it and my face was in frame the whole time. I wasnβt wearing a mask. I wasnβt trying to hide or run or make it look like something it wasnβt. By the time that moment came I was so far past hiding that the whole idea of it felt like a word from a language I used to speak and had long since forgotten.
They had the footage and I was glad they had it. What they didnβt have was everything else.
The world knew Dela Miles as a good man. I want you to understand how completely and specifically the world had that wrong. He was 40 years old when he died and in those 40 years heβd built a version of himself that people trusted the moment they laid eyes on him. He was tall and he kept himself well put together and he had this way of listening to you talk that made you feel like you were the only person in whatever room you were both standing in.
Dela Miles donated to two charities. He remembered birthdays. He shook hands firmly and held eye contact and laughed at exactly the right moments and he never raised his voice in public, not where anyone who counted could hear it.
I knew people who cried when the news broke that he was dead. I knew people who posted long tributes online with photographs from his charity events, photographs where he stood smiling with his arm around someone, photographs where he looked exactly like the man everyone had decided he was. A good man. A generous man. The kind of man youβd call decent without having to think twice about it.
Iβd been up close to Dela Miles for twelve years and Iβm here to tell you that what lives at that close range would hollow you out if you saw it without the packaging.
The thing about Dela was that he didnβt start ugly. I need you to understand that, not because Iβm asking for your sympathy, but because you need to know how the whole thing actually works in real life and not how people imagine it works when theyβre sitting somewhere safe and comfortable and wondering out loud why anyone would ever stay. He didnβt show me who he was at the beginning. People like him never do, because showing you too early would ruin the entire plan.
I was 14 when I lost my parents. Car accident on a Tuesday in November, one of those ordinary terrible things that donβt ask your permission or give you any warning before they take everything you have. I had no siblings.
I had one aunt who looked at me like I was a bill she hadnβt agreed to pay, and after eight months of making that very clear in the small quiet ways that people use when they donβt want to say the thing out loud, sheβd signed what she needed to sign and I was placed in the system.
I could write an entire separate book about what the system does to a kid whoβs still raw with grief and has no one left in the world to hold onto. I wonβt do that right now. What Iβll tell you is that by the time I was 17, Iβd been through four different placements and I was tired in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with sleep.
I had nothing. I want you to really sit with that and let it land, because I think people say it without meaning it the way I mean it right now. I had no one. I had no door in the world that belonged to me.
I had no name that fit me right, because my name was my fatherβs name and my father was in the ground and every time someone said it I felt his absence press into me like something blunt and relentless. I had nothing and I knew it and Iβd reached the point where Iβd stopped expecting anything different, the way you stop expecting warmth after youβve been cold long enough.
Then Dela found me.
He came into my life through the group home I was placed in at 17. He was a donor, one of those well-dressed, well-spoken men who gave money and sometimes showed up in person to walk through and see where it went, and the staff lit up around him because he was charming and he brought food from decent places and he asked the kids real questions and actually waited for their answers.
Most donors didnβt do that. Most of them wrote the check and kept a careful distance, like being young and lost was something they might catch if they stood too close.
Dela wasnβt like that. Dela got down to your level and looked you in the eye and made you feel like you existed in a way that counted for something.
He noticed me specifically and I remember the exact moment with the kind of sharpness you remember anything that changed the shape of your whole life.
I was in the corner of the common room working through a book Iβd already read twice because it was the only one I owned, and he came and sat nearby and asked what I was reading. I told him the title. He asked if I liked it. I said yes. He asked me why. Nobody had asked me why I liked something in so long that Iβd nearly forgotten people did that.
I talked for ten minutes without stopping and he listened to every word of it. He didnβt check his phone. He didnβt let his eyes drift toward the door or find somewhere more interesting to land. He just sat there and gave me his full attention, and when I finished he said I had a good mind and he meant it, I could tell he actually meant it, and something in my chest cracked open a little because I was 17 and I was starving for exactly that kind of thing.
He became my person slowly and deliberately after that. Visits turned into lunches. Lunches turned into dinners and then bookstores where he told me to pick whatever I wanted and paid without glancing at the total. By the time I was 18 and the system released me, he offered me his spare room and it felt like the ground finally decided to hold me up after years of falling.
I was 19 when he asked me to be his boyfriend. I was standing in his kitchen making his coffee exactly the way Iβd learned he liked it and he came up behind me and told me quietly that heβd been having feelings for me and that heβd been fighting them for a long time, and he was sorry if hearing it was too much. I turned around and looked at his face and I thought, finally. I said yes with everything I had.
He was already building the walls by then. I just hadnβt looked up long enough to see them rising around me.
My name is Tommy Dela and his name was Dela Miles. Yes, I took his name as my surname. Iβm going to tell you how everything happened.
Hooked alreadyπ