Fractured

1. Begin Again

Camila doesn't know for sure that it's her until that moment. There is a dull bloom of warmth in her spine, her vision blurs, and then she knows that Taylor Swift is the one she's been looking for. She realises that she's been drugged but it is too late. She fumbles for her gun, but her hands are like lead, and she can only lift it awkwardly from her belt clip and hold it out as if it were a gift to Jessica.

Taylor takes it and smiles, kissing Camila gently on the temple. Then she reaches into Camila's blazer and takes the phone, turning it off and slipping it into her purse. Camila is almost paralysed now, slumped in the olive leather chair in the home office.

But her mind is a prison of clarity. Taylor Swift kneels down next to her, the way someone might with a child, and puts her lips so close to Camila's that they are almost kissing. Camila's pulse throbs in her throat and she can't swallow. Taylor smells like vanilla.

"It's time to go sweetheart," Taylor whispers. Taylor stands then, and Camila is lifted from behind, elbows under her arms. A man in front of her takes her legs, and she is carried into the garage and laid into the back of a maroon Escalade – the car Camila and her task force have spent months looking for – and then Taylor crawls on top of her. Camila realises then that there's someone else in the car, that Taylor wasn't the one behind her.

But she doesn't have time to process that because Taylor is now straddling her abdomen, a knee pressing on either side of her waist. She can't move her eyes anymore, so Taylor narrates for her benefit.

"I'm rolling your right sleeve up, and I'm tying off a vein." Then she holds up a hypodermic in Camila's sight line. Medical training, Camila thinks. Eighteen percent of female serial killers are nurses. She is staring at the ceiling of the car. Plain metal. Stay awake, she thinks. Remember everything, every detail. It will be important. Really important.

She thinks: if I live.

The scar on her left breast was pale and raised, the tissue no wider than a piece of string. It carved a naked path through her tanned skin, it arced and then it arced again back down to it's original point. It was shaped like a perfect love heart. If it had been a different colour or not on her, Camila would have thought it looked like a tattoo. But it's wasn't a tattoo, well it was her tattoo in some fucked up way, her own personal brand.

Camila was always aware of it, the raised skin against the material of her shirt. She had a lot of scars, battle wounds she liked to call them, it sounded better, but this was the only one that still seemed to hurt. A phantom pain, Camila knew. Like a broken rib that had never quite healed right, aching underneath. A scar wouldn't hurt though. Not after all this time.

Her phone rang and Camila turned her head towards the coffee table knowing what it meant: another day, another victim, no relevant clues and that's why they needed her. The caller ID on the screen showing Shawn's name confirmed her suspicions.

She picked up the phone, annoyed at it's incessant ringing on the coffee table in front of her couch. "Yeah," she said. She was sitting in her apartment living room in the dark, she hadn't planned it that way. She had just sat down a few hours before and the sun had set, and she hadn't bothered to turn on any of the lights. Plus her apartment, with it's sparse furnishings, looked slightly less sad when it was cloaked in the natural darkness of night.

Shawn's friendly voice filled the phone line. "We have another victim, same MO," he said. And there she had it.

The digital clock that sat on her empty bookcase blinked insistently in the dark room. It was an hour and thirty minutes off, but Camila had never bothered to reset it, she just did the math to calculate the time whenever she needed it.