So I give her my own name. I call her my queen, because she is the ruler of my heart and soul.

My queen may have all this beauty and innocence to her, but underneath that sugary sweet exterior there lies poison. She’s like a beautiful, delicate rose with long thorns that would kill if touched.

She kills with such an ease. There’s never remorse on her face when she does so. She just kills and disappears into the night. No one ever knows what happened, they just find a person dead. No one ever knows how they died or who killed them. They only the silky red petal of a rose.

That’s the thing about cops, they can’t find what they can’t explain. They can’t look for a nameless, genderless killer who kills so completely undetected. They need to give things names. I know this because I’m a cop myself.

So they named her, the black rose. For years we searched and searched, finding dead ends in every corner. How was it possible that she could strike one man in Russia one night, and in the morning she had also struck a woman in Argentina. She can’t travel that fast! 

That means she knew exactly when we would find them. It’s like she placed them there on purpose knowing exactly the day when they would be found. She is smart, and that makes a dangerous killer.

I’m just a mediocre cop, nothing big. The worst I’ve done was take a guy in for assault, other than that it’s just the regular rounds and traffic tickets. On the exterior I exuded a confidence that made me intimidating, but on the inside I was an emotional wreck.

How could I try to protect people but at the same enjoy watching them suffer? Did it really make any sense? The only person who ever knew about these dark thoughts was my partner, and it was because I hesitated when a guy ran at his wife with a knife. My partner had to shoot him then he looked at me.