Chapter 12: The Garden of Oleander
Alexander
He’s watching her again.
In the dark of his study, the monitor flickers. Grainy footage no one knows exists. Raf, laughing nervously. Raf, crying softly. Raf, back when she still believed she was safe here. He leans in, studying every twitch of her mouth, every blink of her lashes.
Now, thanks to Casey, everything’s ruined. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like that.
He’s spent his life outmaneuvering everyone, always the smartest man in the room. Of course, it didn’t always work. He’d been defied before. But he always hit back.
He thinks back to the first time. Middle school. Charlotte Dorsey. She wasn’t just pretty. Charlotte moved through the world like it owed her something.
She’d teased him for weeks. Light touches in the hallway. Glances in homeroom. Once, a whisper to her friends, followed by a slow, deliberate look.
Charlotte liked him; he was sure of it. She wasn’t mocking him. It had to be a crush. So he asked her to the spring dance. Spent three days rehearsing the words. Waited until she was alone at her locker. His voice shook when he spoke.
But she laughed. Not a shy smile or a kind deflection. A full, unfiltered laugh. Mocking him. Loud enough for kids down the hall to hear. Her nose crinkled like the very idea of him was rotten. She called him a freak.
So, he got her back.
He’d read about oleander in one of his mother’s gardening books. That Friday, he lingered in the cafeteria, waiting until Charlotte left her tray to flirt by the vending machines. In one motion, he popped the lid off her Arizona Iced Tea, dumped in the crushed oleander, stirred it with her straw—then vanished.
It was a seizure, they said. A rare allergic reaction. And no one ever suspected him. Not officially, at least.
At dinner, a few nights after Charlotte was released from the hospital, his mother brought her up—how terrifying it had been, how lucky she was to be alive.
“If calling me a freak was the joke,” Alexander said, not looking up from his plate, “maybe almost dying was the punchline.”
The table went still. But they didn’t ask questions. They didn’t need to. Because they knew. It wasn’t the first time. First, there’d been the neighbor’s cat, Wobbles, found drowned in a gutter days after Alexander was caught trying to feed her crushed sleeping pills in a bowl of milk.
Then, Daniel Carter, the classmate he’d shoved off the jungle gym. Both arms broken. Alexander said it was an accident. But the teacher remembered the way he stood there, watching Daniel scream, his face eerily blank.
Then came Mr. Simmons, his sixth-grade science teacher, who humiliated him for asking too many questions. So, Alexander slashed his tires—all four of them.
There was the movie theater incident, too. He’d thrown a quiet tantrum when he couldn’t get into an R-rated torture-porn film. Two nights later, the theater received a bomb threat. The call traced to a payphone one block from their house.
His parents knew. But they always found ways to explain things. Teachers were overreacting. Other parents were hysterical. The neighbor who caught Alexander trying to set a bird’s nest on fire in the garage? Just “harmless mischief.”
But after Charlotte, they stopped pretending. Just handed him the glossy brochure: a behavioral correctional facility for troubled teens that promised structured days, hard work, and “therapeutic discipline.”
It was a concrete hell compound two hours outside Albuquerque run by ex-cops and ex-soldiers on all sorts of power trips. They stripped everything—belongings, privacy, dignity. There was no real schooling. No letters home. The boys were divided by bunk, forced into silence, punished for everything. They earned points for good behavior. They beat them with open hands, belts, and fists.
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Alexander learned to hold his bladder. To sleep with one eye open. To fast for days, because the food was inedible. He lasted six months before he stopped speaking—because silence made him safer. It made him invisible. But he never stopped calculating. Watching. Memorizing. He tracked which guards got lazy. Which doors stuck in the heat. Which routines repeated like clockwork.
Finally, late one night, he slid a metal tab from a can of beans, hidden under the mattress, and jimmied the hinge pin from his cell door. The screws made no sound. Not if you turned them slow. He crept past the sleeping boys, crossed the compound to the maintenance trailers, where he knew Eric, the barely-of-age janitor, snuck off most nights to drink himself unconscious.
Eric was out cold behind the AC unit. Snoring beside a bottle of Jim Beam. His backpack lay nearby. Inside were his wallet, his keys, his ID. Alexander took everything.
By dawn, he was on a Greyhound bus. By afternoon, holed up in a public library just past the Arizona border, he pulled out Eric’s old backpack. Using a utility bill, Eric’s name, and a saved login, he accessed a dormant electric company portal. Buried in the settings: a plain-text password. He tried it on Eric’s Hotmail account. It worked.
That’s how he found Martha Landry—a seventy-eight-year-old widow living alone in a one-story bungalow in Reno. She and Eric had exchanged a handful of emails after he helped her with a handyman job through a local temp agency. Half a dozen messages from Martha gushing about her garden, her stories on TV, her favorite pie recipe. A thank-you for fixing the porch light. An invitation to visit again.
Eric barely replied. Just a few polite responses. But Alexander could tell: Martha wanted to matter to someone. And she’d decided it would be him.
So, he moved to Reno. Created a new email under Eric’s name, spun a story with slow, calculated care: he’d fallen on hard times. Lost his job. Sleeping in his car. Trying to get back on his feet. He missed Martha. He missed emailing with her. The kindness she’d shown him.
Martha responded quickly. First, he asked to borrow fifty dollars. Then a hundred. Then a thousand for a deposit on an apartment. Over six months, she wired him just over twelve thousand dollars. And by the time her niece discovered the emails and the missing funds, he’d vanished. Her messages bounced back. “Eric” was gone.
Alexander was just seventeen. Still in Reno. Living in a crumbling motel off Virginia Street, wedged between a liquor store and a pawn shop.
The money went fast—a month of rent here, a burner laptop there. New clothes to keep the lie alive. He wasn’t saving. He was building. And when the well dried up, he moved on. He went days without eating, stayed up all night teaching himself to code from battered library books, used stolen cards to launch scam websites that promised vague financial advice. But it didn’t last. He wanted more. He wanted bigger.
Turned out, the Army didn’t care about forged paperwork as long as the body was strong and the mind sharp. At eighteen, he bought an identity off the dark web: name, date of birth, Social Security number. Part stolen, part invented, wholly untraceable. Nothing tethered to who he was.
The machine swallowed him. He rose through the ranks faster than most—because beneath the regimented focus and discipline, there was brilliance. Combat held no appeal. He wasn’t that kind of soldier. What he wanted was control.
They put him in a windowless room in Nevada: two monitors, three keyboards, a wall of blinking servers. From there, he could reach across oceans. He never had to fire a weapon. He just needed a signal. He learned to read heat signatures like topography maps—where someone stood, how long they’d been there, how fast they moved.
He tracked foot traffic through alleyways. Distinguished routine from randomness. Mapped street hierarchies like blueprints from a thousand feet up—who gave orders, who followed, who watched the corners, who waited to run.
He flagged patterns in chatter, phone pings, bank withdrawals, text strings buried in encrypted threads. Drone feeds. Live intercepts. Digital footprints. This was his war zone. Fought through screens.
He got good at it. He learned when to wait. When to press. When to pull back. When to push the button. He never saw blood. But he dropped missiles—on village grids, convoy routes. On couriers planting IEDs. On wedding parties mistaken for insurgents. Courtyards full of silhouettes that only looked like weapons.
He rose fast. Higher. Trusted by the top brass. Requested by name. Then, five years in, they pulled him from his chair. It wasn’t a demotion. He wasn’t being charged with anything. Just a locked room. A man he’d never seen before waited for him. A folder, already bearing his alias, slid across the table.
“You’re being reassigned,” the man said.
“To where?”
The man smiled, too knowing to be kind. “You don’t ask those kinds of questions anymore.”
Inside the folder: a name, a face, a location. No instructions. But he closed the folder—and walked out of the room a different man.
He blinks back to Raf’s face frozen mid-sentence on the flickering screen. Raf—the woman who saw him. For who he was. What he was. And then she walked away. Not out of fear. Out of defiance.
A low growl builds in his throat. He lunges upright. The chair scrapes back. One sweeping motion. Papers, glasses, hard drives, the monitor—everything crashes to the floor.
He crosses the room, shoves the bookshelf hard—another crash, louder this time, as it topples over. His chest heaves. Sweat runs down his neck. And then… calm. Not peace. Never peace. Just clarity. He straightens and wipes his brow.
Raf thinks she walked away untouched. But he once made Charlotte Dorsey pay. And now? He’ll do the same to Raf.