Kill Switch: A Vigilante Serial Killer Action Thriller (Angel of Darkness Suspense Thriller Series Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

concrete floor, and a concrete ceiling. No windows. No furniture. No decoration. But why would there be? A gas chamber needed no such finery.
    Enveloped by an eerie silence like that of a church crypt, she scanned the room.
    The Nazis slaughtered over a million people here, in this room and others like it. Over one million people.
    However, there was no smell of death.
    No sounds of death.
    No sight of death.
    There was nothing. Nothing but concrete.
    Yet…
    Tess shivered, colder than she should be, as though everything – everything – in the room had died, even the very air, leaving nothing but an icy void which sucked the living warmth out of anyone foolish enough to enter.
    Like the room, Tess had known death. A lot of death. So much it would have broken most people. As it almost had her.
    Over a five-month period in Shanghai, she’d killed fifty-three people.
    Fifty-three lives. Gone.
    The first six had been in self-defense. That made them easy to justify. Easy to live with.
    But the seventh?
    Sometimes, when she closed her eyes at night, she could still see that look on his face as she pinned his throat to the floor with her foot, about to push down. Horror mixed with resignation. Maybe even a flicker of relief. It was as if, even though he’d fought to go on living, he knew he deserved what was about to happen and had been waiting for it.
    Afterward, she’d stood over him looking down. Trembling. Crying. Lost. For how long, she didn’t know, but a voice in the back of her mind screamed, ‘What have you done? What have you done? What the fuck have you done?’
    She didn’t eat or sleep for three days after that night. Despite having verified everything she’d been told about him as being true, questions had haunted her like a migraine she couldn’t shake, torturing her every waking moment. Had he truly deserved to die? Had she had the right to judge? To sentence? To kill?
    Tess reached out and ran her hand over the concrete wall. It was cold and smooth. Like a corpse after all the muscles had relaxed. Cracks ran through the concrete and mottled stains clung to it as if desperate not to fall to the floor and be swept away like garbage.
    Fortunately for her sanity, killing had become easier. It had had to – she knew it was the only way she’d be able to make it through what she had to do back home.
    So, week after week, she’d sought out targets. They’d all deserved it – she’d made damn sure of that – so she felt no shame, no guilt, no regret.
    Consciously.
    Subconsciously?
    Hell, the dark corners of the human mind could create nightmares for even the purest of hearts.
    And then came that night with Su Lin.
    Everything changed that night.
    Everything.
    Tess strode out of the gas chamber and back outside, where she squinted at the bright sunshine flooding the crystal blue sky. Warmth once more caressed her, yet she again shivered. It was as if her subconscious wanted to shake off the horrors it had just experienced the same way a dog shakes off water.
    At the entrance, she passed a tour group waiting to go into the chamber, their group leader explaining in Japanese over wireless headsets what they were about to see.
    Turning left and then right, Tess cut between the two barbed wire perimeter fences and back into the primary part of the complex. There, she ambled along the main tree-lined avenue into the heart of Auschwitz.
    On either side of the avenue stood two-story red brick buildings in which the prisoners had been housed. These had been a shock – she’d expected wooden shacks like she’d seen in old prisoner-of-war movies. But the luxuriousness of these buildings’ construction belied their purpose. It was in one of these buildings that the genocide had started, where the Nazis had first tested the pesticide Zyklon B to see if it killed people as easily as it killed bugs.
    Yes, the killing had all started here.
    Just as it had all started for her in Shanghai.
    That was where it had almost