Tahlia felt his presence before she even saw him.

The air between them was colder, fragile even.

"Hello, Miss Meyers." His enticement laced voice greeted her.

She refused to meet his eyes. She couldn't.

But she did.

And she regretted it immediately.

A pool of cold blue was quick to drown her into the exorbitant depths of the color azure.

She remembered likening his eyes to the ocean, the first time she saw him. But it wasn't the tropical kind, the kind that came with mimosa sunsets and a salty summer breeze. No, the ocean she was thinking of was freezing in subzeroes, cavernous, uncharted.

She despised him. Or at least she wanted to, with every nerve in her body.

But she couldn't deny what an elusive work of art the man standing in front of her was.

She looked back behind, making a quick glimpse at the nurse who had accompanied her into the room, then back to the front.

Slowly, she inched forwards towards the desk, settling down with wariness evident.

Because she hadn't been allowed to bring her phone inside, she'd gotten hold of a digital audio recorder. She placed it on the table, carefully, and switched it on.

He sat on his bed. His eyes, akin to a predator, traced along her every movement.

"Good evening, Mr. Hunt." She began. "How was your day?"

She spoke the monotonous, formal piece of conversion that she had mapped out prior in her mind.

Everything she had discovered about the man, had left her head reeling at the thought of breathing in the same room as him. A brutal killer.

She couldn't even look at him, without seeing blood splashed all over his body, his face, covering the maniacal grin underneath.

Deep breaths. Just take in deep breaths.

There was no answer.

He just sat there merely looking, studying her, eyes sharper than she remembered.

The nurse walked over to his bed, telling him to stand up.

As he rose, she involuntarily sank back into her chair. He must have perceived the small movement, for the sound of his chuckle was soon ringing in Tahlia's ears.

Taking the seat across hers, he ran his sight, one last time, along her trembling hands, before meeting her mahogany eyes.

The nurse locked the cuffs in place, checking the chain once by pulling at it and then, without a single word, leaving the room.

Leaving Tahlia all alone with the monster.

She cleared her throat, "Did you eat well, Logan?"

"Just get on with the questions, Miss Meyers."

Her body flinched negligibly at the sudden change of tone.

"Oh, uh okay." She turned away her gaze to flicker through the pages in her binder. "When was the first time you experienced the first symptoms of–"

She cut herself off when, out of nowhere, he raised his bound fists, raising it to both of their eye levels.

"You know, these cuffs feel awfully loose, like I could just.." He proceeded to tug at the cuffs once, gently.

"Slide right out of these"

Her bottom lip quivered.

He's just trying to scare you. Mess with your mind.

There was a moment of pure silence between them, cosmic and thick.

"Natalia." His voice finally sliced through the palpable silence, each syllable of her name spoken slowly, sensually.

"If you're going to ask me the same questions as my fucking psychiatrist, why don't you just ask him for my evaluation records, get the fuck out of here and save yourself the bother?"

She frowned. It would be an understatement to say that she was left disoriented.

What am I supposed to do?

"I-I don't know..These are all standard psychological interview questions, Mr. Hunt." Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth in indecision.

His shoulders sloped, drawing him closer to her seated form,

"Do you always follow standards, Miss Meyers?"

He took her silence as a yes.

"What do you, Natalia, really want to ask me?"

Her reply could only be described as an awkward mix between shrugging and shaking her head.

He looked at her, in what seemed an awful lot like, amusement. It's as if a five year old boy was watching a circus clown juggle for the first time.

Tahlia hated it.

And then she spoke.

"Are you always this vexatious, Mr. Hunt?" The words flew out of her mouth before she had the time to weigh them.

Any professional psychologist would surely have gone into a cardiac arrest at her unethical words.

She mentally screamed at herself.

Logan Hunt watched her with the same glint in his marine eyes, a faint grin tugging at his lips now. "I hope you'll find out for yourself, Miss Meyers."

"No, I didn't mean to- I-I'm very sorry-"

"My turn."

"What?"

He tilted his head to the side, "Remember? You ask me a question, I ask you one."

His smirk only seemed to enlargen.

Of course.

The night had not even begun, and she already regretted coming.

Her silence spoke sentences to Logan, who placed his hands on the table, intertwined.

"Are you from Westfield, Natalia?"

While she wasn't entirely sure if giving out personal details like this to a serial killer was the most sane gesture ever, she nodded her head in response anyway.

She turned to look into her file for the next question, when she heard a loud clicking of the tongue, coming from the man sat across from her.

She realized he was disapproving whatever question she was going to ask him from her list.

Well, if he was going to be incessant about asking him distinctive questions, there was one which had been doing rounds in her brain since the very first moment she saw him.

"How old are you?"

The disposition that surrounded the question, was perhaps, the reason why Tahlia hadn't had a sound night of sleep in a week.

Going in, she had expected an old, deranged man who might have been locked in the asylum for some crime he'd committed thirty years ago or so.

Now, Logan Hunt was deranged, there was no room for doubt in that.

But never in her wildest dreams had Tahlia anticipated for her subject, the Westfield Ripper to turn out to possibly only be a few years older than herself.

While her theoretical studies had not left her a stranger to young, cold blooded killers, coming across one in the flesh was a whole different story.

He looked at his palms, "I don't know."

"What do you mean?" She furrowed her eyebrows.

He shrugged, meeting her eye again, "I don't know. I don't remember."

Just when she thought this man couldn't get anymore perplexing.

"You look like you could be 23-26." She mused, but gained no reply from him.

"So you.. you don't know when your birthday is?" Her voice came out low.

"No."

The fact that there was not an ounce of emotion on his face as he answered, rattled some apprehension in Tahlia.

She'd almost forgotten she was dealing with a psychopath here.

She heard him take a rather deep breath.

"Tell me, Natalia, what is your biggest fear?"

She stilled.

His question had caught her out of nowhere, like a deer in bright headlights.

My biggest fear?

Tahlia didn't have to think twice. She knew the answer very well, too well, unfortunately.

Attached to her fear, was a secret she had spent half her life trying to reserve.

So she inhaled deeply, parting her mouth to say the first generic thing that came to her mind like spiders or height.

"Needles."

Her eyes widened at her own self. She reeled from the fact that her mouth had betrayed her brain, revealing something she had kept locked down in the deepest corners of her mind for nearly ten years now.

She just revealed a part of herself she had buried 10 years ago.

Not to mention; that too, to a cold blooded murderer.

Had she finally started losing the last fragments of her sanity?

She dropped her eyes to the floor, silently praying he wouldn't ask her to elaborate why needles.

"Your turn."

She looked up, almost letting out a sigh of relief when she heard those words coming out of his mouth.

She drew in a deep but silent gasp of air, resuming to think of a question.

Her eyes zeroed in on the pieces of rough paper sprawled all over the desk, some even on the wall, that she had tried not to pay attention to since she had entered the room five days ago.

But she did.

"Did you draw these?" She motioned towards the sheets that practically overflew with different melanges of colors, fighting for dominance on the pages.

"Do you like them?" He smiled, albeit intentions not very apparent.

"Yes, they're beautiful." She hesitated, "You have some serious talent Mr. Hunt."

She meant it. She was reluctant to say it, but damn, she wasn't lying.

It wasn't the most uncommon thing for asylum patients to be scribbling or drawing gibberish, sometimes horrific images from the darkest depths of their mind.

But his were something else.

His were..exquisite.

Some she could make out to be divine sceneries, others still objects. The details, the hues were something Tahlia expected to see in a high end art gallery, not in a mental institutional confinement.

A painting of a Willow tree, that peeked out from underneath all the different paintings, left Tahlia especially astounded. The dark, almost black bark of the tree swerved into various gripping patterns, as well as a huge crack in the centre, highlighted by a lighter shade of bronze.

The realism in his drawings was truly arresting.

"Do you appreciate art, Natalia?"

She bit her bottom lip, out of habit. "I'm not very good at it, my si–" She cut herself off, biting her lips again, this time in hopes that it would shut up her treacherous mouth.

"Yes?" He pressed, catching the slip up.

"Nothing. I think time's about to be u-"

"Something's making you tense, isn't it?"

The sudden depth in his voice added to the menace in his aura.

She shook her head into a small 'no'.

A chuckle escaped his mouth, "Let me rephrase that."

To anyone observing the scene, nothing at that moment, would have seemed out of the ordinary.

But to Tahlia, it was then, that everything changed.

Everything around her was now painted with a darker chrome.

In her eyes, he rose up from his seat, slowly, agonizingly, walking over to where she was sitting.

She froze in her place, feeling as if, some of her unchecked hair was being pushed back behind her neck by callous fingers.

"Am I making you tense?"

She felt his mouth at her ear.

"Mr. H-Hunt..I-I.." She gulped, her mind too stupefied to finish the sentence.

Even though she couldn't look at his face, she could feel him enjoy watching her stagger, rendered helpless.

"No?" He questioned condescendingly.

And just when she felt cold fingers dipping down to the nape of her neck;

The illusion vanished.

She opened her eyes, and everything was in it's place like before.

He sat there, in chains.

His mere words commanded such a dark power, not only did they make her hallucinate the chilling scene, they'd also made her feel every intent behind them.

He sat there not saying a word, gazing at her like he knew exactly what had happened.

After what seemed like a whole eternity of unsettling silence, he smiled, starting to hum a tune suddenly, only haunting Tahlia further.

She licked her dry lips abstractedly, trying to process everything.

A heartless beast, a raging murderer was toying with her mind in undescribable ways, getting his sick pleasures out of playing his sick game with her.

What is happening to me?

She glanced at him, still humming the unnerving melody, looking at her straight.

While he could act all brooding, hell, even charming, he could possibly only be daydreaming about plunging a hot knife into her abdomen with her blood pooling everywhere, staining the marble floor as well as his blue asylum clothes, watching the life slowly drain out of her limp body.

She snapped out of her thoughts only when she heard the familiar sound of the door being opened.

She didn't waste a second, getting to gather her things in a flash.

She stood up, glimpsing back at the man who sat in front of her.

"Good Night, Logan."

She didn't meet his eyes, or wait for his response, just quickly bolting out of the room.

As the door closed behind her, she stood there almost breathless.

"You okay there?"

She knew the voice, it was Michelle. She nodded, still not glancing up. "Yeah, I'm fine."

And for the second time in the evening, Tahlia questioned her sanity.

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