Shadowed Heart: A Dark Reverse Harem Romance (A Death So Sweet Book 1)

by Candace Wondrak

  He started down a hall, and I followed him, my heels clicking on the shiny tile floors. We passed the bathroom on the way, and I made a mental note. Every time was different, but each time, I always found a way.

  His bedroom, as it turned out, was just as ridiculously fancy as the rest of the place, and I felt my gut harden the moment I followed him inside. Dickless turned to me, instantly getting ten times more handsy than he’d been at the club. Before I had the chance to blink, his gentleman facade crumbled and he became the hungry, horny dog I knew he was, pressing his midsection upon mine. His mouth crashed on mine, and I made sure to kiss him back.

  Kissing was… well, I guess I could understand why some people liked it. It could be an intimate thing, but for me? It was almost too much. Like, I could play the game, but not when it came to kissing. Kissing made everything too real, if that made sense.

  When his erection was back in full force, when I felt his hands start to yank at my dress, trying to find the zipper—hint, it’s in the back, dumbass—I pulled my mouth off his, panting, and gave him my best flirty, feminine look. “I need to use the little girl’s room first, if that’s okay?” I bit my lower lip, running a hand down his chest. “When I come back, I want every inch of you on that bed, naked and ready for action.” I let out a soft, slightly drunk giggle.

  Drunk girls had to use the restroom quite often, it turned out, and since Dickless already had me at his apartment, since he knew he would soon seal the deal with me—or so he thought—he gave me an eager nod.

  Out of his grip and away from his greedy hands, I moved to the doorframe, clinging to it as I gave him a wink before going. The man was already in the process of shedding his clothes, for shit’s sake. He literally could not wait to get his dick inside of me.

  The poor fool.

  Well, I guess poor didn’t really suit this one. The rich fool just didn’t have the same ring to it, you know?

  My footsteps were loud until I reached the bathroom door, where I paused, tossing a glance over my shoulder as I worked to undo the heels, slipping them off and pushing them inside the bathroom. My destination was not that room, not yet.

  I headed further down the hall, my bare feet as quiet as a mouse as I went to his kitchen. My focus was on finding something that would help me take him down. He was a rather hefty guy, muscle-wise, perhaps the biggest guy I’d gone home with. Definitely not your typical college boy looking to score off some drunk chick. Judging from his apartment and his expensive car, well, I had no idea who this guy was or why he was at the club all by himself, but in the end, it didn’t matter.

  In the end, Dickless would meet his end at my hands.

  I found what I was looking for after searching the drawers, holding its handle behind my back as I tiptoed down the hall, slipping into the bathroom and closing the door as quietly as I could. I had a few moments, at least. A drunk girl peeing could take a while, especially if I had to fiddle with my dress. Dickless would gladly take it off, I knew, but when I went back in that bedroom, I wanted his eyes on me. My body. It would help distract him from what I held behind me.

  A sharp, clean, stainless steel knife. Needless to say, not a butter knife. No, one of the ones that you used to cut meat, with serrated edges and everything.

  Setting the knife down in the sink, I worked on my dress, my arms reaching back and finding the zipper without an issue. I needed no help to get in or out of a dress like this; I was a bit more flexible than most, I’d say, my body the perfect kind of crazy. Thin but curvy all the same, not a scar or freckle anywhere on me… well, except for the one I refused to think about or look at, but let’s not dim the awesomeness of tonight with the past.

  Tonight was about me, about continuing my reign of terror over the men of this city. Tonight the Night Slayer would claim her next victim.

  My dress dropped to the tiled floor, falling in a quiet heap. I wore no bra, since the tiny dress was tight enough and already padded. My thumbs hooked on the sides of my lacy black panties and tugged them down, and I stepped out of them, every part of me free.

  I breathed in deeply, leaning on the counter before slowly tilting my head up to meet the gaze of my reflection. My blue eyes stared back at me, my true feelings masked. I didn’t look excited as I stood there, naked, but I was. I would show my excitement once I got in that room, once I took charge of the situation and made Dickless regret ever taking me home.

  Some nights I wondered if I was wrong to do this, if, maybe, I was killing the wrong people, but tonight wasn’t one of those nights. A part of me just didn’t care. No one cared about me when…

  Ugh. No. I wasn’t going to think about the fucking past right now.

  My back straightened, and I picked up the knife, moving the blade so that it rested up against my wrist and my forearm. I left the bathroom, holding that hand slightly behind my back, and when I returned to his bedroom, finding him just as naked as I was, I cocked my hip and gave him a smile. The fool didn’t even realize I held something behind my back, didn’t see anything but my perky tits and my shaved pussy. He didn’t even seem to care about my scar.

  Why would he? Dickless had been conditioned by everything to see me as my parts and not my whole. I bet it never crossed his mind that I was playing with him. With my pretty face and my whorish ways, I was just another girl looking to make a mistake, to get used.

  Wrong.

  Dickless lay on his bed, his hands behind his head, slightly propped up on his pillows. His legs were spread apart, his dick standing at attention, ready to be serviced. That dick would hardly be seeing anything tonight.

  I made a big show about sashaying to his bedside, all the while keeping the knife hidden. I crawled up, straddling him as his gaze continued to eat me up. He moved his hands, reaching for me, but I stopped him by leaning over him, my nose brushing against his as I whispered, “Let me suck that big, fat cock of yours first.” I licked my lips as I said it, feeling that dick twitch underneath me.

  Wanna know a secret? It wasn’t that big, and it definitely didn’t have much girth.

  “Sounds good, babe,” he murmured back, hips practically thrusting up into me. Dickless clearly couldn’t wait for his manhood to be inside my mouth.

  But, ew. Let’s take a second to bury the nickname of babe, okay? I was not a babe, no girl was a babe. That was just not a pet name I could ever get behind; call me silly, but I felt what I felt and I wouldn’t apologize for it.

  I gave him a kiss, acting like I was moving down to do a little sucky-suck when in reality I was getting ready to stabby-stab. Before I broke the kiss, before I tore my lips off his to watch, the hand holding the hilt of the knife flipped it so the sharp edge now pointed toward him and not flat against my arm. Dickless’s eyes were closed; he was too enthralled in me, too focused on getting laid.

  I plunged the knife in his throat, an expert at it by now, pulled my mouth off his to see his eyelids shoot open and the shock coating his face. Dickless’s gaze widened, and he sputtered out a pained, “What the fuck?” Even with a knife in his throat, he managed to push me off him so hard I flew off the bed, rolling onto the floor.

  Taking my time in getting to my feet, I gave him a wicked grin as he sat up and shot me an awful look. “What?” I asked. “Did you really think I was going to go down on you? As if, buddy. You ain’t exactly my type.”

  What was my type? I’d let you know when I figured that out, but it certainly wasn’t this guy.

  Dickless yanked the knife out, tumbling off his bed as he came at me, his intent to stab me, I guess? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that he shouldn’t have pulled it out, because once he did, the blood—oh, the blood was spectacular. It came out in a waterfall, gushing and bursting forth, splattering on me when he got close enough.

  I did a little dance to avoid him and the outstretched knife. Dickless tried to put his other hand at his throat, but it was too late. His chest was coated in the red stuff, the juice of life, and he grew more sluggish by
the second. I got him good.

  “I think we both know that I won this round,” I told him, shrugging as I leaped backward, onto the bed and rolled to the other side, putting it between us. “Maybe next time you won’t think with your dipstick as much? Just a suggestion.”

  Dickless stumbled on his feet, losing his balance as he crashed to the floor. He must’ve been woozy from the blood loss. Blood was… it was everywhere, and it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was something I would never get enough of. He also lost his grip on the knife, and it slid across the floor.

  I walked around, setting a foot on it when I saw he tried reaching for it, coughing up more blood. “Bitch,” he gurgled out, his throat all bloody and nasty from my stab.

  One stab. Just one. One was all it took when you went for the kill.

  “Yeah, you know what? I totally am, but I ain’t the bitch that’s dying. That would be you, dickweed.” I moved my foot, flinging the knife back. It eventually hit the bottom of the wall, stopping on the other side of the room, way too far for him to reach it.

  And then, wonder of all wonders, Dickless breathed his last breath and died with a huge pool of blood around his head and torso. So much blood it was like a crime scene in here. I mean, technically it would be a crime scene soon enough, whenever someone realized he was dead and came looking for him—really, it depended on the person, on what they did during their days, whether they had steady jobs or whatnot. Sometimes it took days; sometimes it took weeks, but they were always found, and when they were, the news always reported on them.

  I wondered how long it would be until I saw Dickless’s face flash across my TV in a newscast.

  A sigh left my lungs as I glanced down at myself. My naked body was splattered in blood, no thanks to Dickless yanking out that knife. If he would’ve kept it lodged in his throat, the idiot would’ve lived a bit longer. The pool of blood oozing from his neck wasn’t as fast-growing now, but it was big enough to touch my toes, to seep through them and coat the bottoms of my feet as I looked down at him.

  I needed to shower, and what would you know, Dickless had a spotless, clean bathroom just waiting for me to dirty up.

  Unhurried in dragging my gaze away from Dickless’s corpse, I walked into the hall, trailing a few bloody footprints as I went. Blood might bother some girls, but me? I rather liked it. Blood was literally what kept you alive, so red and gooey and messy. It seriously made the best messes around, trust me. Nothing else was like it. Plus, when it got all coagulated and clumpy? That shit was just cool.

  After shutting the door to the bathroom, I hummed as I reached up and took off my wig. I’d gone through a lot of trial and error with keeping the wig secure on my head, but I’d found a way to keep the wig firmly attached to my head so it didn’t get yanked off by any hair-pulling. The wig looked clean, free of blood, so I set it down on the bathroom counter, along with the cap that kept my hair tucked in.

  My blonde hair was let free, falling past my shoulders as I moved to start the water in the tub. Within a minute, I had a nice, steamy shower going, and I hummed as I stepped in, instantly setting the water swirling the drain to a pink hue as the blood began to wash away.

  With my head underneath the shower, with water pelting me, I stared at the drain, watching as the pink water washed down and disappeared through those tiny, steel holes. Inside my chest, my heart pounded. Not too fast, but fast enough to tell me I’d gotten high off the adrenaline.

  It was hard to describe, especially hard to try to explain it to someone who’s never done anything like this before, but it was addicting. To know that I was the reason Dickless and all those other men were dead, to know they would never again prowl the clubs or bars in search of their victim…

  Fuck them. Fuck them all.

  Being there, watching them take their last breath… it was something I would never get used to. I’d never been a fan of drugs, but I knew what it was like to fly high on the adrenaline, to get off on the way their pupils dilated and they pissed themselves.

  Sometimes shit, too. Those weren’t too pretty.

  Facedown in his own blood, I didn’t get to see the pool of piss coming from Dickless when he died. I really hoped his bowels weren’t let loose by the time I got out of here; that was just a mess I did not want to have to walk around.

  Why couldn’t everyone die with freshly-expelled bladders and bowels? Come on, it wasn’t that hard. Just take your pisses and your shits, you know?

  I know, I know. Enough about the pissing and the shitting. It ain’t ladylike.

  Well, if you hadn’t noticed by now, I ain’t the most ladylike one around. My parents had tried, trust me, oh they’d tried hard to make me the angel they always wanted me to be. A girl who kept her head down, knew her salad fork from her dessert fork, and did as she was told. A good girl.

  But you know what happens to good girls? They get eaten alive by the world, used up and discarded, thrown away until they’re wanted again. I couldn’t take that anymore. I was done being used.

  Go me, right? Yeah, go me. It ain’t like it was easy to leave it all. It was hard to walk away, although I didn’t do so much walking as I did running, because when you did what I did, you learned quickly that, if you wanted to keep going, you had to run.

  Run, run, as fast as you could, all the while hoping no one caught you.

  I didn’t want to be caught, but at the same time, I was waiting for it. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. One day it would come, and the masses would sit back and wonder, what happened to Lola Harding to make her commit such atrocities? Was she mentally unstable? Was something not right in her head?

  To all the people who’d be wondering things like that, I had an answer for them, but whether or not they’d like the answer, well, that was anyone’s guess. My guess would be no, because, even today, there were still some harsh realities people didn’t like to face, some hard truths of life. Even in America, the country so many fools proclaimed to be the greatest in the world, had its dark underbelly—and sometimes that underbelly was lined with money and gold.

  Since I was already in the shower, I decided to use Dickless’s soap and shampoo to clean off, to really get tonight’s sweat and grime off. I’d be dirty by the time I made it back to my place, but, eh, it wasn’t like I had to hurry and get out of here as soon as possible.

  I hummed as I cleaned myself, doing my best to ignore the lone scar down there. Dickless hadn’t even mentioned it, mostly because he’d been too excited at the prospect of sticking himself inside of me and making me forget everything else besides his cock.

  That scar, it was a constant, daily reminder of what they did. What they all did. Now, I knew I didn’t come from a good family. Just because the Hardings had money didn’t mean shit; what really got me, though, was what happened after, when they were found. No one even mentioned me—which was fine, of course. It wasn’t like I wanted the press and police to try to find me.

  No, that meant he had something to do with it, and I really didn’t want to think about him right now.

  I turned the water off, stepping out, onto the mat just outside the tub. I grabbed the towel hanging on the rack—black. Who the hell had black towels? Weird. After drying myself off, I got dressed, doing a little dance to pull up my panties and then the dress. Once my wig was back on—not as easy to put it on over wet hair, but as far as I was concerned, the potential hair-pulling portion of the night was in the past—I slipped on the heels.

  Walking back into his room, I avoided his corpse and the blood on the floor, heading straight to the nightstand beside his bed. His body lay in the front of the bedframe, so thankfully I didn’t have to tiptoe around him to keep my heels out of the blood.

  His clothes sat in a pile on his nightstand, crumpled in a heap, and I tossed them onto the bed until I found what I was looking for: the wallet in his pants and the shiny Rolex he’d taken off and set on the dark wooden nightstand. I tucked the watch into my dress, right between
my tits, before digging into his wallet for cash.

  Nowadays, most people used debit cards. Most people didn’t keep a lot of cash on-hand. But the rich? The rich were an exception, just like they always were. Gotta have that bribe money ready to go, you know? Ah, well, Dickless’s bribe money—a few hundred-dollar bills—was mine now. That also got tucked into my tits.

  I wasn’t worried about fingerprints. I wasn’t in anyone’s system, nor was my DNA. The Hardings were a well-respected family; their children would never be caught dead committing a crime or anything heinous like that.

  Ha-ha. Yeah, that was funny, wasn’t it? Talk about being caught dead…

  With my new watch and money in my tits, I sauntered out of the bedroom, about to leave the apartment, but as I walked past the kitchen, I realized I was a tad bit hungry. So, I did what any self-respecting murderer would do: I walked over to the kitchen and checked the fridge.

  The food was just going to go bad anyway, so why not see if he had anything I liked?

  I ended up finding some meat. Deli meat, go figure. I pulled out the bag and ate a few slices. Some kind of Cajun spiced turkey or something. Whatever the fuck it was, it was delicious, and I instantly decided I could not leave the bag of meat here.

  I took it with me, snacking on it all the while as I left the apartment complex. I kept my head down, away from the cameras, stuffing more meat in my mouth.

  Bet dead Dickless wished I would’ve stuck his meat in my mouth instead of lodging that knife in his neck. Poor fool didn’t know what hit him, and by the time he did, it was too late, as it always was. Using my body to my advantage… it might be cheating, in a way, but men used their statures and their strength all the time to overpower girls. Sometimes you had to play dirty to win the war, and I knew how to play the game in the filthiest of ways.

  I didn’t have a cell phone, so it wasn’t like I could GPS my way home. No, I spent most of the night walking, having memorized the big streets in the city and in all the towns nearby. I wasn’t one of those people who was directionally-challenged, you know, the kind of people who didn’t know how to get anywhere without their phone telling them where to go. There were certain things I was particularly good at, and finding my way home was one of them.