by Koko Brown
Leaving the blade, he turned toward the window again. “He won’t even see it coming.”
A creak in my crutches rocked me back and life, air, completely escaped me. Sebastian had stopped his conversation entirely.
I know because he looked exactly in my direction.
FOUR
The crutches slid under my sweating fingers, as I stared, Sebastian ramrod straight on the other side of the door. I didn’t move and neither did Sebastian, his head tilted like he was unsure he heard something at all.
I didn’t take the chance.
I stepped back, guiding both crutches under my arm. Using just the cast and my foot, I gingerly ventured back across the empty hallway.
Sebastian moved. Picking up his blade, he flicked it closed.
“I’m here, monsieur,” he said, but he didn’t look away from the door. Hand covering his phone, he took a step.
So I took two.
I lost his vision the minute I took them, bumping into the wall behind me. Getting my crutches secure, my next thought was to move, go anywhere but in that hallway.
The wall opening behind me rerouted my plans.
A woosh of thick wood caused me to turn around, the wall I leaned back on opening up into some passageway like something in the movies. I didn’t step into it, though.
I think that had something to do with all the guns.
He had pistols… rifles, and they all lined the walls. The entryway into the room wasn’t deep, but open enough to house nothing short of a one-man militia.
What the hell…
He had what had to be every make and model, handguns, shotguns, and they were all on display, illuminated with back lighting on the walls.
I quivered at the haul, the chill chasing a straight path down the back of my neck.
Why did he have so many guns…? And knives…
They were there, too, their locations on short shelves below the display walls. Some weren’t much unlike the small pocket blade Sebastian had, but others were definitely more intimidating.
Jagged and ruff, the blades looked like something one would gut a large fish with.
I didn’t know what he needed those for, any of this for, but either way I wasn’t going to take it upon myself to remain here to come up with any conclusions myself.
Mostly, because none of them would be good.
I moved my shoulders, preparing to turn away.
“Have you lost your way?”
He’d said the words so close to me, behind and above.
I felt him before I even turned around, his heat crackling within the small space I found myself in. I was trapped, between him and…
He was looking at me when I faced him, his lips parted, his chest rising and falling with uneven breath.
He had his cellphone in his hand, the screen backlit like he was still on his call.
Maybe he was.
“Journee?”
I looked up at waves of crashing blue, deep like midnight.
Sebastian’s hands came together, but he didn’t move toward me. He didn’t do anything.
We stared at each other, one seemly against the other but one of us fairing far better in the odds here.
I needed to get out of here.
But like he knew my thoughts, he closed in on me, that big body all encompassing. He was still in his sweat pants, feet bare, casual, but how the situation differed. He knew I saw his stuff. I was standing in it.
I had no idea what was about to happen, but like before, I didn’t want to linger on to know.
“I feel like you have questions for me?”
I blinked, unsure what I was hearing. But he said what he had and if there was any question about it, that resolved when he reached out and touched a wall.
Long fingers swept polished wood, the room so beautiful if not for the mysteries surrounding what it contained.
He was only a reach away from the barrel of a shotgun and I knew right in that moment, he could do anything. If he wanted to, he could.
I swallowed, attempting to brave up, speak, but to no avail. I was freaked out, terrified, and the words… well, the words wouldn’t come.
Spicy air streamed deep into my soul, Sebastian coming even closer.
“Because if you want to know something,” he said, surrounding me. He descended like an angry storm above.
He breathed. “All you have to do is ask.”
But I wouldn’t. No, I couldn’t and perhaps, he knew that.
Pulling back, he blinked, giving me my space. Stepping away, he placed a hand on the side of the wall, then looked down as movement behind me crackled in the air.
The wall closed, a soft click at the closure, and like it was never there, the room and everything in it was gone.
Sebastian’s hand went white around his phone, his grip on it hard. Assuming he knew he was doing that, he loosened his grip a little.
“I’ll be only a moment,” he said, then left me to my own devices. He traveled across the hallway and back to the room he’d been in, the full display of an office before me.
Making sure he closed the door tight this time, he cut me off from my vision of him and there I was, standing there in the middle of the room. It was only after I went back down the hall, back to get Aleise and get the hell out of there, that I realized he never told me what that room was for. He could have told me literally anything he wanted.
But only left me to wonder.
FIVE
“Journee, your neighbor is not a serial killer.”
There was no way I could rule out any conclusion when it came to what I saw at Sebastian’s house earlier.
Especially, since he hadn’t given me anything to go off.
Serial killer was just something my quite active mind had come up with. It didn’t matter if I worked in a bookstore or not.
“The man had guns, Aleise,” I emphasized.
Phone to my ear, I footed around the oval carpet in my living room with awkward steps sans crutches. My ankle felt fine and I couldn’t use them for a well-needed pace.
Aleise had pretty much waved off any notion of Sebastian being up to anything and it had taken nothing short of the jaws of life to get her out of his house before he got off his call. She had come, though. Mostly, because I’d been freaking out.
With good reason.
“I know he does,” Aleise purred into the receiver. She’d headed home shortly after we’d left Sebastian’s, apparently not wanting “to deal with me” and my theories.
“Big guns,” she bounced back in, basically proving my need for a freakout and my continued pace. I told her the man had to be chopping up people and all she could think about was his biceps.
I facepalmed. “I don’t mean his body and would you listen to me?”
Because she wasn’t, not really. She wasn’t even humoring me and that frustrated the hell out of me. I didn’t go around making stuff up and that guy… something was going on.
Aleise’s laughter fluttered into the receiver, but eventually, it dulled a little and I assumed she’d come back down to earth.
“I am listening,” she said after a beat, then left me hanging for a few moments when some muffling sounded in the background.
“You said he has guns, knives?”
“Big ones,” I pushed into the phone. By the window, I flicked the blinds of my living room windows.
I felt like I’d been watching my back since we got to my house and seriously debated a move. I was barely a year into paying off this house, but…
No activity over there.
The blinds snapped shut once I’d let go of them. He could very well come over to see why we’d left so suddenly, no reason but a slam of the door given. But maybe he didn’t need a reason.
He had caught me in his stuff. Christ…
Would he come after me? Now, that I knew about…
But the thing was I didn’t know anything, not a thing, not really. He told me to ask, but I wouldn’t dare. I woul
dn’t take the chance.
Aleise’s laughter ignited in my ear again.
“Okay, big ones,” she said. “But he could be literally doing anything with them. He could hunt on the weekends, or even just collect them? I mean, you saw his house and all the cool stuff he had. You said all his weapons were displayed on the walls.”
Normally, I might jump on board with that conclusion. I may read books, love books, but my skepticism was very much a part of my wheelhouse. I didn’t jump on board to conspiracy theories at all, fiction or otherwise.
But there was no arguing away that call I walked in on.
“He said he was going to ‘take care’ of someone,” I said to Aleise, repeating once again what I heard. I shook my head, my long twists hitting my cheeks. I basically ripped them down from my bun the moment I crossed the threshold of my living room.
My cement foot weighing me down, I melded down to the ottoman I stopped pacing in front of, covering my face.
“It just doesn’t sound right.”
No laughter followed my words this time and Aleise’s next move was a sigh.
“I understand how it all sounds,” she said. “But there could literally be a myriad of reasons for the things you heard. Like a million different conclusions and where I venture from yours is that he gave you the floor to ask about what you saw, but it sounds like you didn’t take the opportunity.”
No, I hadn’t. I’d been too gobsmacked, too freaked.
“And if he were guilty about something he probably wouldn’t have said that. He would have just ‘taken care’ of you right then and there.”
Humor ignited her voice following the words I quoted Sebastian saying into the phone, which, up until that point, might have pissed me off had they not made sense. She’d been basically poking at me since I came at her with what I saw, but this… well, she did have something to her words.
A surprising smile pulled at my lips and I rubbed my face, staring up at the ceiling.
“Just don’t worry about it,” she went on. “And if it all is truly bothering you, I’ll ask him myself.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said, not wanting her to get involved—especially, if he was dangerous.
“It’s not a problem,” she singsonged, then more of that muffling hit the air. The familiar ding of a car door ajar sounded next and my eyebrows narrowed.
My heart quickening only followed.
I stood. “Wait? Where are you going? You’re not coming back over here to ask? Are you?”
She chuckled. “Of course I’m not coming over.”
Relief filled me.
“I’m already here.”
What. The. Entire. F…
Clamoring, I nearly fell over my own feet on my journey to the window. I made it there with labored breath only to find what I didn’t want to see.
Aleise stood outside, the evening setting around her.
And she was on Sebastian’s stoop.
Car parked in Sebastian’s driveway, Aleise stood from her vantage point in front of Sebastian’s door, wiggling her hips in a set of pink fuck-me pumps. The heels’ height went on for days like her legs, her micro braids pinned up high on her head and the sexy black dress she wore fitting snuggly over the flare of her trim hips. She looked like she was going on a date.
She looked like she was about to fuck.
“What are you doing?” I bit out and she knew I was watching.
Phone to her ear, she waved at me, blowing me a kiss across the street.
She giggled. “I’m going to ask your neighbor out on a date.”
With the way that dress fit, she looked like she was skipping dinner and drinks and heading right to the bedroom.
I know her, I knew she was going to sleep with him—my neighbor that most likely chopped people up to bits.
“Have you lost your mind?” I was grabbing my crutches, which were set up on the side of the window. “He can hurt you—”
“He’s not going to hurt me,” she said, tilting her head on her phone. “Like I said, I’m going to ask him the questions you were too afraid to ask. After that, if one thing leads to another…”
I knew this tactic well from her, the “dates” she’d have come to the bookstore to pick her up after a shift. Aleise was a good-looking woman and well, she knew it and used it to her advantage.
The crutches slipped from my hands, as I watched her put her back to me and take a couple of steps toward the door. She poised her hand, then pulled back.
“But I won’t if um…” she started turning around. Even through the settling darkness, I could make out the expression that slid across her lipstick painted lips.
She was frowning and Sebastian’s stoop lighting displayed it.
Her shoulders dropped. “I won’t if you’re interested in him, though. If you got a claim on him?”
What she said had my eyebrows skyrocketing toward the ceiling.
I had zero claim on that man and wanted nothing to do with him. I had no interest in dating Sebastian or… anything else to do with him. He didn’t appeal to me that way. He…
“Aleise…”
“Do you?” she asked, her voice softening a little. “Because if you do—”
“I don’t,” I urged. “And I don’t want you having anything to do regarding him either.”
More of that laughter of hers.
“I can take care of myself,” she said, then opened her purse though I couldn’t see the contents inside.
She winked. “My old pal pepper spray and I got this, but I have a feeling I won’t have the need.”
She smoothed out her dress to emphasize that, then looked to be going to hang up the phone.
“Aleise?”
Her head popped up.
I sighed. “Be careful and leave if you see anything, or he does anything that…”
I didn’t know what I was trying to tell her. I just wanted her to be safe.
She only gave me that Aleise smile, winking at me before hanging up the phone.
I watched her stand outside in the next few seconds, her light knock in the evening air. She stood there for a long time and I had so much hope, hope maybe Sebastian had gone out. He did leave in the evenings. In fact, nearly every evening.
The door in front of Aleise seemed to open by itself suddenly, slow and without a sound from what I could see. Dark inside, I saw no one, but he must have been there. He must have greeted her.
Aleise’s small body went animated, her fingers twisting around a curled micro braid at the top of her hair and the nails from her other hand brushing the bare, deep toned skin below her dress. Eventually, she started nodding profusely, then suddenly those heels moved.
They went like on autopilot, them and Aleise herself disappearing into the darkness of the home. He led her in like the Pied Piper and she went willingly.
Eventually, that door snapped closed and she was gone, disappeared like she was never there to begin with.
I stared at that house across the street for a long time that night, positioned near the window, tense. Eventually, I pulled up a chair, phone in hand while I waited for either a call from Aleise, or the nerve to do something else.
I thought about calling the authorities several times, but phone sweaty in hand I couldn’t come up with a logical reason for the call. I mean, what would I tell them.
They’d laugh like Aleise.
Cradling my legs, cast and all, I lay my head against the wall near the window.
I thought for a while like that, on my guard at first, but as the night when on my brace loosened.
My mind steadied.
I guess it had been because I’d been sitting so long unable to hold my guard up. At one point, I flicked the blinds, wondering what was going on behind Sebastian’s. There had been no activity, no movement for what seemed like hours.
That was until a breeze of the upstairs curtains.
The upper level window summoned movement, a figure shadowy and gray behind
the cornflower blue curtains up there. The shape had been svelte, slim and obviously female.
Then followed the male build.
Broad and steady, the larger figure approached the petite one, a large hand coming out and an arm twice the size. The second figure had definitely been Sebastian’s, huge and intense. He moved slow toward who’d clearly been Aleise and if the layout of his home was anything like mine, they weren’t just upstairs.
They were in his bedroom.
The master was up there, the largest room of the house. Though, I hadn’t made it that far into his, I had a strong feeling he constructed the layout of his home in the same way. He wouldn’t choose a smaller room to call his own.
That just wouldn’t make sense.
My observation of the two, the bodies of shadows seemly dancing behind the curtain flowing in the window with their slowed, circulating movements, had been one of tension at first. He had her upstairs, vulnerable, and could do anything he wanted with her. But as I watched, the phone was no longer tight in my hands. It slid, then fell to the ottoman entirely.
She went to him willingly, their shadows together willingly, and as I captured two shadows combining into one, I looked away, sitting back down on the ottoman.
She’s fine, was all I could think. She’s good, but the relief I should have felt wasn’t as strong as it should be. I was relieved yes, but I felt something else too.
Something I didn’t like.
I rubbed the center of my chest, a subtle ache there that didn’t make sense. Annoyed by it, I hobbled up. It was getting late.
It was time to go to bed.
Metal under my arms, I braced my crutches to go upstairs into my own room.
Pop! Pop!
A repeat of those pops hit the air, but this time, two pops sounded, then one.
One shot.
Heart choking my airway, I made it back to that window and was there just long enough to see three flashing lights. They’d been on the bottom level, I assumed in the living room like where mine was. There had been no sound accompanying the lights.
Like they’d been silenced.
