My stomach turns over, vision darkening around the edges. The image is so gruesome it takes me a second to realize how callously the detective is talking about death. How pointedly. He’s doing this on purpose.
“That’s horrible,” I say, heat pricking behind my eyes.
“Horrible,” he agrees. “Have you been to a lumberyard recently?”
No, but I can imagine what they look like. I can imagine the fine white specks of wood that gather against a blade, how the sawdust might hang in the air. How it might sprinkle over the green shirt or jeans of a man who visited. Could some sawdust have fallen off in my car? What if they test it?
I swallow hard against the dryness in my throat. “Never,” I whisper.
Sawdust. I thought he might have a hobby. Building furniture in his garage or something. Like a regular man.
He isn’t a regular man. He’s a killer.
“These are dangerous people,” Detective Rivera says. “The man who took you last fall—he’s part of a very violent group. The accomplice of a convicted cop killer, Brooke. Not somebody you can trust—not ever. Certainly not somebody you’d want to know.”
“He put a bag over my head,” I say, voice rising with panic, because we didn’t think of a lie for me to tell this time around. A cop killer? Tears heat my eyes. “Why do you think I know him?”
He looks right at me. “I don’t know. Do you? Know him?”
I feel my spine straighten. I know how he kills. I know how his lips feel when he kisses. I know how his green eyes can burn bright as cut emeralds, but then how they can turn soft and sweet when you least expect it. But I don’t know his name. You don’t really know somebody if you don’t know their name, right? “Of course I don’t know him.”
Detective Rivera waits a long time. Does he want me to say more? Does he really not believe me? But he doesn’t know for sure. He’s not a mind reader. He can’t make me tell anything. He can’t make me say anything at all.
Suddenly Rivera stands, making every muscle in my body tense. “I think you know more than you’re telling me, Miss Carson. And when it comes to Stone Keaton, that’s a problem.”
Stone Keaton. It takes me a moment to register that that’s his name.
So I know his name now. The knowledge doesn’t soothe me, not with the image of sawdust on his arms still fresh in my mind.
Stone Keaton.
“He’s a suspect in multiple homicides,” Rivera continues. “And I’ll tell you, he’s the kind of guy with nothing to lose. The kind of guy who’ll do just about anything to avoid arrest. Including hurting people—friends, officers, family. Makes him very dangerous. Very dangerous to know.”
“I understand,” I say. Though part of me doesn’t—not really. He could’ve killed me that night, but he let me go. You’re mine, he said, like I’m something that belongs to him now. He’s a dangerous killer, but I’m his. Maybe I should feel scared.
Or maybe he’s the one who should feel scared. The police think he has nothing to lose, and that he’ll never let himself be taken in. It seems like that’s the kind of person they might shoot. Does Stone know? Probably. He knows all about the cops. He said so.
Rivera gets a call. He says he has to go. I ask him whether he wants to say goodbye to my parents, but he doesn’t—he seems like he’s in a hurry, so I show him to the door, smiling politely and saying goodbye as if he’s a family friend who dropped by to borrow the boat hitch instead of a man who thinks I’m protecting a killer.
I shut the door after him and press my nose to the beveled glass window that’s set into the massive mahogany door. I watch him head down the walk. He gets into his car and leaves, and all the while I’m turning his name over and over in my mind. Not Rivera’s name, but Stone’s. Stone Keaton.
Stone.
Chapter 10
Five months later
Stone
Early September is hot as fuck, even in the Bradford Hotel. Which is saying a lot, because it’s a brick-and-stone behemoth that usually stays cool. Of course we tapped into the grid when we first moved in, got AC blowing into the parts where we live—the deep interior parts we fixed up and tricked out, posh as a palace. Actually better than a palace, because there’s nothing fussy—it’s all nice rugs and good, sturdy, oversized furniture guys can lie around on, and of course the best gaming consoles and computing shit money can buy.
But whenever you go outside, it’s a wall of heat. And we’re out there a lot, chasing leads on the Grayson thing. Working overtime to hunt those assholes.
I think about Brooke all the while, thinking about that day at the park. Mostly I remember how perfect she felt in my hands, the way her belly felt when I pressed my rock-hard cock against her, pinning her like a butterfly against her cherry-red car door. It was fucking heaven—the kind of heaven I have no right to. Which is always the best kind.
Even the way she tasted was perfect—its own entire category of taste, not mint or berries or whatever bullshit, but pure, warm, soft, breathy Brooke.
She was stiff at first, like she was surprised, but then she softened. That’s the thing that churns in my mind the most—churning like the angry fucking sea—that moment she went from stiff to soft. The moment her little body let me notch right into her.
She’s fragile as a bird, but she let me hold her, like a sickening little token of trust. She doesn’t know what she’s getting into with me. She has no fucking idea.
Her skin is so soft. She’s just so pure. It’s fucked up how pure she is. It’s fucked up how much she doesn’t know and how untouched she is. Her skin is literally like silk. It makes me want to drive my fist into a brick wall over and over and over.
I churn on her silky, untouched skin while we lurk around in the heat, loitering in dark service alleys. I think about her while we linger outside expensive restaurants, in the shadows of the courthouse, cock hard, mind racing.
The whole train of thought is just dangerous, because when you’re lurking around places and dealing with the kind of people we’re dealing with, you can’t be wanting to smash things or grabbing random guys and driving their faces onto a wall just because you’re in a fucked up place.
But I need to keep an eye on Brooke. Make sure she’s not talking to the cops. The secrets we share are my private leash on her. I let her live, and now she’s mine.
We follow different men around Franklin City. Sometimes we follow Governor Dorman himself. We didn’t know his name back then, but we remember his face. Because trust me, young and drugged as we were, we remember the face of each and every one of the men and women who paid good money to perv out on us over the years.
I’d love nothing more than to show Dorman the end of my blade, and I’m sure we could get him alone without a lot of trouble, but we have to be smart. We have to think about freeing Grayson.
So we track guys. We’ve been hurting a lot of guys to get information. Like the one we ran through the wood chipper. The nicknames he gave us—Jimmy Brass, Johnson, Keeper—don’t mean much. Yet.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I head out into the streets in the middle of the night, driving around.
More often than not, I find myself in East Franklin City, outside her big brick mansion with the circular drive and rows of pine trees like soldiers guarding the estate. I look up at her dark window and imagine her sleeping peacefully. Dark lashes resting on her pretty cheekbones. Light brown hair with those angel-bright highlights splayed all messy on her pillow.
It’s her birthday in a week, and this is stupid, but I’m making her a present. A carved hummingbird. I probably won’t give it to her, but I started making it, and I knew it was for her, even though I didn’t say it to anyone. I didn’t even say it to myself at first. I just grabbed a blunt serrated knife and a block of wood and started carving.
I taught myself how to carve in the basement. We never got real knives, for obvious reasons, but a butter knife or two would make its way down there, and if you scrape the shit out of a piece
of wood, you can make something. If you do it for hours and hours over many days and weeks, you can make something fucking amazing.
I work on it on stakeouts. I work on it sitting in gloomy alleys. I keep it wrapped in a cloth in my pocket, though its spindly legs are getting fragile enough that I should probably put the thing in a box.
It’s on a Tuesday, the day before her birthday, that I get a break. One of the clubbing guys we pay for information tells me he heard from the grapevine about some rich guy who was asking around about a hitter who’d take a job to kill a cop last year. Said that the guy plays high-stakes poker in the back of a midtown bar on Tuesdays. Limo and everything.
I get the location and go by myself. Partly because Calder and the rest of the guys are out following up on some other lead. Mostly because something about it smells off, almost as if it’s too easy. I decide just to have a look at who this is. If I decide he’s somebody who needs to talk, or maybe somebody who needs to hurt, I can do the hurting, too.
It’s almost better this way—I don’t always like my guys seeing what I do. And the things I’ve been doing, let’s just say they’re not getting rosier.
Grayson’s been inside a few months, and I’m feeling desperate. Whenever there’s something gruesome to do, I make sure I’m the one to do it.
The way I figure, every time that it’s me, it doesn’t have to be one of them.
That’s how I end up behind a sleazy midtown bar. There’s a faded pub sign out front and piles of moldy crates in the back. It could be any old bar, any illegal poker game.
I watch a customer get out of a taxi, his movements cautious, his gaze wary as it darts around the street. He doesn’t match the description I got. I’ll kill a lot of guys if I have to—I need answers. If I don’t get answers, I’m not sure that I can control myself. Maybe that’s a sign that I should bring in the guys.
But I don’t.
Better if only one person has to see. One person to hurt people.
I raise my fist. The knock echoes through the alley.
A man opens the door. Greasy wife-beater. Big scowl. “The fuck you want?”
“The game. I want to play.”
“You know the secret word?”
A secret word? Like this was some fucking exclusive nightclub. I resist the urge to pull out my Glock to prove a point. Instead I pull out my wallet and give him a glimpse of the thick wad of green inside. “Yeah, I know it.”
He snorts. “Good enough. Game starts in two hours, strictly speaking.”
“And less strictly?”
“High rollers don’t show up until midnight.”
That means I have some time to kill. I give the fucker at the door enough money to keep him silent, at least for tonight. He assumes I want to hustle at the game, take them unaware, and that’s fine. No one needs to know my real purpose until it’s too late for them to do anything.
There’s a park down the block, the kind with statues and gardens. The statues are covered in graffiti from the neighborhood gangs. The gardens dried up a decade ago.
Now there’s only a network of bums and drug dealers. They give me hard looks but don’t come close. It isn’t the fact that I’m carrying that keeps them away. They can see that I’m like them. Made hard and merciless by years at the bottom of this city. Everyone here was made in a basement of their own.
I find an unoccupied bench with a plaque, unreadable from the rust. Someone once built this park with care. Someone loved it. I kick away a used needle with my boot before sitting down.
This spot gives me a good view of the side entrance, but I don’t need it yet.
The men I’m interested in, the ones high enough to matter, they’ve got more money than God. I’m done dicking around with the grunt workers, the men desperate enough to take cash for dirty work.
I should wait in silence. Maybe light up. Play fucking Candy Crush on my phone. Anything but dial the number of a pretty little rich girl. I shouldn’t even know her phone number, but my mind’s like a fucking bulldog when it wants something. It knows the numbers forward and backward, as sharp and strong as her shining eyes or the freckles across her nose.
“Hello?” Her voice is clear and soft. Beautiful like her. She’s a sparkling pond, and I’m black ink. The only thing I’m good for is ruining her.
I’m silent a long time. Long enough I expect her to hang up.
Then she says something that makes my heart stop. “Stone?”
How the fuck does she know it’s me? It’s been five months. And how does she know my name? “Have you been talking to the cops?”
“Detective Rivera was waiting for me when I got home. My parents had called him when—”
When we went on that little joyride last spring. A little kidnapping. “He told you about me?”
“Not much. Your name. And he asked me about…” Her breath shudders over the line. “He asked me about a lumberyard.”
The fear in her voice burns me. She might as well be flame. “And you remembered the dust on my arms, didn’t you?”
There’s a rough sob. “Tell me you didn’t do it.”
“That would be a lie, princess. And I don’t lie to you.”
In the silence I can hear her breathing. I can hear her wondering. “I wish you would,” she says finally. “I wish you’d lie.”
I know what it’s like to pretend. I’m done with that, though. “We don’t have anything between us. Not promises or nice words. This is all we have. The naked truth.”
The word naked hangs over the phone line, hard and weighty as a rock. I didn’t mean for the words to be sexual, but as the seconds of silence tick by, they become that way. As if I expect things from her. More than a kiss or a touch. As if I’ll make her fuck me.
“That makes it sound like I’ll see you again,” she says breathlessly.
Is she still afraid of me? She should be, after what Rivera told her.
“Probably. And I’ll make you drive me around. I’ll keep you until I’m done with you, but I won’t make you fuck me, understand? That’s a promise.”
“He said you’d kill anyone to stay free. That you have nothing to lose.”
“Yeah, that just goes to show he doesn’t know shit about me.”
“So that…wasn’t you? At the lumberyard?”
I hate the hope in her voice. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill. I said I have something to lose.”
“Oh.”
I would kill for my guys, no question. To protect them. For revenge. Even as I think about it, the picture of her smile forms in my mind. They aren’t the only people I’d kill to protect.
“I can’t answer every question. I can’t tell you everything.” It would put her at risk as much as me. If Rivera thinks he can use her as leverage, he won’t hesitate. “But I can promise not to lie.”
There’s silence, where I can hear her thinking.
I know whatever she says next will be her test of me. A test I’m suddenly desperate to pass. I’ve never gotten close to a girl. Never wanted to. Quick fucks when my body needed a warm, wet place. That all changed the night she witnessed me killing someone. The night I let her live.
There are a thousand incriminating questions she could ask me. A million sins I’ve committed, both things I did on purpose and things that were done to me before I even understood.
“Will you hurt me?” she finally asks. “If you see me again?”
And I breathe a silent sigh of relief, because this is one question I can answer. “Never,” I tell her, my voice dropping with promise. “I’d cut off my hand first.”
I may not know how to date a girl, how to make love to her, but I damn well know how to protect someone. I’ve been doing that since I was old enough to fight. It was only ever supposed to be for the boys in that basement with me, but somewhere along the way, she burrowed into my dark heart.
Was it when she stood up to me in her torn party dress?
Or when her brown eyes softened looking at me across the
front seat of her car?
I’ve become obsessed with her. With the shape of her eyebrows. The feel of her skin. I’m stalking her in a way that would make her run straight to Detective Rivera for help if she knew about it.
There’s this Instagram video where she’s in a floppy hat and little orange shorts, blowing bubbles at her friend Chelsea. You can’t see Chelsea—she’s holding the phone, backing away, wanting to protect her phone from the bubbles. Brooke is happy, eyes shining, coming at her with bubbles, a brightly feathered bird captured midflight in all its glory. The clip’s all jerky, and both of them are laughing and kind of screaming, but it’s the good kind of screaming, not the bad kind.
I watch that fucking thing over and over. Forty-six seconds.
I don’t have an Instagram or Facebook account or anything—none of us do. Because what the fuck do we want with that? But we use fake accounts for researching people and casing places. It’s great for knowing where people are or when they’re on vacation.
Or seeing what Brooke is doing.
It’s a hot night, and I really want her to be in those shorts. I need to imagine her like that, breathless and laughing and so goddamn beautiful it makes my chest ache. “Where are you right now?”
“Why?” she asks, suddenly on guard—I can hear it in her voice.
I stare across the park at the moths swirling around a streetlight, around and around and around like idiots. “Because I want to know, that’s why.”
“In my bed,” she says, hesitant. “Reading.”
“What do you have on?”
A longer pause this time. “I don’t know. Just a T-shirt.”
“That’s all?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Because you make me feel like there’s something to fight for.” The words come up out of some dark, twisted part of my soul. They feel both too raw and perfectly right.
There’s a long pause. Then, “Panties,” she whispers. “That’s what else I’m wearing.”
My cock is hard as steel, hearing her say the word panties. “What color?”
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 91
