Takedown: An Enemies to Lovers Dark Romance

by Lana Hartley

  My options are slim.

  One, I can remain in the Maxor Hotel’s ballroom. Drowning here in the empty conversations and endless mockery, or…

  Two, I can go home. Suffocate in the inescapable obsession over my appearance and my social status.

  My heart is aching for a place that’s truly home. It isn’t a place I’ve been before. I don’t know if it’s a place that I’m going.

  “Hello?” Mother picks up the phone, finally, and pretends that she wasn’t watching my phone call on her phone’s screen the entire time.

  “I’d like to come home, please. Could you pick me up, or send Father?” I ask. My voice sounds like it’s fading away. Am I whispering? “The party is winding down.” I hope this detail will grant me an exit, but it won’t. Mother wants me to schmooze, to never miss an opportunity to make impressions and connections. “Other people are going home.”

  “No,” Mother says. “You’ll stay. We’ll let you know when you can come home.” I can almost hear her eyebrows knit in frustration. She’ll stop when she thinks of the lines that might form on her skin. “Socialize!” she groans. Mother hangs up.

  Jeremy

  Lorenzo Sirvio doesn’t know that he’s breathing his last breaths tonight, but I know it. I know, because I’m going to snuff him out.

  His propensity for cruelty isn’t a well-kept secret. Not like how I manage to rid the world of plenty of terrible stains like him. No one knows that I’m a serial killer. Being clever, wealthy and unpredictable has lent itself well to my dangerous hobby.

  Tonight, Lorenzo is getting a surprise. I’m going to slide my knife in him and listen to his gasping breaths and know the world is a better place because he’s not in it.

  Sitting on the far side of the bar, I wait for Lorenzo to show up. I’ve watched him enough to know his schedule down to when he eats an extra candy bar he keeps stashed in his desk.

  Running my finger along the condensation on my glass, I lick my lips and watch the entrance. A girl in an elegant gown walks into the room. Everyone notices her — how could they not, with that monstrosity of a dress wrapping her up like some delicate little present?

  I watch her. Forgetting Lorenzo, and his impending death, for a moment. The beautiful girl carries herself like she wants to be anywhere but here. If she notices the eyes on her, it would surprise me. She sits on the far side of the bar. I watch her order a drink. She’s too young for alcohol. The bartender brings her a ginger ale.

  What a good girl.

  The Maxor Hotel bar likes to serve underage girls, but this particular bartender doesn’t and I approve. Yes, the murderer with morals, that’s me.

  I come here for the scum and clean up some of it, but I’ve never seen someone so enchanting as her. I’m not sure what about her presence compels me to move closer, but I remove some of the distance between us and sit nearby.

  “Another?” the bartender asks. I wave him away. I can’t be bothered to look away from this delicate little woman.

  In the room, I can observe everything around me, hyperaware and keyed up for action. She is the opposite — dialed out and utterly drained by everyone and everything. She’s so disconnected. I want to change that.

  I see her, sweet little beauty, all by herself and away from the world. Some of her peers bolt into the room. When they enter, holding bottles of champagne and walking in a tangled gaggle of leering, the air becomes putrid. They stink of superficiality and arrogance. Nothing like her. When she’d entered the room, she had tried to cocoon herself back into solitude. These girls boisterously wander in, and they spot her.

  I clench my fists. My legs urge me to stand when I see the newcomers close around her.

  “We got some champagne. If you want some, you can have it, but you’ll have to suck it off our cocks. I mean, we have to know you’re worth it,” I hear one of them loudly proclaim.

  “Yeah, Carrie, we can throw some dick at you so you won’t be such a weirdo,” one of the girl says, taking a swig of her champagne bottle and then burping. “Or do you need to find some other caterer to try and save from actually doing her fucking job and getting us what we want when we want it?”

  I would kill every one of them to pull sweet Carrie from this situation. But that’s not how I’ll procure my beauty. I quiet the monster inside, for a moment, and let calmness come. Carrie will be mine.

  “Are you done yet?” Carrie asks the intruders, bored and unperturbed. As she’s looking down, she catches me staring at her.

  Carrie sees me. She smiles in such a soft way. She seems surprised by my stare, and her cheeks get pinker. The color on her is ravishing, and for a moment I swallow just thinking about how fucking hard I am at her little reaction.

  I leer at the lovely Carrie, and she smiles again. It charms me in a way that I don’t think I’ve truly experienced before. I have fucked hundreds, maybe thousands of women, but my cock is harder than it has ever been for my innocent beauty. Does she know that she’s trapped herself? Would those kind eyes still regard me in such a pure way if she knew what I’m going to do to her?

  Carrie

  Mother finally calls, hours after my original plea and several ginger ales into a dreadful evening, to tell me that I’m released from this hell of a party, and I’m thrilled. I wait outside for the car to pick me up. The chill whipping wind reminds me that I had a wrap, a wrap I’d left back in the ballroom, but I’d rather freeze than re-enter that hells cape of boozed up prep school kids. Hugging my arms together will have to suffice.

  I rub my hands up and down my arms in hope that I’ll create enough warmth to bridge me through the wait. A feeling like someone is watching me ripples down my spine, and I turn to see a pair of striking green eyes. The same eyes that belonged to the man looking at me in the bar earlier. I normally ignore whatever attention I receive, but this man’s whole presence seems to slip me from reality into a place where only the two of us exist. My breathing stills but my heartbeat increases. My palms start to sweat. My mouth runs dry. I remember feeling my face heat when he looked at me before. It’s odd; I generally have no interest in boys, yet this man is just that — a man. I don’t know why he’s looking at me. I don’t know why I want to keep looking at him.

  Shouldn’t I find this creepy? So what if he’s got the chiseled jawline of a man crafted from marble? His lips are sensual. I look between his strong eyes and his full, pouty mouth and wonder how a man can have such suggestive lips.

  Yes, suggestive. Because suddenly, I don’t feel like being Carrie the virgin anymore.

  Oh god, he’s walking closer to me! Can he tell by my face that I’ve been thinking about him? Maybe the shock reads through my eyes. I shut my mouth, snapping my lips closed when I realize they’re hanging open at the sight of him.

  I can’t look away. He’s got to know I was staring at him, and he can only know because he was staring at me, too.

  If I had a single calm bone in my body, I could tell myself to relax and then, you know, actually do that. But I’m awkward and totally unsure of how to act in situations like this.

  “Are you cold?” the green-eyed man asks when he approaches me. There’s a dark, rich tone to his voice that sends shivers down to my toes, making the hair at the nape of my neck stand at attention. I didn’t know eyes could be so striking. I didn’t know a voice could be so…delicious.

  “No,” I say quickly. I am cold, but for some reason I say no.

  “You look cold, Carrie,” the stranger says.

  He knows my name. Why doesn’t it raise some kind of red flag for me? The sound of my name on his lips charms me rather than scares me, and that scares me more about myself than it does him. That’s got death wish, or at the very least, weirdo written all over it.

  His eyes crinkle in a charming smile. “My name is Jeremy Burke. I saw you with your friends at the bar.” He pulls off his coat and places it on my shoulders, his hands holding me for a few extra seconds. The extra touch prompts me to put my hands on his, and I h
old them there for a few very long seconds. Jeremy looks into my eyes so intensely that I think that if I had secrets, he’d know them just from that look. If I had secrets, I’d want him to know them.

  How can I be so utterly bewitched?

  I pull my hands from under his, sucking in a breath. “They’re not my friends at all.”

  Jeremy laughs, a quiet, haunting sound. I feel as though I recognize the pain behind that laugh, and he recognizes something in me, too. Jeremy’s eyes promise as much. “I didn’t think they would be. You didn’t seem like you wanted to be here tonight, yet you are.”

  Considering his question, I purse my lips as I look at the smooth lines of his suit. He’s sharp and well-dressed, his smoothed-back hair looks like something from GQ and his hands are large and powerful. He’s even impressively tall. I didn’t know they made men this way, and if I did, I don’t think I’d ever consider that I had something in common with such a fine specimen of masculinity.

  I narrow my eyes, studying him. “You say this because you watched me, not because this is some vague pick-up line. You picked up on more than just my name.” I, too, can speak in statements that aren’t even questions.

  “Not many men observe the women they find attractive,” Jeremy says, a faint smile ghosting the corners of his lips. “It is more than just beauty. I was observing you, finding that you were too smart for your not-friends.”

  That makes me smile. Sure, Jeremy could be just complimenting me, but he’s charming me and I’m enjoying it. And he’s right. Those prep school kids are some of the dumbest shitheads that I’ve ever spent time with, and my mother considers the books of reality TV stars to be the pinnacle of intellectual expression. “If you saw that my peers were so intolerable, then why bother looking at me at all, beyond seeing my beauty?” I ask. I don’t know why I ask it; it feels presumptive to say that he was looking at my beauty when he could have been speaking generally. I think I just want Jeremy to keep talking to me until the limo service arrives, so I’m crestfallen when the notification on my phone announces the driver that pulls up before me.

  “Thank you for this,” I say, reaching to hand Jeremy back his coat.

  His hands close over mine. My breathing stops and it’s hard to form words. “Thank you, Jeremy,” I sputter out.

  “Carrie,” says Jeremy, and he opens the car door for me.

  I step inside, wishing I could pull him inside this limo, lift up the partition, and do something utterly uncharacteristic for me.

  Well, the thing I want to do is Jeremy. And he’s just odd enough that if it weren’t for his charm, I’d say we were similar. I have none of that. Nor do I have the courage to ask for what I want.

  “Goodbye,” I say before Jeremy shuts the door. It is an odd choice of words, and I blink uncertainly, nervous. When I start to gather my wits, I see that Jeremy has vanished.

  I pull his coat around backwards and hug it against me, inhaling the scent of him and what I recognize as Acqua di Gio. I smelled it once at a department store counter and found it alluring (and far more interesting than the makeup my mother wanted me to look at). I’m glad that Jeremy let me keep his coat, but it might be difficult to explain to my parents if they pay any attention to me when I come home.

  Just then, my phone dings. A text message from Mother. They’re out for the evening, and I can have friends over.

  That’s some kind of joke there. My parents know I don’t have friends at my school, but they think that forcing me to attend these parties is going to magically conjure up some kind of compatibility with other Westwick Prep students. As if.

  At least I can be alone tonight. I’m feeling friskier than I can ever remember. The heat pooling in my belly won’t let me ignore it, and I raise the partition of the limo since it’ll be at least twenty minutes before I’m home.

  My mind is racing with dark sexual fantasies about Jeremy. I’ve never done anything with a boy, or a girl for that matter. I don’t know what I’d want, and some of the ideas that flutter through my mind are a little strange. But the privacy in the back of the limo means that only my hand and I need to worry about the thoughts I have. I want Jeremy to ask me more questions. I imagine him touching my neck when I answer, grazing his thumbs over my collarbones and then telling me to undress. I think about him doing the same, wrapping me in his arms and telling me I’ll never be cold again. It is cheesy, but I don’t even know what it would feel like if we had sex. I drag my fingers over my clit with increasing speed, my gown bunched up around me, and let my head fall back as my eyes roll back. I let the fantasy take me away and very quickly my breath hitches in my throat. Little cries accompany the fireworks behind my skin as thoughts of Jeremy take me right to an orgasm.

  Perhaps this night wasn’t so bad, after all. I bring the coat up to my nose, smelling my own musk mingling with the cologne and that scent that is uniquely Jeremy. What would it be like to heat the air with those scents together in real time? I shiver just thinking about it, and my legs wobble when I step out of the car.

  Mother would have been proud if she thought I was tipsy from the party, and therefore socializing. But I’m glad to be alone. It’s silly, but I race to my room and tear off my dress, laying on my bed naked next to Jeremy’s coat and curling up to sleep.

  Jeremy

  “Please, I have money!” Lorenzo Sirvio whines, the desperation making his voice shrill.

  I have money. I live off an inheritance, the interest more than enough to keep me doing what I do best: killing the sickest of the sick. One could argue that I’m included in the “sickest of the sick,” and I can’t say I’d disagree.

  Unlike my victims, however, there’s no one to pick me off.

  I look into Lorenzo’s eyes. I see nothing. The cloudiness of fear, the gloss around his eyes from tears. But I don’t see a single thing that moves me to emotion.

  I look out the window of this tower, this empire that he’s built. I know he lives off the pain of others, and the crimes he’s committed that have a paper trail are nothing compared to the ones known only to their victims, suffering in silence. I’m no hero, but I was happy to loosen the bolt on the door where he kept the six orphan children in an old warehouse. I watched from afar as those children scattered out, out in the world, no longer in his hands. If I were a hero, I’d be ushering them to safety. I’m not truly here to punish. I have a compulsion to kill that I justify by killing criminals.

  If I’m going to kill anyway, why not kill those who don’t deserve to live?

  You may not like murder, but if I told you more about the things that Lorenzo Sirvio has done, or the worse things my victims have done? Well, you’d be mostly fine with it, no matter how uncomfortable it would be. They violate justice. I bring out a perverted sense of that justice being exacted.

  “Can you hear me?” Lorenzo whimpers.

  I had looked at him, then looked past him. I have a gun, because guns scare the shit out of people. He doesn’t get to know that my weapon of choice is a knife. He gets to take the quick way out of the building.

  I knew that his windows were scheduled to be cleaned, and I made sure the panel was removed when he’d be alone in his office. Normally Lorenzo would masturbate before he left to enact his worse fantasies. The stalking of each victim challenges my ability to not feel anything. Well, that’s perhaps worrisome thing. It generally doesn’t challenge my sociopathy. I didn’t feel anything. I was gathering information, figuring out my best moves, keeping track.

  I was going to go for something different last night when I followed Lorenzo to the hotel bar, where he liked to pick up high-value escorts and beat the shit out of them. He pays the hotel for its silence, and the escorts have no recourse. The cut they give the hotel isn’t as high as what Lorenzo Sirvio offers. Sirvio has the kind of money I have.

  If I cared about money, if I was stupid enough to allow him to try and bribe me, I could manage to double my own money. But I don’t care about money.

  I don’t care
about the dreadful things these despicable victims I chose do.

  I’ve only come close to caring about one other thing before…well, before my parents. Undoubtedly, a psychologist could have quite a time dissecting why I cared for my parents and, after witnessing their murder/suicide, I now care about so little and commit murders I generally make look like suicides. I have no interest in the psychology. I only know that my compulsion to kill creates a sort of brotherly bond with Carter Luwein. His stepmother raised him to kill, and he’s got his own trauma. Carter actually cares about people, about heinous acts, though he was raised to kill. Ultimately, Carter cares more about killing than anything else.

  Now, Carrie Winters — a girl that my initial searching reveals barely exists on the internet, and I’m excited to do more in-person reconnaissance on her — is the closest thing I’ve ever felt about someone. I don’t want to kill her. I want to kill for her.

  I’ve only ever wanted to kill. And that? I always do that for me. Because that’s my compulsion.

  The instant I saw her, I needed her more than I needed to slice flesh with my blade. To watch that look on someone’s face when they knew they were going to die.

  It took a while, but Lorenzo’s making that face now. Being as wealthy as he is, Lorenzo thought he would get out of this somehow.

  “You’re going to walk out that window,” I say. I don’t bother concealing the boredom in my voice. Looking to his eyes that look where he’s lost all hope — it isn’t giving me the thrill that it once did.

  I do have the aftershock of arousal when the lights dim on his soul. I do love that loss of hope, in that moment where I’m a god in absolute control. I’ve laid down my holy judgment, calling for his death. And yet today I still don’t care. I don’t care about his crimes. I hardly care about his death.

  Lorenzo takes a shuddering step forward. I hold the gun up to ensure he’ll do as he’s told.