by Cole McCade
She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, holding herself still and trying to pull herself together. The fox-eyed man. This had to be him. The voice, the accent. The same as in the alley. The same as had purred in her ear, husky and almost sexual:
You ruined my kill, little one.
I didn’t ruin anything!
Think. Think. He wouldn’t have tied her up and taken her…wherever this was…if he wanted to kill her. He’d have done to her what he did to that man in the alley, a flash of silver and then no more Willow, crumpled on the floor of her room with the red in her body pooling out to mingle with the red of her hair. He must want something from her. Something she didn’t have. Maybe he thought she was someone she wasn’t, and had some kind of connections or—or—
“Here,” that accented voice rumbled, and something slick and cool and damp pressed against her lips.
She flinched back with a gasp, an odd little pop in her chest, like something had cracked her sternum. Her eyes snapped open. He stood there: bent over her, his massive, agile bulk blocking the light, that platinum hair falling down his chest. She hadn’t even heard him move; he hadn’t been there before she’d closed her eyes, and she slammed them shut again and held her breath and willed that when she opened her eyes again, he’d be gone. All of this would be gone, and she’d be safe home in her bed, waking up from an awful nightmare of blood and terror and men with hair like an angel’s halo and eyes like a devil’s sin.
He said nothing, but she could sense him there. Watching. Waiting. He had a heat that was a presence all its own, a living entity that reached its curling, greedy fingers out to her and touched naked skin that shivered in the cold of this space. The silence was surreal; she should be able to hear cars outside, maybe the sounds of building HVAC. Something. Anything. She’d even take the call of crickets and frogs outside if it told her they were close to the Corvus…but she heard nothing. As if, when she closed her eyes, the world ceased to exist and was replaced by nothing more than a terrifying blankness that wouldn’t fill with color again until she looked.
But she couldn’t.
Looking made it real.
Looking always made it real.
Long seconds stretched on. Seconds in which she kept her eyes closed, kept her face turned away from him, leaned her body as far away as she could. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move, as far as she could tell, his heat that same prickling presence that wrapped around her in a smothering grip.
What was he waiting for? What did he want? Why didn’t he say anything?
The silence mounted until each second was a darting needle of agony, sewing panic into her flesh and making it an immutable part of her. She would live with this panic forever, burned into her flesh, grown there like a scar. If she even lived. If he didn’t kill her. Quick-slash grace, and she wondered if she would even feel it—or if it would be one blinding moment, and then nothing but wet warmth and everything turning dark and slow.
Say something.
Nothing.
Say something!
Her lips trembled. She felt the scream coming, but managed to force it back into nothing but a whimper, shattering the silence, the sound plunging into it like a dagger and making her flinch at her own voice—loud, too loud in the nothingness behind her eyelids. Still no response. No demands. No pain, when she fully expected the hot burst of a bruise or a cut or something at any moment.
He was torturing her with silence. Torturing her with not knowing, with waiting.
Letting her torture herself, when already he was inside her head and crawling through her terrified and racing thoughts.
Maybe he wasn’t even there anymore. Maybe she was imagining that heat on her skin, that fire in the air. And maybe if he was gone, she could find a way to wiggle out of these ropes and get home. She peeled one eye open warily. Her heart and body jumped in the same sharp leap, hard enough to make the chair rattle and pull her ropes tight and seize her with her breaths caught in her throat and the bindings chafing against her chest and between her thighs.
He was still there.
Standing against the wide open, echoing concrete space of an empty warehouse filled wall to wall with shadows…he was still there.
He stood motionless as a statue, his head cocked, one pale eyebrow arched mockingly. A glass of water dangled from one long, broad hand, caught delicately by the rim in his fingertips, the marks of prints in the condensation on the side. He’d discarded the long coat, leaving only the molded Kevlar painted over a tight-fitting black shirt, black fatigue pants draped against narrow hips and long legs, and sensible reinforced black boots. Military, she thought dimly, something about the way he held himself and the clothing striking a familiar chord. Military or ex-military, unless he was one of those trained mercenaries she’d heard about, the kind used by major oil companies to protect their interests when they sent contractors overseas.
If he was a soldier…soldiers didn’t kill civilians, did they?
But he did. You saw him. You saw him spill that man out like a soft flesh-sack, cut open and leaking everywhere.
His gaze flicked over her, the only motion of an otherwise stock-still body that didn’t even seem to breathe. His stillness was strange, this eerie conservation of energy and compact control that was somehow more frightening than the violence of that slashing blade.
Something glinted in his eyes, reflecting off the lenses of his eyeglasses. “You seem unnerved.”
She said nothing, pressing back in the chair and shifting her posture to ease the pull of the ropes, moving subtly, trying not to be obvious. There was an old adage in her head, one about not showing fear in front of a rabid dog because they could smell it, would react to it, would attack. She didn’t think that applied here, but a tiny core of animal panic inside kept repeating over and over again:
Don’t. Show. Fear.
He only watched her still, as if waiting for something. He was strange; strange enough that she didn’t know what to do, how to react when all she knew was that he’d kidnapped her. He’d broken into her house, and kidnapped her.
But he hadn’t hurt her. She wasn’t in any pain save a headache from being drugged, and the stiffness of sitting against a hard chair in a bound position for—she didn’t know how long. No hot dull softness of bruised flesh anywhere, or the grittier, rawer wet burn of cuts. He wasn’t threatening her. Wasn’t menacing her in any way, wasn’t doing anything she would expect an angry kidnapper, a mob hitman, a mercenary, a thug to do.
As if he didn’t have to. Didn’t need to.
And the confidence inherent in that, the certainty, was even more terrifying.
Her toes curled up, and her fingers clenched against the pools of sweat in her palms. She thought of Dexter, of Hannibal, the quiet charismatic serial killers who carried themselves with a certain subtlety, a skin of the ordinary stitched loosely and thinly over the nightmare beast howling underneath, soft-spoken words making the most grisly atrocities seem so very normal, in their worlds. She wondered what his normal was.
And how long she had left to live.
She met his eyes. He met hers. And she realized she wouldn’t find out, unless she said something. Nothing would happen if she didn’t speak.
But that didn’t mean she was in any way in control here.
She wet her lips, and dragged her voice up from the pit of her stomach. Talking hurt, her throat full of dry crackles, but she managed, “Wh-who…who are you?”
That lofted eyebrow twitched. “Please don’t be coy.”
“I didn’t see anything,” she gasped. “I—I swear I didn’t.”
“You did.”
He moved out of her line of sight. She flinched, leaning away, craning her head to follow him, but he came no closer. Instead he caught another chair by the back, lifted it, and returned, setting it down with the back facing her. His footsteps didn’t scuff, didn’t thud. Not even the chair made a sound, handled with such delicacy and finesse that it touched the ground without so muc
h as a tap, a click, a clack. She didn’t understand how a man so large could move so silently, as if he didn’t exist. As if he was a nightmare gliding through the night unseen, not revealing himself until he closed in for the kill.
He settled astride the chair, his long, powerful legs spread lazily to flank either side of it; his arms draped along the back, the glass still dangling from his fingertips, swaying lightly against the rungs of the chair with a measured tick, tick, tick like a clock, the small sound painful in the ringing, oppressive silence. Fox-gold eyes studied her: one inch at a time, touching her every vulnerability, from the quivering part of her lips to the fragile flesh of her throat to the thinness of clothing stretched so flimsy over her breasts. Her soft unguarded stomach. Her bare exposed thighs. Hips. And that secret place in nothing but panties, that made her feel naked with the rope pressing up against her and his eyes on her like he knew he could touch her with a look and make her wildfire senses kick into overdrive.
“You saw me,” he said softly. Tick, tick, tick, water swaying in the glass but never spilling. “You know me. And that, little one, is why we have a problem.”
She couldn’t stand to meet his eyes. She dropped her gaze to the glass instead, watching a single bead of moisture cut a path in the frosted condensation down the side, watching the water sway back and forth, always trying to find a level. She was that water right now, trying to find a level, but he kept tilting her with his strange behavior and his silence until she didn’t know what level was anymore.
“What are you going to do with me?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided.”
“So you just…kidnap me, until you make up your mind?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. He lifted a hand to tap a single blunt, graceful fingertip to the rim of his glasses. “I want you where I can see you, bella.”
“You want me where I can’t run.”
He inclined his head. “That, as well.”
She pressed her lips together, jerking her gaze back up to him, glaring at that calm, sinisterly serene face; he had the beauty of something that could only be made for sin, masculinity blended with a certain refinement that could have belonged to royalty. Killers shouldn’t look like that: such a cultivated mixture of power and elegance, brutality and precise calm. Anger tried to fight past the smothering blanket of fear, bright and hot. He was toying with her, wasn’t he? Letting her think she might actually have a chance of going free, when he had every intention of killing her.
“What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Do you think I would tell you that?” He purred the silky words. “But I know who you are…Willow.”
He reached back with his free hand; she tensed, braced for a knife, a gun. Instead he brought out a square, familiar scrap of nylon in pastel blue with navy blue edging and zippers, tattered at the edges and a few threads chewed into those cloudy puffs that happened when nylon caught in a zipper’s teeth.
Her wallet.
Dizziness and dread rolled over her, the blood draining from her face to leave her faint. She’d dropped her wallet in the street. Stupid. Careless. She’d practically led him to her doorstep, and opened the door to invite him in.
He set the glass down on the chair between his spread legs and parted the folds of her wallet with his thumb as if parting folds of flesh; amber eyes scanned lazily from side to side.
“Willow Persephone Armitage.”
He rolled her full name over his tongue, that fluid accent wrapping around it to make it something lyrical, something like dark caramel liqueur, a thing that didn’t belong to her. Her cheeks burned—with shame, she told herself. Shame that she’d been such an idiot. Shame that she wasn’t fighting and screaming with everything in her. Shame for the next words that rolled out of his mouth, as he pulled her ID from the little inside pocket.
“Twenty-four,” he murmured. Every word he spoke was measured and slow, contemplative, and yet despite its neutrality she felt judged. Small. Like the nothing she was. With a languid, dismissive motion he let the ID fall from his fingertips; it fluttered to the floor, her own tiny face staring up at her with that vacant deer-in-headlights look of every state ID everywhere, pale with a kind of frozen blankness that reflected every inch of her frightened desolation. “Unemployed.” The stub from her last unemployment check, drawn out between two long, tawny fingers, turned over thoughtfully, then released to flutter to the ground. “Resident of 429 Pinion Lane.” The crumpled business card she’d given out when she’d thought she’d be a nanny full-time; it tumbled end-over-end to the floor. “Caretaker for a disabled father.” The plastic laminate of her father’s disability benefits ID, dropping down to the floor with a little clack. “Joseph Armitage. Formerly an employee of the Corvus River Textile Mill.”
A chill shot through her, tingling every inch of her body. That wasn’t on the card.
“Did you hurt my father?” she snapped, and twisted against the ropes. They bit into her, scouring her wrists, sawing against her breasts, licking between her thighs with a sharp burning friction, but she didn’t care. He’d been in the house. He’d been in the house, and her father had been drugged, unconscious—“Did you touch him?”
He only looked at her coolly, until she was afraid of the answer in those gleaming, unreadable amber eyes. Her eyes burned, blurring. Her father couldn’t be dead. This monster couldn’t have killed him, he—he—
“So very afraid,” he mocked softly. “Why would I hurt your father?”
“Because that’s what you do! You kill people!”
A brief nod. “With reason.”
“How do you know those things?” she demanded. “How do you know who my father is?”
“Google.” His fingers went lax. Her wallet tumbled free, the blue wings flapping before it landed with a smack. Acid eyes peeled layers from her soul, never moving from her, never blinking. “All those little connections, one life strung to another in bits of data and motes of light flashing from one wire to the next. I know your father. I know your brothers. I know the two you lost, before you ever had a chance to know them. I know the nights you lie in bed and look at the glowing small screen of your phone, and perhaps the things you say are vague, but the longing in them is not. You miss someone. You hate someone. You love the same person, and that hate is born of love.” He sounded so empty, when he said it. Like he wasn’t even human, capable of only observing these things from a distance but never experiencing them, never caring about them, with the detached contempt of a dark and dreamlike god. “You leave a map of yourself in every bit of data, little one. A map of your heart, and the strings tethered to it.”
So you know which strings to pull, is that it?
Was that a threat?
She ducked her head. She hated that he spoke of her so…intimately. As if he knew her. As if she was so transparent, and with one glance at a few quiet, lonely words he’d found her heart and soul between the wires, a curio he’d plucked out to study for mere minutes before he crushed it between his fingers.
“Why the hell would you google me?” she muttered.
“I had to know you.”
“You don’t need to know me. You don’t need to know anything about me.”
“But I do.”
Heat brushed her chin—that heat he gave off with a forge’s furious brightness, warning her seconds before his angular, elegant fingertips caught her chin as delicately as if she were a dragonfly with fragile wings. Behind that careful touch was such strength, such brutality, straining at an invisible leash and threatening to crush her at any moment. She trembled, her breaths sucking in. Every whorl of his fingerprints, every subtle rough abrasion of work-worn and hardened fingers scored into her. No. Every hair on her body prickled, and her skin drew tight. This was why she didn’t like to be touched. Not by strangers. Not by anyone, when the slightest touch could raise a tiny but steady spark that she feared would one day consume her in its flame.
She couldn’t resist his grasp,
as he tilted her head up. As he met her eyes, studying her like an insect under glass. There was nothing human in those eyes. As dead and empty as his voice, as if long ago something had cut him open and drained out everything bright and kind and feeling inside him to leave only this frightening, chilling husk, the seductive beauty of a man overlaid on the hollow nothingness of a corpse.
His thumb traced the dip below her lip, grazing light enough to make her shiver. The very tip of his nail outlined the shape of her mouth. His gaze dropped to linger with a palpable touch, following the path of that loathsome, tingling caress.
“How else will I decide?” he whispered.
Decide what? she wondered, but was afraid to know.
With a glower, she jerked her face to the side, ripping from his grip. “So what else did Google tell you? Did you stalk my Facebook posts? Maybe you retweeted a few cat videos, is that your thing?”
He rumbled: a brooding, curious sound. “I did not think you had anger in you. Interesting.” Pulling back, he straightened, leaning back on one arm with his hand curled about the lip of the chair, his long, serpentine body slouched forward with sensuous arrogance. “What it told me, little one, is that you are very young.”
He slid off the chair, oozing like oil; every movement had deliberation to it. Self-possession. Still no sound, as he drew closer. Closer. Closer, until he invaded her space and she couldn’t escape him, couldn’t escape the sway of rosary beads dangling in front of her nose or a strange scent about him that made her think of distant deserts and coiling incense smoke.
With another low sound, he sank to one knee in front of her. When he struck, swift and darting, she flinched back with a cry. But he was lightning-quick, those rough hands catching her head—no. Cupping her face. Cupping her face, cradling her in the burning fire of his palms, the tips of his fingers buried deeply in her hair and his thumbs grazing along her cheeks. He tilted his head, looking up at her as if she looked different from this angle. While to her, this close…
