by Cole McCade
Or maybe he was an arrogant peacock who liked parading around, showing off the obscene chisels of a predator’s fine-sculpted, tightly honed body.
He opened the tall, double-door stainless steel fridge—the interior organized with obsessive precision, for the few moments she could see it—and scattered an array of ingredients on the counter, vegetables and a thick bloody slab of steak and a cloth-wrapped wheel of cheese. She watched with a touch of bemusement as he chopped and diced, sliced and shaved, handling his cooking knives with a quick, deft precision that nauseated her when she remembered he’d held that knife with such killing ease, handling it like an extension of himself as he’d slit a man’s throat.
Within minutes he’d tossed together something that smelled like stir fry; he moved with a comfortable relaxation in the kitchen, the quiet efficiency of a man accustomed to doing for himself and unwilling to settle for the bare minimum simply because society said the woman cooked and the man lived like a Neanderthal until a woman decided to take care of him like an overgrown baby.
Independent, she thought, watching him, cataloguing, analyzing his behavior the way she’d learned, when she worked for the nanny agency, to analyze developmental behaviors and budding social skills in children. Priest was no child, but he…something was stunted in him, something evident in his strange, stilted yet flowing speech and self-expression that couldn’t be wholly explained by English as a second language. Yet it didn’t stop him from being wholly self-sufficient. And not just out of necessity, she guessed; though he likely couldn’t rely on anyone else, if he made a habit out of killing people the way some people made a habit out of smoking. She thought maybe he’d been like this even before whatever had sent him down this dark path, if he hadn’t been born that way from the very start.
No. No, she didn’t think so. Something in that tattoo on his back said there had once been something much more there, something that bled in the crimson lines down his back. The way he’d looked at the crucifix. The quiet fervor in his prayer. The simple things that gave this cold hideaway the comforts of home, the elegance of the art he chose, even the sense of quiet pleasure he gave off as he moved about his kitchen with a familiarity born of practice and skill.
There was something human in him, no matter how he masked it behind cool glances and strange, carefully deflecting questions. She just had to find it.
And hope it was enough to save her life.
The scents of savory spices filled the air; her mouth watered, her stomach twisting and snarling, and she wondered if he would eat right in front of her and leave her to starve. If that, too, was part of this—depriving her, starving her, taunting her with what she couldn’t have until she was desperate and in enough of a state to say anything that would let him pass his judgment and decide to kill her.
He said not a word. There was only the sound of knives on the cutting board, the hiss of the skillet, the scrape of the spatula. Then the clank of plates, glasses. She stopped watching when she caught herself following the flow and flex and pull of taut muscle making his tattoo writhe as he tossed the stir-fry. She’d never really taken much notice of men before; not that way. She was too busy keeping her focus on one man, the only man in her life, the man who should have shaped the mold for how she saw men…but instead shaped the mold for how she saw herself.
She stared down at her kneecaps. The right was reddened, bruised from her tossing and thrashing. She hated thinking of her father that way. Hated resenting him as someone who had changed the entire path of her life. But it was better than worrying about him; better than wondering if the police had stressed him into a pain attack. Better than wondering if Maxi was taking care of him, or if he was on his own and struggling to down his pills with shaking hands, confined to bed when he’d want to be up. Out.
Up, out, and looking for his daughter.
The clank of dishware warned her Priest was coming, followed by the scrape of wood on concrete. He dragged a chair from the small table setting in the kitchen, the same chair he’d sat in before; he set it down facing her, then sank down with a carved wooden tray balanced across the wide spread of his thighs. Two plates sat side by side on the tray, flanked by tall glasses of iced tea and heaped with steaming stir-fry in a tart-smelling, savory brown sauce.
Two plates.
Huh.
Priest picked up one of two forks, caught up a mouthful, and lifted it to Willow’s lips, watching her expectantly. She flinched back.
“You’re not feeding me.”
He sighed patiently. “You need to eat.”
“So untie my hands.”
“No.”
“I’m not going anywhere with the chair chained to the floor; if—”
“No,” he repeated more firmly, and offered the fork again. “Eat.”
Five minutes ago she’d been wondering if he planned to starve her. Now the idea of eating like this, sitting here like a child while he fed her, made her think starvation was the better option. She scowled at him, clenching her fists behind her back.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you need to eat,” he repeated, as if it was obvious.
“Most kidnappers are content to starve their prisoners.”
“You watch too much television.” Priest set the fork down and picked up the other, stealing a bite off the second plate and slipping it past his lips. He lingered for a moment, clearly savoring with a quiet pleasure that sheened his lips and…God, she hated him. “In reality, the majority of kidnappings happen for one of three reasons. Love, trafficking, or as a method of bargaining and bribery. Save in the case of the most psychologically unstable, one does not wish to torment or deprive those one loves. In the case of trafficking, one does not want to damage the merchandise and lower the value. In the case of bargaining and bribery, harming the victim means removing leverage to obtain what one desires. So it is generally in the kidnapper’s best interests to look after the health and well-being of their subject. The sort of glorified…ah, what is the phrase…‘torture porn’ you are thinking of is only a small percentage, and often sensationalized for television. The reality of kidnapping is, honestly, quite dull.” He shrugged, picked up the fork, and offered her the food again. “So eat.”
He’d recited the information with cool, methodical dryness, and she wondered again who he’d been before. Clearly well-educated; even with his accent and his odd way of speaking he spoke English with perfect precision, hesitating on only a few words here and there. Maybe he hadn’t been military, though. Maybe a cop? FBI? Someone who would know how to profile people, and the patterns of criminals.
And how to kill without getting caught.
“Which one is it, then?” she asked. “Love, trafficking, or bribery?”
“Neither,” Priest answered. “It is simply a matter of business.”
She eyed the fork, then looked away. “I’m not eating that.”
“Please do not make me force you. That would be quite tedious.”
She snapped a glare toward him. “You wouldn’t.”
He answered with that same mild, unreadable look. “Try me.”
The fork wasn’t moving. This was mortifying, caught like a toddler in a battle of wills with a parent over eating her vegetables—and she remembered, once, that Uncle Wally had danced a spear of broccoli on the tip of her nose and turned it into a singing tiny tree who wanted a warm place to hide in her mouth when it was so cold outside. A lonely ache started below her ribs. Did Uncle Wally even know she was gone? Probably not; her father wouldn’t have told him, not even for her sake. She wanted Wally; she wanted the safety he radiated, the way nothing could ever be wrong when he was near. He would wave a hand and, like magic, Priest would wilt like cut grass and Willow would walk out with her head held high in the shelter of Uncle Wally’s embrace.
But that was a child’s desperate fantasy. She couldn’t rely on someone else to make this go away. She couldn’t wait for Maxi to tell the police what Willow had told
her, and send the rescue squad to save her. That was her problem. Even if she’d become the adult in her relationship with her father, taking on the role of the parent, she’d never stood on her own. She still always turned to someone else to ask what to do, how to respond, what to say. She’d never made decisions by herself. It had always been her and Dad, or her and Wally.
But she was alone now.
Her against Priest.
And she had no one to rely on but herself.
And while she had to eat, she wondered how long she could hold out. If, if she refused now, he wouldn’t even bother to try to feed her again. Did she want to take that risk, when she might need her strength later?
As if he’d caught her tumbling thoughts, he said, “You can defy me all you wish, but you will eat.”
“Are you threatening me with stir-fry?”
His lips twitched. “I might be.”
“There’s a problem with that.”
“And that would be?”
“What goes in must come out. And if I eat, I don’t see you letting me up for a bathroom break.”
“I will let you up.” He considered, then rumbled, “Under conditions.”
“And those would be?”
Something dark glinted in his eyes. “You’ll find out, won’t you?”
Willow made a frustrated sound. She was down to this: bargaining over what went into her mouth just to have some measure of control. “Fine. I’ll eat. If—” She turned her face away, when he started to move the fork toward her mouth. “—if you tell me why you killed him.”
He went still, frozen save for the movements of red-flushed, firm lips. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Have you really killed that many people, that you can’t remember the only one I saw?”
“I have killed that many. But I remember them all.” With his free hand, he reached up to idly finger the beads of the rosary; she didn’t think he was aware he was actually doing it. “Do you really want numbers, firefly?”
Yes, she almost said. Yes. I want you to be accountable. I want you to confess to everything you’ve done.
But confessing passed the weight of the words from the confessor to the listener, and she didn’t think she could carry that much. And so she only lowered her eyes, shaking her head.
“No, I don’t.”
“Then eat.” Again that insistent mouthful of food, hovering in front of her lips. “And I will tell you why.”
Reluctantly, she parted her lips. He slid the fork past gently, and she flushed; this was wrong, her parting her lips for him so he could glide inside, filling her mouth. The taste of rich, spicy beef and crisp snow peas melted on her tongue; he held her eyes as he drew the fork back, her lips sliding over the tips of the tines.
“Acceptable?” he murmured.
She nodded, but said nothing. She didn’t know what to say. How to explain that for that moment, for that second in time when his fingers had nearly brushed her lips and he’d watched her every movement, tracing her lips with a lingering gaze…
…she’d found warmth in his touch, and had been sure she was imagining it.
“Are you certain you want this?” he asked. “Like the apple offered to Eve, once the fruit of knowledge has been consumed, it cannot be returned.”
“Tell me,” she said. “Whatever it is, I want to know. I need to know why.”
“Do you need to make sense of it so much?”
“I need to make sense of you. I need to know what I’m dealing with. I need…” Her tongue darted over her lips; her chest was so painfully tight, rolling and twisting hard. “I need to know what you are. So tell me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOR LONG MOMENTS HE ONLY looked at her, and she thought perhaps all bets were off. That he wouldn’t tell her, wouldn’t fill the screaming gap in her brain that needed a reason to make him logical and human and something that didn’t terrify her as much for his calm, understated brutality as for the way she’d writhed when his fingers had teased against her panties and his thumb had circled her clit and she’d begged don’t while her body had said more, more, give me more.
Then he lifted the fork again, and offered her another mouthful. “If you would ask others, I am a monster. It is a simple definition. Easy enough to accept.”
She accepted the bite, licking the taste off the fork, then swallowed. “People aren’t monsters. Sometimes they’re broken, but not monsters.”
“No?” He toyed the fork between his fingers. “How many dead would it take for you to call me a monster? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?”
A sick chill crawled over her skin. “We said no numbers.”
“Ah.” He inclined his head. “So we did.”
“You’re taking care of me. Being gentle. A monster wouldn’t do that.”
“My nonna raised me with manners.” He shrugged. He’d taken the apron off, and the tail of his hair rippled and shimmered in skeins against his chest with every movement, until he was sun and ochre and earth and bright white slashes and puckers of scars. The scars on his chest were different from those on his back; scars where the color had been erased—as if the wounds cut into him with every fight, every kill, had erased a little more of his humanity. “Manners only make for a more polite, congenial monster.”
“Nonna?”
A brief nod. “Si. ‘Grandmother,’ en Italiano.”
“You’re Italian.”
“Venetian,” he corrected dryly, and stretched the fork toward her again.
After she took the bite, she asked, “There’s a difference?”
“Mostly a point of pride, but yes.” He set the fork back down on the plate, assessing her with a measuring gaze. “Asking about me was not the deal. You eat, and I tell you about him. This is not the part where I monologue my evil plan. I don’t have one. You, quite frankly, have me at a loss. Eat.”
He was waiting. And after a moment, she parted her lips. Obediently, her pride hissed with a touch of derision, but it was hard to listen to her pride when he was looking at her, something smoldering, warming those icy eyes. Her mouth tingled, swollen and strange and sensitive, as his gaze licked hotly over her parted lips; her tongue a curling thing hungry not for food, but for something to touch. To taste. And when he slipped the fork past her lips, when the warmed silver grazed her tongue and stroked her mouth, when the roughness of his knuckles brushed the corners of her mouth…she shivered somewhere deeper than skin, deeper than flesh, all the way down to the bone.
Silence was a burning thing; silence had become alive, and spoke in a wordless language she didn’t understand, whispering between them, traveling along the path from eye to eye and filling her head with terrible thoughts. Wicked thoughts that didn’t have form or color but came with touch, a phantom echo of his fingers against her body.
The tink of the fork against the plate snapped the silence in brittle two, and left it crumbling; she sucked in a breath and looked down, staring at the tray and not at him; he was only a pair of hands seen through the fringe of her lashes. Even his knuckles were scarred in mottled white, as if he’d torn them open over and over again with the vicious lash of his fists.
In her peripheral vision, one of the glasses of tea rose, fell, the ice clinking. Then he spoke, his voice oddly thick, heavy, his accent rolling deeper, hotter, like the pressure front that swept through in a crushing, smothering layer before a violent storm.
“Do you want to know who hired me to kill him?” he asked. “Or simply why?”
She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to know any of this, but she had to. This situation wasn’t simple. Not the way she’d been taught to understand such things were: nasty, cruel, awful people doing nasty, cruel, awful things, predictable and understandable for all that they were terrible, their motivations base and simple and driven by money or drugs or outright human cruelty. But she was quickly realizing that with Priest, A plus B did not equal C, and not only did she not know the formula, she didn’t understand the varia
bles. Priest was a wild card, and the only thing she could be certain of here was herself.
Yet she couldn’t even be certain of that, when he could scorch her with a single look and fill her with the pregnant anticipation of something she didn’t understand, shouldn’t even think when he held the thread of her life stretched taut between his fingers.
She pushed it down. She was good at that: pushing things down, putting them off for another time, another day. Burying her head in the sand.
“Someone hired you?” She opened her eyes, looking at him. “You’re a contract killer? An assassin?”
He inclined his head. “At times. Sometimes, the choice is mine.”
“So you just…kill anyone you’re paid to kill. No questions.”
“No.” Firm. Decisive. A touch of a growl underscoring that sinful voice. Something went flat in his eyes, strange and dark; she’d touched a nerve. “I only take assignments if they meet my criteria.”
“Which are?”
“Very simple.” He traced his thumb along the handle of the fork, gaze lowering to follow its path along the edge, and in his hand she imagined not a utensil but a blade, keen and terrible. “They must deserve to die.”
“So that man deserved it?” she bit off, and ignored it when he dipped the fork in for another mouthful and offered it to her. “Why? How did you know that? Or did the people who hired you say so and you believed it?”
“I always—” He stopped, narrowing his eyes. “Eat. We had an agreement.”
She pressed her lips together, then sighed and reluctantly opened her mouth. This time there was nothing sensuous about the bite he deposited past her lips, and she snapped it off the fork sulkily and slumped back in the chair, chewing at it.
“Good girl.”
She stiffened, scowling. “I would kill you right now if I could.”
“But you cannot, and that is why we are here.” He slouched forward in the chair, relaxed and sinuous, like a snake shifting its coils. “I research my targets, firefly. Never trust the word or the judgment of someone who would pay money to end another’s life. If they have reached that point, they are already compromised.”
