Hidden (To Love A Killer #1)

by Lexie Ray

  What struck Ash the most about his neighbor was that he felt like he already knew her. He felt connected to her. It was an eerie feeling he couldn’t explain or make sense of, but one he trusted. She wasn’t normal and neither was he. He liked to think of himself as keeping an eye on her and at times would let himself fantasize about protecting her, holding her thin body close, escaping with her in his arms. He knew it was a weird thing to do. In this instance, there was a fine line between fantasy and reality. Ash hoped that soon the two would intersect.

  Besides, people couldn’t help where their minds wandered to, he reasoned. It wasn’t as though he had control over every thought. He liked to wonder about what she might be thinking, what her dreams were, her hopes for her life. People like them didn’t exactly hold on to high hopes. Usually it was some form of simple peace they were after. He wondered how similar her dreams might be to his own. He wondered if she liked his name. Did she like his face?

  Ash snubbed his cigarette out, scraping it firmly against the iron radiator, and flicked the butt in the general direction of a wastebasket that was resting in the corner of the room. Smoking had done nothing to cool him down. The cigarette may have even made the stagnant temperature of the apartment worse. And yet the discomfort that resulted compelled him to light a second. This was how he liked to unwind, how he needed to decompress after a long day of waiting, watching, tracking. It was a strange life. There was little reward, but Ash had no choice. He had to stay off the grid, which meant no payroll jobs, nothing that would require filling out paperwork, providing a social security number or any form of ID.

  He had lived his entire life outside of society. It was how he had been raised. It was what he had been designed to be, a ghost of sorts. A “contract” had brought him to New York, and Ash was starting to wonder how much longer he could tread water. Some contracts made less sense than others. This one had turned into an ocean of fantasies and mysteries. The risk of drowning was increasing.

  Ash ran his fingers through his damp hair, which clung momentarily back then fell messily into his eyes. He should shower, maybe after this cigarette. For the time being, he was more interested in staring out his window, watching how the light from the girl’s apartment spilled out across the rusted fire escape railings, then he was in the shower, rinsing away the sweaty stickiness from his skin.

  He had once watched the girl climb out onto her fire escape to smoke. He wondered if she might do something like that again tonight.

  Ash rose to his feet and leaned against the soot stained windowsill, arching his head out the window to see if he could catch a glimpse inside the girl’s apartment. He could see nothing but shapes and shadows. There seemed to be no movement over there, so Ash let his gaze wander across the vast cityscape. The city sparkled, the bright lights twinkling, encouraging all who gazed out that their dreams would come true. Here and there lights rolled from yellow to red, from red to green, rhythmically orchestrating the distant flow of traffic. He caught the faint briny scent of the water, though it hid well mingling under the smell of hot garbage that wafted up from the street and his own cigarette smoke lingering in the air.

  He reached his hands up, bracing them against the window frame, and leaned out a bit farther. His arms flexed hard under the strain. The muscles were long and lean, chiseled and glistening with sweat. Ash looked down. The people below continued walking along, completely unaware anyone or anything hovered above. That’s how everyone was here, unaware. No one was looking, seeing, or even caring what anyone else was doing. That’s why it had been so easy to disappear here. That’s why it was easy to stay hidden and not be found. He knew that’s what his neighbor was up to: staying hidden.

  Suddenly, Ash noticed the sounds of muffled voices. It was subtle, but he picked up on it. The voices seemed to be coming from the girl’s apartment, carried through the night air. He could have easily dismissed it, chalking it up to a midnight conversation, but his ear caught something more. He wasn’t listening to a calm chat between friends. One of the voices sounded distressed. It was the girl. She wasn’t talking, she was having an argument. Her words, though unrecognizable, were spoken sparsely, few and far between, and contained an edge of terror in their tone.

  Ash realized, as he trained his hearing even more keenly on the voices in the neighboring apartment, that something over there was wrong. And it immediately started to give him a very bad feeling.

  * * *

  Hunter was trembling. She could feel her rib cage quake with each inhale. Her legs turned soft and rubbery. She feared her knees would buckle, go weak. For as terrified as she was, however, Hunter was determined not to show it. Her palms felt numb. Her head was swimming with dizzying thoughts, but she kept her gaze on the man, glaring at him. Her expression hardened, stone-like and severe.

  She was tempted to rip the gun from her purse. She wanted nothing more than to annihilate him, but if she glanced down at her purse, if she broke eye contact, she feared it would afford him the opportunity to lunge towards her.

  How had he gotten into her apartment so easily? It had to have been through the window. He had to have climbed the fire escape. But how had he known she lived here? How did he find her?

  His face was cracked with deep furrowing creases across his forehead, down his cheeks, and around his mouth. His skin looked like leather. The clothing he wore had the unmistakable mark of country living, the slowed down life of fixing cars and drinking beer. His thick fingers and stout hands were grease stained. The dirt seemed to be so deeply imbedded in the skin, under the nails, that it was now a part of him. There was no way of separating the grime from the man.

  This was not at all how Hunter remembered him. Life up north must have aged him. It must have chipped away at his decency, at his goodness. If his spirit was anywhere in there, Hunter couldn’t see it.

  She also couldn’t see how she was going to make it out of this alive. The gun in her purse was her only hope, but it seemed miles away. He could seize her before she even gripped it in her hands. The thought was petrifying.

  She had been told not to hesitate. She had been told to shoot first and think later. The voice of the skinny Latino kid rolled through the back of her mind, mocking her. She knew she had already hesitated, already failed, missing her window.

  That’s when Hunter noticed the man had a knife drawn. He was rotating it slowly in his palm. There was something hungry about the movement and it turned Hunter’s stomach nauseous.

  This put her at a disadvantage. The folds and zippers of her purse stood between her and the gun. Hunter’s heart pounded against her chest just thinking about what it would take to fumble through those layers. She knew the second she motioned for her purse, he would be on her.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said, her tone flat and low, seething with disgust. She thought she heard her voice crack, wavering in its conviction with fear, but it didn’t matter. He was already laughing at her, enjoying her like a performance. “If you leave now, I won’t call the police, but if you don’t...” Her voice trailed off into a thin whisper until it was nothing more than a thread, “I’ll kill you.”

  The smile faded slowly from his face, as his eyes grew dark, menacing. He turned the knife handle over in his hand, and over again, thinking, envisioning where he might plunge it into her, where he would most like to thrust it in. His mouth pressed into a hard line. Hunter knew he probably wasn’t allowed to seriously harm her, only retrieve her. The real blows would be saved for when she was back at the farmhouse, though she knew anything could happen between now and then. He could deliver her in a bloody mess, making any argument he wanted to excuse her beaten state. If that’s what he really wanted to do, Hunter knew he could.

  “Leave right now,” she said, making every effort to raise her voice.

  “You know I’m not going to leave, not without you, Hunter,” he said coldly. His voice was devoid of humanity. There wasn’t a shred, not a trace of compassion. It was as though he
was soulless, a dark shell of a man. “Come here.” The command sounded more like a threat.

  “I haven’t done anything,” she replied, as her voice cracked with distress, paving the way for tears. “I haven’t said a word to anyone. Just let me be, please. You don’t need me. No one up there needs me for anything. And I won’t say a word to anyone. No one will ever know. I promise.” She hated that she was being reduced to begging. Tears rolled slowly from the corners of her eyes, betraying her deepest fears, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  “You know too much,” he said.

  “But you know I haven’t done anything with it. I just want to live my life, that’s all. I’m not going to report anything. You know that. If I was going to, then I would have already,” she said.

  The man extracted a roll of duct tape from his pocket and lifted it to his mouth. After locating the edge, he bit and pulled, tugging at it sharply. The noise, shrill bursts, made Hunter quake. It was too familiar.

  “Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” he barked.

  Hunter glared at him for a long moment. Her mind raced with thoughts that overlapped so chaotically that she couldn’t make sense of anything. She couldn’t see a way out of this. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and her pounding heart only drove her into panic. It was overwhelming. As her anxiety mounted, she became seized in the cold grip of despair.

  Finally, she lowered her gaze and began slowly turning as instructed. In the corner of her eye, she could see the man smirk, pursing his lips grotesquely. He snorted, laughing at her defeat.

  Her back was to him.

  Then a surge of adrenaline, powerful and raw, swept through her, jolting Hunter to action when she realized her purse was concealed from his view.

  Hunter quickly yanked the front flap up and grabbed the zipper, which stuck for a second, alarming her. It was an old purse and if the zipper wasn’t pulled at a particular angle, the metal tended to lock up. Time seemed to slow down and speed up all at once. She sensed the man lunging towards her. She could hear his heavy boot steps, hollow echoes against the hard wood floor.

  All of a sudden, the zipper scratched open, permitting her hand to grasp tightly around the cool handle of the gun.

  She stumbled forward, trying to gain distance from the man, desperate to buy space, frantic that he shouldn’t grab her.

  Hunter whipped around, facing the man, and by the time she did, by the time she had lifted the gun, the barrel pressed flush against his chest.

  It felt like he was on top of her. She could smell his sour breath. He was baring his teeth, grinding them, grimacing at her, aggravated that he was forced to pause. It wasn’t until he spoke that Hunter realized his knife was at her throat.

  “I don’t have a problem with killing you,” he said, spitting the words at her.

  “Cut me and I guarantee you, you’ll have a bullet in your chest before you can do any real damage,” she whispered.

  He pressed his mouth into a hard line, his gaze burning through her.

  “You don’t have it in you,” he said. Hunter’s stomach twisted in knots, lurching under the stench of his breath. “You belong on your back, like how we taught you.”

  “You wanted to flee, Thomas,” she said, crying. “What happened to you? Why did you let them get to you?”

  Without warning, his head slammed against hers. Immediately pain seared through her skull. His body pressed against hers, bracing her against the wall. She nearly screamed, but gasped instead as she felt his knife slice lightly into the side of her neck. He felt like hundreds of pounds, deadweight, but she was able to grab his knife hand and thrust it away from herself. Suddenly he collapsed to the floor, unmoving. It took a long moment for Hunter to understand what had happened. The faint pop that was ringing in her ears, the sound that had occurred the moment before he had fallen was what clued her in.

  Thomas had been shot, but not by her.

  Hunter stared down at him. She couldn’t believe her eyes. He lay face down on the floor. There was a hole, black and gory, in the center of his back. Blood began to pool, seeping out from under his body.

  When she looked up, she saw the silhouette of a man in the shadows outside, standing on her fire escape, beyond the open window. Through the dim light she could see a gun in his hand. The barrel looked unusually long. That must be a silencer, she thought. That must be why she hadn’t heard a bang, but only a faint pop.

  The man on the fire escape ducked, stepping through the open window into her apartment. When he straightened up she discovered it was the man from down the hall, her neighbor, Ash.

  Hunter realized he wasn’t wearing a shirt, as he stood just inside her apartment. His muscular arms and chiseled abs were taut, flexing and rippling, as he tucked his weapon down the back of his pants and walked towards her. She could feel her cheeks flush pink at the sight of him. Each step he took was nearly silent. As before, there was something predatory about his gait. But unlike earlier, it seemed even more pronounced now. His movements were fluid, almost catlike, sensual.

  He stopped in front of her. Hunter looked up at him, noting how tall he was. His layered hair fell at messy angles into his eyes.

  “Are you okay?” He asked in a low and deep tone that seemed to set her at ease.

  Hunter nodded.

  “Is there anyone else in the apartment?” He asked, again in a voice so quiet that it soothed her.

  She shook her head. “No,” she whispered, but he didn’t take her word for it. He slowly stalked down the corridor, checked that the door was locked, both its handle and deadbolt, then walked soundlessly back through the kitchen and into the bathroom at the far end.

  Hunter could hear him pull back the shower curtain. He was thorough in his investigation of the space. He looked in the linen closet and adjacent coat closet as well, until he was satisfied, having gone through every inch of her apartment, that they were in fact alone.

  “How did you know I was in danger?” she asked when Ash returned.

  He looked down at the dead body, watching the ever-growing pool of blood spread across the floor.

  “I heard you,” he said, paying her no mind. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she said.

  “Do you know who he is?” he asked.

  Hunter realized she wasn’t breathing. The answer seemed to stop her heart. She couldn’t tell him who this man had been, what he used to do to her in New Hampshire. There was no way she would tell. Hunter fell mute with anxiety.

  “Was he alone?” asked Ash.

  There would be a world of people who were going to come looking for him, Hunter thought, and they were more dangerous than either of them could ever imagine, but still she said nothing.

  Ash studied the lines of her face, her narrow sloping nose, the high cheekbones, and straight mouth. There was something almost cherubic about her features. She looked like an angel, or maybe one that had fallen from grace. Her hair was messy and fell wildly around her shoulders. She stood, arms crossed, tightly wrapping around the front of her chest. She was staring down at the dead body. She seemed captivated in a way.

  Ash needed to think whether it would be best to dump the body where it could be found and therefore leave a warning to anyone who might come after her next, or if it would be smarter to make the guy disappear entirely.

  He felt her eyes on him.

  Ash looked up, meeting her gaze.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a sultry tone intended to solicit real information. Men couldn’t resist the allure of her low voice, it’s velvety timbre, and Hunter needed to find out who this man was that could kill with such precision. And how did he know to show up when he did?

  “Your neighbor,” he said in a flat tone.

  “Why do you have a gun?” she asked.

  “Why do you?” he countered.

  “Yours has a silencer, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  “It does,” he said, as the corner
of his mouth curled upwards into a wry smile at how perceptive she was.

  Hunter found his smile extremely attractive.

  “Are you going to explain?” she asked, allowing her smooth tone to twist off her tongue with seduction.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not.”

  In an instant he was at his feet, walking into the bathroom again. From her vantage point, Hunter watched, as he tore down her shower curtain, ring by ring. Once he returned with the plastic, Ash spread it down rather carelessly next to the body.

  “Grab that end, would you?” He asked, flinging the plastic open like someone who was laying out a bed sheet.

  Hunter grabbed her end, spreading the plastic out smooth and taut against the ground.

  “What are you doing?” She asked.

  “I’m going to make him disappear,” he said to her, this time looking her straight in the eye. “Does that sound like a good idea?”

  Stunned, Hunter said nothing.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.”

  “You’re the one that killed him,” she said. “I’m not responsible for any of it.”

  Ash looked at her for a long moment.

  “I know when someone wants someone dead,” he said. “Don’t lie to yourself.”

  The steel blue shade of his eyes turned dark and smoldering. Hunter felt like she was falling into those eyes. How did he know her so well? Whatever this connection was, did he feel it too?

  “Lift his legs. This part’s going to suck,” he said, instructing her.

  Hunter grabbed the dead man’s ankles and lifted as best she could, but his body was incredibly heavy. She could barely get his thighs off the ground. Ash, however, was remarkably strong and lifted from under the shoulders. It only took a moment. They had moved the dead body onto the shower curtain, exposing the pool of blood, which had already begun to coagulate into a dark crimson puddle.

  Hunter was suddenly struck with immense overwhelming trembling beyond control, gasping for air, nearly hyperventilating. She tried to muffle her sobs by holding her hand over her mouth, but it did little to conceal the upheaval of emotions that were surfacing. Backing away quickly, she fell to the bed and crouched forward, burying her face in her hands. She could feel his eyes on her. She was embarrassed. She didn’t want to be crying. She couldn’t help it. There was a dead body in her apartment. A man had almost killed her. No, worse, a man had almost abducted her with plans of returning her to the farmhouse, imprisoning her in excruciating misery of the barn.