Chapter 11
Silence rings from the other side of the door as I press my ear to it. I haven’t heard a peep from her all night long. Even though I raped the other women after I killed them, something about fucking her while her heart still beat and hate waved at me from within her eyes made me feel like a fucking failure.
She’s not what I expected at all.
I thought she’d fall into my arms and thank me for liberating her. That she’d look at me like she did him. She looked at me like she was calculating each thing she was going to do to me when she got loose.
“Lyla,” I call out, pushing the door open a crack.
There’s a lump under the covers, but I can’t see through the dark enough to tell if she’s awake.
I take a deep breath and push the door open. It slowly gives with an eerie creak accompanying the movement.
“Lyla, can we ta—” I start, but something moves behind me, cutting my words off.
As smooth as a panther on the prowl, Lyla jumps from behind the door and cracks me over the head with my mother’s iron lamp from the bedside table.
I stumble forward, falling over the end of the bed. I turn over to not have my back to her, sliding to the floor as she drops over me and lifts the lamp again.
“Please,” I beg, and she smirks.
There’s that look again. The one that’s intoxicating to a man like me. It’s intense and guileful.
“I fucking love when they beg,” she says, and the world goes dark as she drops the lamp on my head. Pain is the last thing that registers. Other than her sinful smile.
I hurt her badly, and instead of curling into herself, she’d gotten free.
And now, I don’t know what she’s going to do to me, but I know it’s going to hurt like fucking hell.
I put myself onto a game board with a skilled killer, and it seems I didn’t realize I was outmatched when I did so.
Coming to is hard.
My stomach retches over and over as I come around. The scent of my sick nearly makes me vomit again as I roll over.
My hands and feet are bound, and the world is moving. At a rapid fucking pace, I might add.
I’m in a trunk—most likely my trunk. The space is compact, and I can’t move even a muscle. Where I’d been generous with her bindings, she hadn’t been with mine. Professional at her center.
The radio blasts inside the car as she heads towards God only knows where. She won’t open this trunk.
He will.
This is the worst-case scenario for me. Once he knows what I did, he won’t be easy on me.
I close my eyes and wish I’d never seen Lyla and Neo in that club.
I wish that my life had taken a different path altogether.
But when I open them again, I’m still in a trunk—tied up and headed for death.