Chapter Eight. The Huntsman #3
A smile ghosts across her full mouth, and I zero in on the wound bisecting the corner of her bottom lip. She either doesn’t know how close she is to death or doesn’t give a fuck.
Since she is who she is, I’m going with the latter.
“I already told you, Huntsman. Two years.”
“I don’t know what the fuck that means.”
“There isn’t much I don’t know about you.”
Why that sends a fissure of fear down my spine as if she issued a threat, I can’t grasp. Don’t want to. I just know it makes me mean.
Meaner.
“I’m going to enjoy killing you, Eshe. Other people, it’s just a job.
But you? I’m going to take my time with it.
Find out the spots that make you scream out and make sure I play there the longest with my knife.
By the time I finish, you’re going to pray for death, and there won’t no mercy coming.
Not from God, and for damn sure not from me. ”
She blinks. Blinks again.
“I think I just came,” she whispers.
I surge to my feet, disgust soaring its way through me on crimson-edged wings, and it carries me across the one-room, bottom-floor apartment and out the door into the tiny foyer. Disgust not at her. That would be too easy, too simple.
Nah, it’s all directed at myself.
Because I had to get the fuck up out of there like a goddamn coward before I crawled on that bed, tore the covers back from her lushly curved body, thrust my hand between those thick thighs, and found out for myself if she really had nutted all over my sheets.
After scrubbing my hands over my short sandy curls, I interlock my fingers behind my head, tipping it back to stare at the water-stained ceiling.
I can’t even lie. There’s a part of me that wants to charge out the front door onto the cracked and broken lot that the empty, blue multilevel house sits on.
Inhale the air that smells of car exhaust, fried meat someone’s cooking for dinner, and the faintest whiff of weed.
Shit, I’m desperate for anything that doesn’t carry the scent of cedarwood, musk, and earth as rich and brown as the beautiful tone of her smooth skin.
But I don’t trust her. Even battered, bruised, and with alarms set around my nailed-shut windows, I don’t trust Eshe not to escape. So I’m fucking trapped. As trapped as she is.
Aren’t we two fucking peas in a pod?
Releasing a low growl, I drop my arms, turn on my booted heels, and return to the apartment.
Eshe’s no longer lying down but sitting with her back propped up against the back of the pullout couch.
As if she’s been waiting on me to reenter, her gaze finds me as soon as the door opens and, like a fishing rod, reels me in, tugging me across the room until I’m back in the chair I abandoned.
Without removing my gaze from her, I reach over, grab the nearly empty pizza box, and toss it onto the bed.
She’s the first to break our standoff when she dips her head to the contents and greedily scoops up one of the three slices left.
When she moans, her lashes fluttering down as she chews, my entire body tightens until it threatens to snap in half with the slightest nudge.
My dick bricks up, volunteering as fucking tribute to be that volatile nudge.
Locking down the vicious curse clawing its way up outta my chest, I insert immediate distance between me and her by returning to the kitchen for a bottle of water.
By the time I approach the bed once more, she’s wolfed down one slice and is already biting into the next.
I lob that at her, too, and she catches it one-handed without pausing a beat in eating.
“I like what you’re doing with the place,” she says around a mouthful of pizza.
I survey the room as if I don’t know every nail, splinter, and water stain in the apartment. Still, I see it through her eyes. The boards nailed over the bulletproof windows. The peeling wallpaper. The brown water stains dotting the ceiling. Yeah, it’s a pit. And it serves its purpose.
“How long have I been out?” she asks.
“Seventeen hours.”
“Damn.” Her eyebrows wing up. “You cleaned me up and dressed my wounds.”
I don’t answer since she’s stating the obvious.
“And put me in your T-shirt.” Dropping the water to the bedcover, she pinches the shirt and lifts it to her nose, inhaling noisily. “Mmm. Smells just like you, too. Like murder, mayhem, and sex. All my favorites.”
She’s trying to get a rise out of you. Don’t give in. Don’t give in, muthafucka.
“Pizza. I’m not surprised we’re here eating this.
It’s your favorite, after all. Doesn’t matter the topping.
” She tips the slice to the side, studying it like it’s an unknown species instead of an Italian dish.
More surprise undulates through me, but I must do a shit job of concealing it because she shakes her head as if she’s a teacher and I’m her disappointing student.
“How many times I have to tell you there isn’t much I don’t know about you? ”
She shifts against the back of the couch as if seeking a more comfortable position. Since I don’t sleep more than four hours in a stretch, I don’t have any additional pillows to offer her.
Goddammit. This ain’t the Holiday Inn, and I ain’t hospitality services.
Ignoring the discomfort flashing across her face and the equally fleeting need to ease it, I lean against the wall, crossing my arms over my chest.
“All right. Given name, Malachi James Bowden. Thirty-three years old. Birthday May nineteenth. Shoutout to the Tauruses. One sister: Miriam Tanai Bowden. Died at the age of four. First kill at ten, the foster father who murdered your sister. Second kill, two months later. Mike Flannery, the pimp in Worcester who beat and tried to rape you.”
I don’t move, but shock pins me to the wall all the same like a dissected frog splayed wide with all its organs and guts on morbid display.
“Hired assassin Derrick Trudell took you under his wing at thirteen, and you started killing for money. You don’t need me to tell you the reputation you’ve earned since then.
” She tilts her head, and that feeling of being studied, examined, increases.
But I remain still under her scrutiny, refusing to give anything away.
Anything more, that is. “You like to read; your home library is really impressive.” A small smile tugs at the corner of her mouth, and just how the fuck she knows that is worrisome.
Oh right. I have video of her breaking into my shit and walking around like my place was hers.
Don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out it wasn’t the first time she’d been there.
“You don’t watch a lot of TV, but when you do, your go-tos are the old black-and-white classics.
Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G.
Robinson. Your favorite snack is apples.
Your favorite drink is Glenlivet 18—not to be a snob, but that’s shockingly highbrow.
I would’ve pegged you for a Corona man, myself. ”
Shut up. Shut the fuck up.
The guttural words reverberate off my skull like a desperate mantra, growing in volume until it fills my head like a deafening storm.
But underneath the growled winds … I swallow hard.
A part of me I hadn’t even been aware existed until this woman chained me to her bed and took her knife to my skin, brought my body to life with her mouth, shudders with each detail she drops.
That part craves each point. It’s been so long since I’ve been seen.
Since someone knew me. Saw, knew Malachi, not the Huntsman.
Not since Miriam.
And until this moment, I didn’t understand that the hungry, gnawing emptiness inside me was …
Loneliness.
“Apples were…” I rasp, the words slipping out of me of their own volition.
Horror sizzles inside me, and despite being a whole-ass grown man of thirty-three, embarrassment scorches my face.
And yet, I can’t stop the rest of the words from escaping.
“Apples were my sister’s favorite food. I hate them but eat them for her. ”
“I missed that detail somehow,” she murmurs, as if talking to herself, her gaze dropping to the untouched bottle of water.
After a moment, that startling sharp focus shifts back to me.
“Tell me something: Is that why children are off-limits? And why people who order those hits have been known to disappear? Oh, you’re a killer, same as me.
And you make no apologies about it. But you have a code of honor that’s all your own.
And fuck anyone who doesn’t get it. But I do.
I have a theory. I think it’s your way of honoring your sister.
Of protecting her from the monster you weren’t—”
I shove away from the wall and stalk to the window, fists hanging by my sides.
Tension rides me harder than a whore with a forty-dollar trick.
My first inclination? Hurt her. It’s what I’d do to anyone else who dared speak to me like that.
They wouldn’t be able to talk without a throat.
And God knows I want to put my hands around hers.
But only to squeeze tight while I beat that pussy up like it offended me.
I drag a hand down my face.
The desire to find out how she knows all this seethes inside me.
But that would require asking her questions, and I …
can’t. I can’t open myself up more to her than I already have.
Exposing more of my underbelly will drive me closer to insanity, and no one wants that.
This world won’t be able to handle that.
Shit.
Eshe has me betraying myself, the very values and codes that have kept me alive for the last twenty-three years.
It was a mistake bringing her here.
I knew it when I tossed those bodies off her.
I knew it when I carried her out of that tomb of a warehouse.
I knew it when I brought her here, washed her, and bandaged her wounds.
Time to bring this back to business. I need to keep her alive long enough so I can kill her.