Chapter 8
Koen
One Year Ago
She smells like coconut and vanilla, and it’s like the scent is rewiring my fucking brain.
I’m over her, hovering close and breathing her in. Her legs are parted, allowing me space between them.
My hand wraps around her throat, squeezing as her air chokes off, and she thrashes.
I typically wouldn’t be so bold, but she found two of my notes today. It’s the only time I’ve ever been so brazen. She drank two glasses of her special tea I laced tonight, so my pretty girl isn’t waking up any time soon.
My thick cock drags over her center, earning me a sleep-filled whimper from Greer.
It shouldn’t, but it colors my world with vibrant strokes of red, red I want to paint myself with, using her as the brush.
I never knew watching someone sleep could make me so hard before. Not even death itself stirs the hungry beast inside of me.
She’s going to catch me if I don’t stop, but the urge to feel her wetness coat my fingers has me doing the unthinkable, for most men, anyhow.
I slide my hand beneath her nightgown and push her panties to the side.
Her body is in overdrive, her hips undulating against me, seeking my touch like it’s natural, like it needs me.
I’ve never been needed before.
It’s more thrilling than I could’ve ever imagined, even if she’s unconscious beneath the weight of my drugs.
“So fucking wet,” I mutter aloud, unthinkingly.
Her answering mewl gives the illusion that she’s heard me, and I want to slide my cock inside her perfect mouth and gag the wicked tormenting sounds right out of her until her lifeless eyes look up at me, open and devoid.
Now, there’s an idea!
I shake my head, pulling my fingers from between her lush folds, her scent coiling into my brain as I back away from her on the bed.
I don’t have time for the voices tonight; I’m on a mission.
I watched her tonight, focusing my gaze on the back of her head as she laughed and talked with a man outside the local cafe.
The temperature was mild for a summer evening, so they took seats on the outside lanai. Her summer dress, covered in lemons, was high enough that when she moved just right, I’m sure you could see the apex of her.
If one were in the proper position, that is.
I, myself, was watching the subject of her affections, while running his face through software recognition and gathering intel on him, how dare he speak to her? How dare he even think about touching what’s mine?
Jack.
It’s not even a respectable name.
Jack reaches across the table, running his hand over hers, and her back stiffens.
She should know the drill by now. I killed the last man she took to the movies—mind you, he deserved it. How often had I heard her say no when he tried to brush his hand up her thigh as the movie played?
Enough that it took every ounce of restraint I had not to kill him right then and there. Splattering his blood across the screen would’ve been so satisfying.
Alas, I waited.
Followed him.
Avenged each touch he landed and some that he didn’t. Some he only thought about in his perverted, fucked-up little mind.
If she knows David’s dead, she hasn’t let on.
I check her phone, search history, and computer. She’s the perfect girl—keeping to herself and only speaking to one person religiously: Allison Cheney.
That’s a sticky situation, to say the least. A top lawyer in Columbus, who studied at Yale and would delight in putting a psychopath like me behind bars.
Jack slides his foot up the inside of Greer’s leg and hisses, slamming my laptop closed and glaring at him through the window of my truck.
As if he can feel my disdain, he places his foot back on the ground. Greer adjusts in her chair, tucking her legs closer to her body.
“That’s my perfect girl.”
I’m well past obsession now, sinking deeper into the depths of fucking insanity when it comes to her, and I can’t find the damn surface.
I only kill for her now.
She left me for dead, and now I’m her fucking composer, slaughtering those who don’t fit in our symphony, those who don’t belong in our song.
Because while I don’t know what my dim future has in store for me, I know one thing: she is mine.
Now
Greer shivers in my hold.
Fuck, her body has always been so inviting.
“W-who are you?” she whispers as I let my hand drop from her mouth to her throat. My other hand holds a gun to a small exposed section of her neck, the cold metal begging her to make one wrong move.
“Your protector.” My answer sounds deranged even to my ears, and it does nothing for her fear.
If anything, the scent of her alarm becomes the overwhelming fragrance in the room.
“The cops are outside. They’ll find you,” she stammers.
I drop my hand and fist her nightgown over her stomach. “The cops don’t fucking matter. What matters is how they got here. Why are they here, Greer?”
She cries out as I say her name, and it’s music to my ears, like she plucked the strings of her vocal cords with vibrations only meant for me.
“I—I didn’t know where else to turn. I wasn’t safe.”
“And are you safe now?”
Her tears wash down her cheeks, her sniffles making me angry, though I can’t work out why.
They all cry when faced with the end. She can’t know I’m not here to kill her. I’m only here to remind her how she’s to behave.
Our game will be over if I’m found out.
Our game can’t end.
It’s the only thing keeping me human these days.
“Answer me, poison.”
She swallows as I tease my hand over her throat, recalling how it felt the last time I toyed with her in her sleep, felt her pretty cunt around my fingers, and fondled her throat as her pulse slow-danced toward its finish.
I don’t know if she’s aware of what we do at night.
I also don’t know how she’ll react if she finds out.
“I’m not safe. You’re always lurking. You’re always here.”
“Mm. I knew my good girl was lurking beneath those stupid little ideas Allison puts in your head.”
She gasps at the mention of her friend, turning in my arms as they had gone too lax to hold her steady.
Her eyes take in my mask, my black eyes being the only thing staring down at her.
My mother always said they were the Devil’s eyes. Perhaps that’s why she did the things she did to me.
Perhaps if I didn’t have the Devil’s eyes, I wouldn’t be the Devil incarnate today.
That’s neither here nor there. The past is what it is, and we can only move forward.
“You can’t hurt her. Please, leave her out of this.”
I scoff. “Haven’t you done enough for her? Where does your protection end?”
Her eyes speckle with fear, and its coloring is so perfect against the gray of her irises.
“You know nothing about me,” she says, her voice soft and careful.
“I know everything.” I tug her to me, clutching her throat in my hand. “I even know what you feel like when you flutter around my fingers.”
She gasps, ripping her nails into my gloves as if to break through and steal my very DNA. “No, you don’t!” she grunts, trying to breathe as I cock my head preternaturally, watching her fight.
She’s so fierce.
I inhale her strength like a drug, shivering when it laces through me. “The real question is, why are you pretending you don’t know me, Greer? Do you realize that when you rouse, thinking you’ve come in your sleep, that it was me commanding your orgasm? Your body knows me.”
Her tears are back, and this time, they seem to have shame floating on their surface before they roll down over the leather of my gloves. They never sink into the naturally waterproof surface; they move on quickly, finding somewhere to hide.
“Please, don’t hurt me,” she whispers, choked by emotion as I toss her back onto the bed in one smooth thrust.
“I came here to warn you. You get the police off my fucking trail, or your blood will be the next on my gloves.”
She shakes, backing up as I lean over where she’s fallen, her legs dangling over the edge.
“You’re mine. Everything to do with you belongs to me. You don’t speak about me outside of this house. Our business is not their business. Do you understand me, pretty poison?”
Her entire body is shaking, her gaze latching onto the only part of me uncovered: my eyes.
My hands slink up her thighs, spreading them wide. “If you scream, you die. Got me?”
She nods violently, her tears now falling like Niagara Falls.
Sliding her panties to the side, my action makes her realize what’s about to happen to her.
She forced me to slink through the shadows tonight to avoid detection from the prying eyes of Oakland’s finest. She’ll be punished for it.
“Please, don’t…” she whimpers, sobs choking her words as I flip her over on the bed, tossing her nightgown over her supple ass and thronging the butt of her panties up her crack, exposing her beautiful flesh.
My hand rubs over each globe. “Begging is futile. I know your body better than you do. Besides, I take what’s mine.”
“No, please. Anything else. I’ll do anything,” she begs.
A dark chuckle rumbles out of me as I remove my glove, rear back, and slap her ass cheek.
The shock of it ripples up my arm, leaving behind a delicious sting.
Her cry of surprise only feeds the looming darkness. “Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep, Greer.”
Another slap.
She hisses, trying to crawl away from me, but I bend my knees against the backs of hers, pinning her in place.
Another slap.
Her face is buried in the bed, and I don’t know if the little beast is crying or moaning, and it’s making me furious.
“Look at me!” I growl, my voice carrying through the room. Bear snarls in the other room from his kennel.
It had been too easy to lure him in there now that he and I know one another.
She lifts her face from the duvet, casting her eyes over her shoulder at me, murder sphering their surface.
Another slap, this one the hardest yet. I let my hand linger in the aftermath of the blow, drawing heat into the mark.
She grits her teeth, and it makes me angrier. She’s holding back something, and I want to know what it is.
When I slide my hand beneath her ass, she bucks wildly, trying to escape, a scream rending the air as Bear thrashes in his cage.
Hurrying, I force her face back into the mattress, bending my body over hers, the toes of my tactical boots barely hanging onto the rug. Two fingers probe her wet heat, satisfied when I find her drenched.
“Stop hiding from me. Stop hiding from the darkness your soul is bathed in.”
Plunging my fingers inside, I force her face further into the mattress, relishing in the jerking response of her body as she tries to not only fight me out of her pussy but to breathe.
“I know your secret, Greer Allen. I know about the man that you killed. I know that you have blood all over those pretty manicured hands. I also know how your story ends if you don’t learn to behave for me.”
Fisting her hair, I tug her face away from the bed.
She chokes, dragging massive breaths into her lungs. “You can’t know. No one does.”
Her choked whimper is all I need to add another finger inside her.
She’s beside herself, rightfully so. It will take some time to work the defiance out of her.
And I’m willing to give her every bit of mine.
“I know.”
“How?” she cries.
“Because I’m the man you killed.”
Her scream is muffled as I pull my fingers out of her, letting go of her hair.
Turning her over, I swipe my drenched fingers across her face in conquest. “Behave yourself, pretty poison, or I’ll be back for you sooner than I want to be. And I don’t like to be forced into anything.”
She fights her nightgown down, her body shaking violently as I shove back into my glove and head out the window I came through.
Looking back, I etch the vision of her into my brain: flushed cheeks, swollen lips, my hand prints decorating her ass, puffy, red eyes, and a confused look in them, that’ll haunt me.
Until it’s time to take her home, that is.