Chapter 15
Greer
What have I done?
The soft snores of the man beside me cover the house’s silence, and Bear’s warmth seeps into my feet, giving me some sense of normalcy.
What’s not normal is what I did an hour ago on my knees.
The Oakland Nightstalker has his hand on my hip while he sleeps.
His sleeping implies he has some trust in me. Enough to think I won’t slip out of bed and murder him.
I barely made it through the first time I tried to kill him with my psyche intact. A second intentional attempt would unravel me.
I try and fail to fall asleep before slipping out of bed without rousing my stalker or my traitor dog.
Wandering to the only other room I know will entertain my restless brain, I drop into the computer chair and acclimate myself to his system.
It would be easier if I could keep the mouse on the correct screen. However, it has gone missing twice, and I have had the worst time finding it.
His computer is unprotected, but a man like him doesn’t worry about someone breaking in. He’d just kill them.
A chill runs along my spine, causing me to sit straighter as I click on a file on the desktop with my name on it.
File after file comes up, each with a matching date. Each is a video.
Clicking on one from December last year, I hear my cough echo through the room.
Shit.
Fumbling with the system, I finally get it turned down before clicking play again. There has to be a reason he kept this file.
Last year, before Christmas, I caught a nasty chest cold that I was sure was going to turn into pneumonia.
It didn’t, thank god.
My cough sounds awful.
My stalker enters the room, placing a bag down on the edge of the bed. He checks my forehead for fever before shooting it with a temperature gun I’d left lying on the table.
The black-and-white video doesn’t tell me if I still have a fever, but he places it down and doesn’t seem too concerned.
Maybe not, then.
Opening his bag, he removes a contraption and screws a small mask onto it, then kneels at the edge of the bed and places it over my face.
A nebulizer, I realize.
He gave me nebulizer treatments in my sleep?
Sitting back, I breathe through the heavy emotion lumping in my throat as my eyes well.
I don’t think anyone’s ever cared for me so selflessly. Sure, he’s a psychopath, but he has to have some redeemable qualities.
He kept me from getting worse.
I click on another video. He’s standing beside my bed, just watching.
It was earlier in his stalking, only two months into sneaking into the house.
Bear wanders in, giving him a growl. When he turns to look down at Bear, the skull on his mask glows in the camera’s night vision.
He pulls something from his pocket and tells Bear to sit.
A treat, I realize, once Bear listens and gives it to him.
I click onto another, then another, watching him care for me through ups and downs and earning Bear’s trust with treats and toys.
He takes him outside and plays with him.
Some of the videos show him touching and teasing me, but most show him just spending time with us, with me, of course, unaware.
Why did he keep the ones he didn’t touch me in?
I click on the one I watched before with him. August 9th.
I clearly ask for more, and yet I remember none of this.
Leaning in, I watch the way he fucks me slowly. Deliberately. It’s like he knows he needs to savor me.
I’m shifting in my chair as my body temperature rises, my thighs pressing together.
“Poison?” I hear from the doorway.
Startled, I accidentally flung the mouse to the floor. It shatters as I stand, and the chair rolls backward.
I smash all the buttons on the keyboard, trying to get my moans to stop sounding through the room.
“God, I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you another one.” I crouch to pick up the pieces, and he walks closer.
Dropping before me, he swats my hands away from the mess, lifting his fingers to tip my chin back. “What were you doing?”
“Getting to know you,” I blurt. “You know me, but I don’t know you. You stole that from me.”
He eyes the video I was watching. “You watched that one three times. What did you learn?”
I swallow.
How long had he been standing there?
“You savored me. Like I was delicate. Like it was the only time you were going to fuck me.”
“I savored you because of how you felt. Because I had no fucking choice; your cunt felt so good gripping me.”
“Come to bed.” He grabs my hand and leads me toward the door.
When we get back into the bedroom, he turns me toward him. Slowly, delicately, he undoes my braid, flicking the hair tie through the dark room.
“Hey!” I protest.
“No.”
He tugs me toward the bed and tucks in behind me, tossing a leg over my hip as his breathing evens.
“You took care of me when I was sick,” I say.
“Mm. More than once.”
“Why?”
“You’re mine. I take care of my things.”
Stupidly, I smile as I shut my eyes.
I drift off, wondering if it’s really a bad thing to be in the arms of a killer.
Even if I already know the answer.
Today, I’m still confused about everything I saw on the computer system last night. The way he cared for me and touched me with such a haunting delicacy… it has me reeling.
Sounds from the kitchen alert me that he’s still here. He decided not to leave me alone after yesterday.
I grin.
Even with how I gave him hell, he hadn’t laid a hand on me in anger, which is a stark contrast to the killer I know him to be.
He never expressly said he was the Oakland Nightstalker, but he didn’t deny it, either.
The knowledge that he’d been on that road to lure someone to their death that night still has me in a chokehold.
His obsession with me started with a hit and run, one I’m wondering if fate had a hand in.
Walking into the kitchen, I can feel how tangled my hair is. I sleep like a fish out of water, so I braid it. But he doesn’t seem too fond of my braid.
Brushing it is going to be so fun.
“Morning,” my stalker says.
I grunt, walking toward the counter where he’s preparing something.
“Your coffee is made right here.” He turns, handing me a mug.
It’s the perfect shade, and I narrow my gaze at him. “It’s annoying how much you know me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“Mm. Well, you’ll have to get over that. I made you some breakfast. It’s in the microwave.”
“How’d you know to have my coffee ready?”
“You make this whimpering sound when you wake. I heard you and started your cup. I know you’re not a morning person.”
I digress, I hate that he knows me so much because it’s clouding my judgment. It’s hard to hate him for everything he’s done when he’s glaringly perfect, and it’s because he has an edge. He’s been watching me for two years, studying my every move. So, of course, he’s good at taking care of me.
“What’s on the agenda today?”
“We discuss the rules of the house.”
“Don’t escape?” I ask.
“Too late for that, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t get far.”
“You got further than I thought you would.”
Pride fills me.
“I also thought you’d want to take a ride later. If not, that’s fine too. There’s plenty I can get done around here.”
“A ride would be nice.” Even if it’s so that I can secretly get a lay of the land to orient myself for my next escape attempt, because there will be another.
“I got you a helmet. Well, I’ve had it for a while, but still, it’s yours.”
I hate the butterflies in my stomach.
This man killed Brent. He’s killed every man I dated since we crossed paths.
He also drugged and molested me…
Even if I sounded willing in those tapes, I didn’t have a choice, I remind myself.
“What else is there to do around here?” I ask. I’m used to so much work that I leave on Friday with a longer to-do list than I started with on Monday.
“Well, there’s a library down the hall, and a pool out back, and I have a full gym, if you’re into fitness.”
He knows I’m not. He also knows I’m asthmatic because I spied my inhaler on the bathroom counter, when I clearly recall leaving it at home by accident when I went to Allison’s.
He went to my house and got things I’d need.
I ignore the warmth in my belly as I fork through the eggs he scrambled for me.
There are three locked doors. If one’s a gym and one’s a library, what’s the other?” I ask.
“Pray you never find out.”
A kill room, possibly?
I swallow over a speck of fear crawling up my throat. “Got it.”
He sighs. “Listen, last night…”
I shake my head, cutting him off. “Don’t ruin last night. It was perfect. I felt free to do what I wanted.”
“You don’t feel guilty?”
I laugh. “Why would I? I initiated it.”
He narrows his gaze at me as if he doesn’t believe me. “Well, then. Let’s talk rules.”
Stalker’s Rules For Survival
Do not try to escape.
Do not touch the computer equipment.
Eat three meals a day.
Remain hydrated
If taken into town, speak to no one.
Do as you’re told without argument.
No Masturbation.
Please direct all your needs to me, as I’ll be your sole provider.
No clothes while sleeping.
Do not at any point and for any reason put yourself in danger.
Looking over the paper he’s typed up and printed, I can’t help but hover over the two most intriguing ones: No masturbation and no clothes while sleeping. Sleeping in the bed beside him in the nude ensures my availability to him at any point in the night, which I don’t hate, but I also don’t love.
It might further my cause, though.
Even if I hate to think of myself as an animal merely trying to survive, I am. And my body is a tool I can use.
“I’ve broken most of these already,” I say sheepishly. “Will I be punished?” Fear skitters through my bones. Recalling how he punishes, I decide it isn’t something I want to go through again.
“Well, they didn’t exist until now. So, no, poison, you won’t be.”
I swallow, hating his knowing smirk.
“Alright, then.”
“So, you agree to them?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
I laugh. “Okay, then.”
“You’ve masturbated while here?” he asks, his dark eyes growing even darker as he stares at me from where he’s leaning on the table before me, his nose tantalizingly close to mine.
“Why? Would you roll the tapes back to watch?”
“Would you like me to?”
I grin. “No. I haven’t. Because you told me the other night that you’d know.”
His smirk has so much depth that I might drown in it.
“Maybe we’ll amend that rule to only masturbate where I can watch you.”
“On the cameras or in person?”
“Either one.”
“Are we actually changing the rule, or is this tentative?”
“You’ve got a wicked tongue,” he says, his tone darkening.
“As you well know.”
The implication of my words hangs between us momentarily before he leans into me, his nose skimming mine.
I try to keep my wits about me, but his presence is so consuming—like a heated blanket on a cold day, like the sun when at its peak in the sky.
“Don’t toy with me, poison.”
Clearing my throat, I force my eyes to widen because they’d grown heady under his scent and proximity. “I’m not.”
“We’re changing the rule. Give me your list,” he whispers, to which I hold up my paper between us, my hand shaking.
Another grin spreads across his lips as he walks down the hall to his stalker room.
While he’s gone, I take a few steadying breaths, remembering my plan and trying to reel myself back in.
The sound of a printer shooting out paper rends the air before he reappears down the hall.
I realize he’s shirtless, and my eyes travel down his long torso, an eight-pack cutting into a V right above his low-slung sweatpants.
He’s gone shirtless before, but two deep scars are visible in the light spilling through the windows.
One cuts across his chest, and the other is jagged and thick, running across his abdomen.
He hands back the paper, and I lay it down on the tabletop, lifting my finger to run it over his mangled scars.
“Attractive, aren’t they?” he grumbles.
“Well, they don’t take away from your beauty, if that’s what you’re trying to imply.”
Standing, I keep my hand on the one on his stomach, the worst one. “What happened?”
He laughs, and the sound is a bit maniacal. “Not like you care. So, let’s not pretend.”
“I do care, or I wouldn’t have asked.” My tone is cold and stern.
“Those are the scars from where you hit me, pretty poison. You know, the night you left me reeling in the middle of the road?”
“But this is so deep…”
“Mm. That part’s my fault. I had a knife in the other hand, you couldn’t see, unsheathed and ready to fight whoever got out of your car.”
My eyes widen, and for the first time, I realize I could have been the dead one that night.
A secret, stupid part of me believes he wouldn’t have followed through. That on some fate-twisted level, we’re connected, and he wouldn’t have had the strength.
But looking at him, knowing the things he’s done, I know that’s a fucked way of thinking that’ll only get me killed. Because I’m no fool, if it comes down to him or me, he’ll choose him every time.
I’m not safe with him, and it’s why I have to remain level-headed as I execute my escape plan.