Chapter 23 #2
“I should be honest with you too.” We should talk about everything to do with whatever happened to him before he was made into a frankenstruct, though the very idea makes me queasy.
“Go on.” He splays his hand on my shoulder and looks completely untroubled.
I could so get used to his casual touches…and those not-casual orgasmic ones.
“Ummm. I think I said I wanted to find out who murdered my father?”
“Yes. You did. I said I’d help you in exchange for loads of fucking.” Now he smiles?
“Truth.” Was it a bargain deal? Probably. I twist and kiss his hand, thinking. “I have already found out who did it. It was Clay Skinner, or men he commanded. He basically confessed and threatened me when I went to see him yesterday at the Revenant Institute.”
“He what?” Kail pushes back and sits up as if he’s on springs.
I lever myself off the bed, lean on my arm. “That’s why those men came for me. He told me to leave Revenant, or else he would do something bad to me that might involve me stopping breathing.” I tweak a corner of my mouth, wait to see what Kail says.
“That’s…can’t you tell the law here? Whoever that is.”
“It’s Sheriff Bob Baxter. I believe he’s in the pocket of the institute.”
“Try? Is it not worth it?”
“I don’t know. I’d rather wait. It might implicate me…us, in the new murders, you ummm did.” I stare at the sheet between us while he strokes the back of my head.
“The men who aimed to kill you.”
He’s assuming those two were sent to do that. In the light of day, I think that unlikely. They were meant to scare me. Step one in the Clay manifesto.
“Maybe. So, anyway, as I was trying to sa,. I know the answer to that question. What do I really want? I want revenge. I want the man or men involved to suffer how my father did.”
“Right. Right.” A frown line cuts between his eyes, joining all the scars that weave over his face. The one bisecting his nose is the best. I wouldn’t know what to do if he was normal, and somehow the scars make him handsomer. They add a dash of wickedness.
“Revenge is good,” he says, drawing me out of my contemplation of his looks.
“Oh.” Well, this turned out better than I thought it would.
“Do you have a plan? Any idea about how to get your revenge?”
A very good question. “Not…exactly?” Maybe if I stare at the bed it will appear in magical script. “I don’t have a plan. I need one, don’t I?”
The noise he makes is a sort of a pained squeak, and it makes me look. He’s dragging his hands down his scarred face as if horrified.
“What?”
“You have the institute, which must be big, though my memory is fuzzy. Worth millions, maybe, in the way of your revenge.”
“Billions,” I mutter.
“Billions? So, the institute can throw money at this, bury you in violence or whatever is possible, legally, illegally, whatever they want.”
“You’re with me.” It sounds pitiful.
“I am like a baby that has muscle. I barely know what I’m doing at any second.
My mind is forever vomiting up things I didn’t know I knew.
Yes, this fist can kill.” He makes a big solid awesome fist for me.
Muscles bulge along his arm, the scars and abraded sutures writhe, and I’m impressed, despite his argument.
“But I don’t know how to do revenge. I don’t know what your plan should be.
Put Clay before me and I can make him dead, but that’s all I can promise. ”
“I wish. You, a baby? I do know what you mean, and it’s depressing. Gah.” I bury my face in the bed for a moment. Idiot. A plan, a plan, my kingdom for a plan.
He strokes my hair in consolation until I resurrect myself and lift my head.
“Before I forget. I will get something to remove those stitches left in you, and the staples. I think I know someone to ask.”
He eyes the tattered ones on his arm. “Sure.”
“You know…the McCluskers seemed tuned in to most everything. They weren’t too bothered by you showing up. And those Weirdos…” Can I involve them?
It could be dangerous. Could be? Very likely it will be. I might be asking them to do illegal stuff?
“That book club you went to yesterday to meet people. That was them? The Weirdos. Yeah, I followed you for a few hours.”
“Stalker.”
“I enjoyed it. Me being your stalker is why you’re alive.”
I reach over to pat his side. “Thank you, again. Let’s have some toast before we go see the neighbors. I might confess to them.”
Wait. How did Kail know anything about the institute, apart from that Clay works there? Does he know the institute made him? I add this question to that note I made about talking to him about everything to do with how he got here.
“Telling the neighbors seems completely wrong.”
“Yet they are oddly capable. They already helped me fend off a massive, mean monster with their weaponry.” I smile to signal the joke.
“Huh. True. You definitely need spanking.”
I push up onto all fours, and his gaze drops to my chest where my breasts are on full display, then I leap off the bed and prance away. I’m naked, of course, and showing off my ass as I pirouette through the doorway.
Is the day after a double murder supposed to feel this good? I feel like dancing all day long.
With a roar, Kail bounds off the bed, making it squeak and rattle.
He lands with a thud on the floor with both feet, then he leaps after me.
I shriek and hightail it along the upstairs balcony, hitting the corner post of the stairs with my hand to do a left-hand turn before I sprint downstairs as fast as humanly possible.
He, alas is not human, so he catches me at the bottom, pins me to the floor, and delivers a spanking that really should not be as sexy as it is.
I’m left there, ass stinging, with the echoes thrumming through me lower down to all those intimate places as he climbs to his feet.
Even my nipples are happy about this and have scrunched into peaks.
I’m still panting from the run when I rise to my hands and feet and eye him where he stands behind me.
It’s not quite a shock that the spanking has me aroused, again. Or that I’m dying for cock.
I waggle my ass then collapse onto my forearms. Then I sigh. My nipples brush the cold timber floor.
Grinning, he shakes his head, even though his hard-on is sitting there, front and center, begging me to ride it. “Nope.”
I bop my forehead on my arms, cursing quietly.
This shop had better exist. I’ll do a search while we make toast and coffee.
Funny how when we’re at the counter on the stools and I’m tapping out that search on Duck-Duck, he leans in, catches sight of my search and goes still.
“No?” I pause. “I thought you wanted this, and there it is.” I spin the phone. “The Love Realm. Sex Toys R Us. And on Main Street.”
“It’s good.” He nods. “Perfect.”
“I’ll get the dragon one that’s bigger than a T-rex then?” Absentmindedly, I grab another triangle of buttered toast, though I’m still wondering why he seemed worried about the search.