Chapter 8
ROMEO
> Observation: catastrophic blue balls.
> Effect: self-control degrading.
> Containment protocol: tie her to the bed and fuck her until the end of time.
> Note: does she ever wear a bra…or own a full-length shirt, for that matter?
When I open the door to Gabi’s bedroom, her bathroom door is shut, and I can hear the shower running. Beppe blinks up at me, letting out a huff of excitement as he comes to greet me.
“Hey, runt.” I scratch his head, and he wags his tail as I pull a treat from my pocket and give it to him.
Happy with his score, he runs back to his blanket to gnaw on it.
I set the bouquet I brought for Gabi on her nightstand, and when I glance over at her bed, I freeze. The giant stuffed teddy bear peeking out from beneath the blankets catches me off guard.
At first, I think I’m imagining the similarities, but when I pull back the covers, I can see that I’m not.
It’s well-worn, the fur faded and threadbare in some spots, the stitching nearly coming apart at the seams in others. Despite my brain being nuked that day, the memory of what came before the strike still lingers.
We rode every ride at the fair, and I chased her through the funhouse while she screamed the entire way. Maybe it was the wolf in me, but that sound hardwired itself into my DNA, satisfying a primal need I hadn’t even known existed.
When I caught her, I pressed her up against the mirrored wall, both of us breathless. All I wanted to do was crush my lips against hers. I’d thought about it relentlessly when I palmed my cock in bed every night. But even then, there was a part of me that felt like I might ruin her.
So instead, I took her to the shooting gallery and played until I won her the biggest prize they had. She looked at me like I was her hero when the attendant handed it to her.
Staring at it now, I’m not sure what to make of it. She’s been hiding it somewhere, though I wouldn’t know where. For all my moral failings, I have enough decency not to have a camera in her bedroom.
I could argue that it means something, but Gabi has always loved anything soft and fluffy. Besides that, there’s the small, irritating as fuck detail that she’s been writing about some other guy in her journal, and I don’t know who the hell he is.
She wants to keep things ‘casual’ because of him, and that alone is enough to earn him a place on my hit list.
There’s an entire playlist on her phone dedicated to him, and the way she describes him in her journal doesn’t help.
Brivido (Bree-vee-doh): a shiver, shudder, or thrill.
If he were a shark, he would have been a megalodon—built for destruction.
The way he looks at me hijacks my entire nervous system.
Feeling his presence before I even see him.
Words that settle under my skin.
When he’s in my orbit, I can’t concentrate on anything else.
If he were a song, he’d be C.O. by R&C.
Everything she writes about him is abstract and sensory-heavy, and for someone who analyzes patterns all day long, I can’t figure it out. But that’s probably a good thing. I doubt she’d ever forgive me if I killed her crush.
In the years since I basically told Gabi to fuck off, I’ve tried to do the right thing and let her move on.
I probably sped up the process by being an asshole to her at every turn.
I knew eventually, she’d find someone else.
He was always some mythical, distant creature that I’d fucking despise no matter what.
Whenever I considered her future, I fantasized about ripping his throat out, whoever he was.
But it always felt like I had time before that happened.
The future has a tendency to sneak up on you, though, and now she’s engaged to my dipshit cousin and crushing on some other random asshole.
It bothers me that I don’t know who she interacted with before I started watching. There’s no record of him anywhere on her phone, so they must have only talked at school. But since that was pre-Julian, I have no way of knowing who it could be.
The fact that she’s still pining for him, though? That’s a fucking problem.
I hate the way other men look at her. It triggers every territorial instinct I have when they start sniffing around.
Admittedly, I may have made a few of them shit themselves when they got too close. A little violence and a lingering threat go a long way. Still, on principle, I’d like to choke the life from their eyes.
Letting that thought go for now, I move around her bedroom and look through her things. All her books are special editions of historical romances in various pastel shades. But one title appears in five different versions.
Pride and Prejudice.
Presumably, this is the Mr. Darcy she seems to obsess over in her online reading groups. A flip through the pages confirms it.
I set it aside, making a mental note to take home a copy so I can see what’s so special about this asshole.
Everywhere I look, there’s something quintessentially Gabi. Fashion magazines. Nail polish in every shade of pink that’s ever existed. Tea sets and fancy stationery. One half of her closet is an explosion of feathers, sequins, and pink. The other is all black.
I frown at a skirt the size of a thimble, wondering where she’s worn it and whose eyes I need to cut out.
In another drawer, I find her underwear, identical to the pair I stole.
I’ll never look at cherries the same again.
The blow-dryer in the bathroom switches on, and I wander back to her bed and sit down, propping myself against the headboard. I yank the stuffed teddy bear out of the covers and pose him beside me before I grab her phone from the nightstand.
I already know everything she does on here, but it’s something to pass the time while I wait.
When I unlock the screen, I check out her private Instagram page that only her friends know about.
The bio reads: Probably overstimulated. Social skills still loading.
Control-alt-delete that awkward thing I said.
Scrolling down, I find selfies of her and Beppe, along with pictures of her and her friends eating pastries, drinking mimosas, and celebrating every possible milestone with ice cream. Gabi always gets bubblegum.
In the mix, there are also a few random outfit-of-the-day posts, one of which I’ve burned into memory. She’s wearing a pink plaid skirt, white knee-high socks, and a cardigan. She looks like a geeky little librarian, and I’d give my left testicle to fuck her in that outfit just once.
I mutter a low curse as I glance down at my pants. Now I’ve got a goddamned hard-on.
The blow-dryer in the bathroom switches off. With the time I have left, I open her camera app and take a selfie in her bed, leaving it in her gallery.
I toss the phone back onto the nightstand. A second later, the bathroom door swings open, and Gabi walks out.
When she sees me sitting on her bed in the black balaclava, she freezes.
Her eyes wander over me in search of something familiar, but there’s nothing for her to see. A polycarbonate visor obscures my eyes beneath the mask, seamless and reflective, like the faceplate of a motorcycle helmet.
“Eros?” she squeaks.
“Expecting any other masked men in your bedroom?”
The modulated voice draws a shaky exhalation from her chest.
She lingers there, way too far out of reach for my liking, wearing nothing but a tiny pair of shorts and half a top with a little bow on the front.
“Scared of me, little shark?”
She hesitates, long enough for me to consider a hundred different ways to tell her I’m not a complete psychopath. But also—don’t fall in love with me. Just in case.
“Should I be?” she asks.
If I were being honest, I’d tell her yes.
Not because I have bad intentions, but because I can’t guarantee anything when I lose control.
Over the years, the episodes have decreased, but I’ll never eliminate them entirely.
It’s impossible to predict what could set me off, and being alone with Gabi is a risk I shouldn’t be taking. But I can’t fucking stop myself.
“Would it make a difference if I told you that I never want to hurt you?”
She thinks about it and takes a tentative step forward. “How did you get in here?”
“I have my ways.”
“Are those the same ways that helped you figure out where I was the other night and how to get back to the penthouse? Or what I order at my favorite bakery?”
“Possibly.” I shrug.
“So you are stalking me?”
“I prefer the phrase courting you from afar. It sounds less creepy.”
That cracks a smile from her, and I think we might be getting somewhere. She bites her lip as her eyes roam the length of me—from my black hoodie all the way down to my boots.
“Did you kill them?” She swallows.
I scoot to the edge of the bed and swing my legs over the side. “Come here.”
When she obeys me, it sends a shot of need straight to my dick.
I pull her closer and graze the back of her bare thigh. I’ve never felt anything as soft as her skin, and it irritates me that my glove is in the way.
“What are you wearing?” I groan, gripping the half-exposed cheek of her ass.
“Pajamas?”
“These are barely even underwear.” I drag my finger along the hem, fighting the urge to slip it inside.
“Don’t get distracted,” she says. “Did you kill them?”
I consider lying to her, so I don’t scare her away. But Gabi’s too smart for that, and I don’t want to do that to her.
“Acts of Service is my love language,” I tell her. “It was a romantic gesture.”
Her lip twitches as she fights a smile. Then she remembers that this is serious, and she’s letting a murderous lunatic grope her right now. I can see the war in her eyes, but I need her to verbalize it.
“Does it bother you?”