Chapter 31
HARPER-RAYN
Knight’s warm arm rests over my waist, holding me against his chest as he sleeps soundly behind me, but me? I haven’t been able to sleep a wink since the moment Mom was admitted to the hospital. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not my mother’s welfare I’ve been concerned about.
It’s three in the morning, and my eyes are starting to sting. It’s been well over forty-eight hours since I last slept, and I’ve never felt so frustrated. I just need to close my eyes and drift off into a peaceful sleep, but apparently, it’s easier said than done.
Letting out a sigh, I slip out from under Knight’s arm.
If I stay here much longer, my endless groans of frustration are going to wake him, and as much as I’d love the company while I waste away during the night, I’m not going to do that to him.
Not when he has such a high-risk job. He needs to be on the ball every moment of the day, and my sleepless night won’t be the reason why he goes into work tired.
Hell, I think I’ve already caused him enough stress. He doesn’t need any more of it.
Padding out of our room, I take myself to the couch and get comfortable under the throw blanket before finding my Kindle on the coffee table.
I flip through my options, trying to find something that could potentially take me away from the horrors of reality, when a strange shiver trails down my spine.
I sit up straighter on the couch, the shiver turning into goose bumps as the odd sensation of someone watching me prickles my skin.
My heart starts to race, and I shoot to my feet, spinning around to find a figure standing in the hallway, his dark stare captivated by me beneath that vampiric mask.
I suck in a breath, my body already trembling.
He’s come for me. It wasn’t enough to almost kill me in the parking garage or to murder Dr. McKullan, but I knew that. I knew it right from the beginning. He wasn’t going to stop until he had claimed every inch of me. Until I was broken beyond repair.
I frantically search the room for anything to use as a weapon, anything to defend myself against this monster, when I realize the only weapon I have is my voice. I take a deep breath, preparing to scream for Knight, when the masked stalker shakes his head.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk, little kitten,” he purrs, his voice making my stomach tie up in knots. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Holy fucking shit.
This isn’t Elias. It’s my masked stalker, the man Knight had me committed to a psych ward to get rid of, the man for whom I take meds every day to ensure he can never return.
Only those meds haven’t been taken. I’ve washed them down the sink or flushed them down the toilet, leaving my consciousness defenseless.
“It’s you,” I breathe, keeping my tone low.
As he strides toward me, I instinctively back up, my heart racing faster than ever before, but he moves too swiftly, and when my back hits the living room wall, he steps right into me, towering over me with those dark, deadly eyes locked on mine.
“It seems somebody is trying to claim what belongs to me.”
I shake my head. “Not yours.”
He reaches for the delicate fabric of my sleep shirt and lifts it up until he finds the letters he carved into my skin, the raised scars spelling out a single word that has haunted me since the very first day this began—M I N E.
“Perhaps it’s time I remind you where your loyalties should lie.”
Raising my chin, I look him dead in the eye.
“You’re a figment of my imagination. A nobody.
I don’t belong to you, and the second you give me what I want—which you will, by the way—I’ll be ending this and giving myself to the man I truly belong to.
No more twisted games. No more fucking with my head. You can’t hurt me anymore.”
A deep laugh rumbles through his chest as he grips my chin in a bruising hold. “It looks like my pretty little kitten has finally discovered how to use her claws.”
“You’re not getting anything out of me. All I need to know is how to end this with Elias. Tell me what I need to know, and then you need to leave and never come back.”
His gaze darkens from within the terrifying mask, his hands dropping to my hips and clutching tight. “Mmmm. So feisty.”
“How do I end it?”
He whips me around until my chest is pressed hard against the wall, his large body moving right in behind me until I feel the hardness of his cock grinding against my ass, and I have to remind myself that none of this is real.
He can’t hurt me. It’s all in my head. There’s no blade in his hand.
No fucked-up bloodied rose. He’s nothing more than a hallucination.
“You don’t, kitten. You let the vile man claim you. You let him take you and violate you in every way, you let him end you, because that’s what you want deep down, isn’t it? You deserve it. After all, the good doctor is dead because of you. The SWAT officer. Gone. And it’s all your fault.”
I shove back against him, but he presses harder, his cock grinding against my ass. “Tell me this isn’t what you want,” he purrs in my ear as my body begins to respond to his skilled touch. “This isn’t why you called me here?”
I swallow over the growing lump in my throat.
“No,” I say, but my voice shakes, and suddenly I have no idea what I want.
It was always so good with him, so explosive and powerful.
He has nothing on Knight, but he knows exactly what I need and when I need it.
Though I suppose that has everything to do with the fact that he literally lives rent-free inside my head.
“You don’t exist.”
He scoffs as his hand plunges inside my sleep shorts and immediately thrusts into my soaking core, his thick, skilled fingers making my whole body tremble with pleasure.
“No?” he questions, his fingers splitting inside me and massaging my walls with tantalizing strokes that make my knees buckle beneath me. “You don’t feel that?”
“Fuuuuck,” I groan, my hands pressed against the wall.
He doesn’t stop, and soon enough, my eyelids begin fluttering as his thumb joins the party, pressing against my clit and rubbing tight, needy circles with just the right amount of pressure.
“What did I tell you, kitten? There’s nowhere you can hide from me.
Nowhere you can run. I will always keep coming for you.
Always find you,” he tells me as his fingers curl just right.
“There’s no escaping me, Harper. You belong to me. ”
I shake my head as waves of pleasure crash through me like a tsunami. “I belong to Knight.”
“No,” he growls in my ear, his fingers thrusting deeper, wilder. “Mine!”
“I’ve never been yours.”
“Tell me you want to play my game,” he insists, a desperation in his dark tone, as if trying to push me over the edge, trying to weaken my mindset and any progress we’ve achieved in therapy, but it won’t work. Knight has brought me too far.
“Oh, I want to play your game alright, but not with you,” I tell him.
“You’re not the one I want. You’re not the one I give myself to every night.
Not the one who feasts between my thighs.
He’s the man I come home to. He’s the man who holds my heart in the palm of his hand, and it’s his soul that’s bound to mine. Not you. Never you.”
He pushes me further, his thumb madly rolling over my clit as a strange distance seems to form between us, as though someone just cut a tether that I didn’t realize existed. “You want to know how to stop Elias?” he questions, an edge to his tone.
“Yes,” I gasp, my chest heaving against the wall while I tip my head back against his big shoulder as a familiar tightening pulses deep within my core. “Yes! Tell me.”
His fingers split inside me again, working me right to the edge, and as my knees begin to shake, my hips frantically jolt.
The raw, intense pleasure rocks through me like an electric current.
It’s too much to hold on to as his curled fingers massage my walls and drive me insane.
My orgasm grips me in a choke hold, exploding through my body and shattering me like glass.
Hot pulses of undiluted pleasure blast through me as I reach back and grip his strong thigh, my fingers digging in as I struggle to keep myself standing.
“There’s only one way you stop a man like Elias Slater,” he murmurs in my ear as the high consumes me, my walls spasming around his skilled fingers.
He’s relentless, just like Knight, and his fingers work me like a fucking magic wand.
Then, just as I reach my absolute high, he says three little words that send me crashing back down to earth. “You kill him.”
I suck in a gasp, suddenly feeling cold, and as my body stops trembling, he pulls his fingers free of me, and I fix my sleep shorts as I press away from the wall and spin to face him.
Only he’s no longer standing right behind me.
He’s clear across the room, staring at me with his head tilted, looking like the perfect masked psychopath.
“What did you just say?”
“You heard me, kitten. There’s only one way you end this, and it’s with his life in your hands.”
I swallow hard, my chest heaving for a whole new reason. “Do I really have it in me?”
“You killed me, didn’t you?”
A softness appears over him, and I suddenly realize that I can see straight through him, and every passing second, his body becomes more transparent.
He’s leaving, and this time, I think it might be for good.
“Wait,” I gasp, a desperation clutching my chest, feeling as though I still have so many questions to ask, so much I still don’t know or understand. “What’s your name?”
A soft breath sounds through the room as I settle my gaze on his fading eyes, a brokenness I’m entirely too unsure about settling into my chest. “I don’t have a name, kitten. I am you. I exist only for you.”
And with that, he disappears out of the living room, leaving me standing here all alone, my body trembling with unease as I take deep, heavy breaths.
My hands shake, and I can’t help but feel lost. It felt so real, yet I know deep down that was just a hallucination.
Just a warped reality my brain made up in order to deal with the stress of everything that’s been going down.
I take a moment, waiting for the uncontrollable shaking to fade from my body. The moment it’s gone, and I’m finally able to put one foot in front of another, I find myself racing to the kitchen, a whole new kind of panic surging through my veins.
Reaching up above the fridge, I grab the little canister of pills before hastily tipping one out into my hand, and before I even get a chance to fill a glass of water, I pop it into my mouth and swallow it dry.
Now that I’ve gotten exactly what I need, I won’t risk myself again.
“Doll?” Knight’s voice sounds from behind me. “Everything good?”
I whirl around, my eyes wide as I find Knight watching me with a deep suspicion in his eyes, his gaze locked on the open canister of pills in my hand, and I don’t doubt that he sees the crazy in my eyes, the madness of my hallucination still pulsing through my veins.
“All good,” I tell him a moment later, fixing the cap back on the canister. “Couldn’t sleep, and realized I hadn’t taken one of these today.”
He nods and slowly approaches me before taking the little canister from my hands and placing it back up onto the high shelf for me before closing the cupboard. “You sure?” he murmurs, his fingers brushing my messy hair back off my face.
“Promise, I’m perfect,” I whisper into the darkened kitchen before pressing up onto my tippy-toes and brushing a gentle kiss over his lips. “Can you take me back to bed?”
Knight captures my lips in his, deepening our kiss as his arm scoops behind the back of my knees, folding me up into his strong arms as he turns on his heel and stalks out of the kitchen.
“My pleasure,” he tells me, and as he makes his way back down the hall, I hook my arms around the back of his neck, more than ready to spend the rest of my sleepless night losing myself to him.