Bonus Psychopath’s Kiss
Erik jerked awake, sitting up straight in his chair and reaching for his gun. He quickly realized he’d been woken by the beeping coming from his speaker. Setting his gun aside, he hit the enter key, ending the beeping.
He shouldn’t have fallen asleep. It’d been a long ass week. He hadn’t planned on having a job come up while enacting the final stages of his retirement plan.
He was 37.
Young for retirement, but the time had come to get out of the business and collect the $200 million he had sitting in a bank account in Barbados. Assuming he lived another 50 years, it was four million a year for the rest of his life. More than enough to keep him in tequila while he sat on a beach somewhere and enjoyed spectacular sunsets and the newest James Patterson novel. He’d been planning and saving since he turned 25 and realized the life he’d chosen, the life he’d been born to, wasn’t sustainable.
If he kept at it, he’d eventually get himself killed.
It was also a lonely life. No way to meet people.
There was only one person he was interested in anyway, but she only knew him as the contractor she’d worked a few jobs with years ago. Which was why the final part of his retirement plan was so critical.
Speaking of his plan… he leaned forward in his chair, blinking several times before focusing on the monitor. There she was. Tangled red hair, rosy cheeks from her walk, lipstick red lips and sparkling green eyes.
Letty.
Or more accurately, Lotus Gray.
It hadn’t taken him long to find her name and everything else about her once he put his mind to it. She hadn’t given up the goods easily though. Letty was a private person. She had to be. Safecrackers were a rare and dying breed, which meant if their services were needed, the client might do anything to get to one. If Letty had too much personal information floating about, she could be tracked.
Erik was nothing if not persistent though. It’s what made him good at his job. While Letty specialized in one particular skill, he was a Jack-of-all-trades. A burglar, an assassin, a security expert, a hacker, a bodyguard, a technical analyst, and the list went on. He was a loner who was expert level at many black-market skills.
He took jobs that appealed to him, but never worked for the same client twice. Well, almost never. In order to be close to Letty, he broke his number one rule, the rule that allowed him to work with relative ease of mind.
The first time he saw her, he’d been hired on to work as the inside man for a jewel heist on a five-person team. His job was to shut down the security system and subdue the guards so the rest of the team could get inside. Once he got them in, he was to walk away with an easy $100,000 for an afternoon’s trouble. And he would have walked away. Except for Letty.
When he laid eyes on her, it was like one of those cheesy movies. Time slowed and he stood frozen, staring at her with what he was sure was an expression of love, lust and complete stupidity.
She stuck her hand out as they were introduced, which he completely ignored because the scent of her strawberry shampoo and baby powder deodorant struck him and he could do nothing more than breathe in and out. Eventually she’d dropped her hand with a frown and moved away to talk to the other team members.
Nothing like that had ever happened to him before, and he was curious if it was a one-time thing. His job had very little to do with hers. He was only supposed to see her during the planning meeting, but after he finished his part of the job, instead of walking, he stuck around.
He couldn’t let what happened go.
He had to know if what he felt was real, or if his brain had taken a temporary leave of absence. So, he stalked her. He followed her back to her place, which was a feat in itself considering she was on Interpol’s radar and, out of necessity, had become very good at disappearing.
First, she flew from Basil, where the job had taken place, to Sydney, Australia, where she’d gone sight-seeing for a week, while switching hotels and identities every two days. He hadn’t slept much during that week as he surveilled each hotel she stayed in, following her from one to the next. Then she’d gone to Vancouver, Canada, completing the same tour she’d done in Sydney. Then she’d flown to Vienna, Austria, where she’d stayed in two separate hotels before finally going home.
Over the course of those few weeks, her appeal turned from curiosity to definite interest to full blown fixation. He couldn’t ignore his obsessions. He was a tenacious guy, task driven, able to hyper-focus on each task until it was completed. His obsessive focus had never landed on a person before. Letty would be the first and likely the last, since he rarely let his obsessions go.
It was while he was in Canada that he began to suspect his obsession was love. His heart beat faster every time he caught a glimpse of her. His palms sweated as he imagined touching her, holding her, fucking her. His mouth went dry when he thought about talking to her. All symptoms pointed to an increase in oxytocin levels.
Love.
He’d never fallen in love before. He didn’t talk to women. He didn’t talk to anyone if he could help it. He was anti-social and work-driven. He suspected he had some form of undiagnosed autism but didn’t know for sure. He was raised by a loving family, but they didn’t understand him. Couldn’t relate to him. They did the best they could, but he knew it was a relief when he moved out and moved on. They had other children who could provide what Erik could not.
He hadn’t seen his family in almost ten years and it was for the best. Occasionally he checked in on them and anonymously sent money. They probably figured out who the money was coming from, but it didn’t matter. He felt a sense of pride every time he saw a picture of his parents’ new five-bedroom country home on his mother’s social media feed.
He’d always known he was different. He had difficulty feeling things like love, remorse, grief. When their pet cat died of old age, the rest of the family had been devastated while he’d wanted to dissect it and see what its insides looked like. He hadn’t. He had enough understanding of how people worked to know his parents would’ve freaked.
He spent most of his childhood playing with electronics. Taking them apart and putting them back together in a better, more efficient configuration. He hated leaving his room for anything, including school. Everything he needed was in one place.
Finally, in an effort to get him out of his dungeon of a bedroom, his parents had enrolled him in karate classes. Surprisingly, he’d taken an instant liking to martial arts, despite the social aspect. He loved having a sense of power, and knowing how to subdue a person gave him that. He’d earned his first black belt before he was ten and had several by the time he moved out. When karate wasn’t enough for him, he’d turned his focus to weapons and then security.
Which was why Erik had skills in many sought after underworld professions.
He spoke to Letty on their second job together. He’d contracted on with the same team, but this time in the capacity of hired muscle. He was to get Letty safely into the vault she would need to access and then protect her while she worked.
The job had gone smoothly, the two of them working together like clockwork despite his heart pounding like he was running a marathon every time she was near. After they”d finished, she smiled at him, shook his hand and walked away.
Again, he followed her as she travelled the globe. This time to San Francisco, then Paris, then Vienna. He found out that she rented a studio apartment, located inside an abandoned warehouse outside of Vienna. It was paid for by a nearly untraceable numbered company. He’d persisted though, and followed the breadcrumbs until he had a name. From there he was able to get everything he needed on her.
He watched the screen as she entered her apartment and dropped a bag of groceries on the counter. She had her smartphone pressed to her ear as she pulled food from a cloth sack.
“Unlucky in love I guess,” she complained to her friend… he checked his other monitor for her call history. Call in progress with Violet Gray. Her best friend and foster sister. “Another bad date. I would have fucked him anyway, but he disappeared before we even finished our meal. Do you know I haven’t had sex in four years?”
He smirked. They first met each other four years ago. Their last meeting had been three years ago, on their third and final job together. It was then, as he inhaled her scent once more, as he listened to her voice and watched her work, that he knew he would keep her. As she opened a safe containing $40 million dollars in uncut diamonds, he planned their future. He calculated that he would have to work for three more years than he’d originally planned so he would have enough saved for a companion when he went into retirement. He figured another $30 million should do it. She had a sizeable bank account too, but the majority of her earnings went into a mysterious fund. She rarely touched her own money except for travel and minor expenses.
His gaze strayed back to the computer monitor when she laughed suddenly, her joy coming through the speakers on his desk and gripping him by the throat.
Guilt rushed through him. He was going to destroy her laughter and take away her smile. But it would be temporary because he planned on giving her a lifetime of joy. He just had to make her love him first.
He touched the screen over her face, stroking her.
“Soon.”