Chapter Six
Alexandra
“You want me to kill you?”
My tongue clicks against the roof of my mouth and my jaw slams shut. I did not expect this. Do not even want to hear it. What I want to hear is groveling, begging, tearful cries for mercy before I finally torture and kill him.
Now that he’s asking for it instead of fighting it, it’s harder to keep my fists closed.
Instead, they drop to my sides, and I stare back at him, confused.
He nods. The corners of his lips might even be in a smile.
“Yes. I want you to kill me.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter? I murdered your brother. Hell, I’ve killed more than just him. You’d be doing the world a fucking favor by spilling my brains on your living room floor. So do it already.”
There’s a noise outside. A thump. Probably a neighbor, maybe a rat; this isn’t the best of neighborhoods, which is the entire reason I chose to live here — my neighbors in this god forsaken craphole of an apartment building mind their own business. I know that once I kill Dixon, none of them will ask questions about the noises they might’ve heard, and none of them will talk to the police. That kind of security is worth the fact that I often carry some sort of weapon — mace, a knife, and one time a hatchet, and I felt really cool while doing it — in my hand when coming home late from work.
I shake my head and return my focus to the man in front of me. “This is really what you want? You don’t want to live?”
“Don’t deserve it. You’re not the only person I’ve hurt, Alexandra. Stop fucking around and do it.”
Another thump. Louder this time.
I frown at the door.
My next-door neighbor is away on vacation for the next three weeks — I know because he asked me to water his stupid plants, which I agreed to do, but only because he paid me fifty bucks in advance — and the apartments both above and below mine are vacant, because this is a shitty building and only the truly desperate live here.
What the hell is making that noise?
Are there squatters?
It wouldn’t surprise me. Because this building isn’t only crappy, but the owners want twice what’s reasonable in rent and the only reason I can afford it is I have trained my bar-tending customers to tip me very well through the ingenious art of showing just the right amount of cleavage.
“I don’t believe you.”
Don’t, and can’t, even though the proof is right in front of me. He’s not supposed to be like this. He’s supposed to be an unrepentant killer, not some haunted, handsome man with an earnest death wish.
“Don’t believe I want to die? Why? If you need help understanding it, I can give you the number of some guys on the volunteer fire squad. Call them. They’ll tell you I’ve been acting strange, taking risks.”
“Firefighting is a risk. Everyone knows that. That’s not proof of anything.”
“Of course it’s a risk. But it’s even riskier when the other men on your squad have to pull you back from the flames. When they have to warn you over and over that charging into a building that’s burning so severely that it’s unsaveable is a bad idea.”
A heavier thump. Closer still.
I should go check it out, that’s definitely not one of my neighbors, and if it is a rat, it’s one big enough that I should probably be armed, but there’s something so enrapturing, so pained in Dixon’s eyes that I can’t look away.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
I shake my head. There’s agony in his words. Agony, and something else. Something deeper. This has to be a game. A trick.
“You’re lying.”
“I wish I was, Alexandra. The fact is, I want you to—”
Those distant-but-growing-closer thumps become something entirely different: a bang. A crack. A crash as the front door of my apartment flies open and a man in a black ski mask bursts through. Eyes that are only dark brown orbs floating in a sea of black lock right onto me, and he raises something in his hand.
A gun.