Chapter 11 Kat
KAT
PLAYLIST: JOKE’S ON YOU – CHARLOTTE LAWRENCE
Ican’t tell why I am here. Taking every risk I can as I play hide and seek with death and the devil. If I pull the trigger now, it’ll be over in a second. I have everything with me.
I have my backpack and my gun ready.
No one searched me, because Doug knows who I am, and no one suspects shy Ella.
Lilian has to pay for what she has done.
To me.
To all the others.
An infestation removed from the earth.
Only I can’t.
My body won’t let me.
Lilian stares at me as she whispers, “You’re here.”
So, she knows about my apartment and might suspect me at this point.
I should leave.
Or finally do it.
“I am,” I say instead and walk to her.
My rucksack drops onto the floor as I step around her desk and sit on it. She leans back in her chair, but I don’t let her.
I grasp her face with one hand and pull her into a kiss, with tongue.
The moment our lips meet, nothing is real anymore. Whoever we are, whatever will happen, I don’t care.
Lilian melts into my touch just as much as I become one with her. It doesn’t matter that an entire office can see us violate Clause four point one of a contract no one knows about through the glass doors around us.
My longing for her purrs through my chest down into my core. I want to pull her close, have her sit on my lap again, see her come.
She would most certainly murder me if I so much as tried it here. I wouldn’t care, though. I like an audience, but Lilian? Protected and private, Miss Perfect. I like teasing her, but I also recognize hard boundaries.
I bring the kiss to an end, even if I don’t want to. I have to find out what she knows and suspects about me. The loss of touch brings Lilian back to her senses, and she distances herself.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” I ask her. “You seem stressed.”
“Never you mind,” she snaps at me.
“You know, I am, per contract, an excellent listener with no ability to talk about anything you tell me,” I say with a silent chuckle.
She snorts out.
“Don’t tell me you have been worried about me?” I ask to tease her just enough to get something from her, and it works perfectly.
“Don’t make yourself more important than you are,” she says coldly.
“What was it you whispered when you saw me? ‘You’re here’, that’s right. Sounds like you cared.”
Anger burns through her eyes before she snaps. I am amazed every time how anger makes people spill all that’s going on in their minds.
“Is that what you want ot hear? That I care about you? That I was worried? Please, choke on it. Everything is a mess, my business, I am under infinite pressure, and you have nothing better to do than make everything about you.”
“I make you angry,” I say. “You care.”
She groans out in disbelief, jumps up from her chair, and turns her back to me as she stares outside the massive window front.
“Running from something is never a good idea,” I say before I can stop myself. I should give that advice to myself, but it’s so fun to tease her, push her.
“Sounds like you know,” she says without looking at me.
“Maybe,” I say, well aware I am entering dangerous waters.
“Your apartment, it was arson, wasn’t it?”
“Looks like it,” I say carefully, staring at her.
“Who are you running from?” she asks and turns towards me.
A voice in me shouts to tell her everything, come clean, and kill her afterwards, but she just delivered me the perfect cover for incinerating the apartment myself.
“Who says I am?” I ask, and she rolls her eyes.
“Come on, Ella, I’m not an idiot.”
“I know you’re not,” I answer hesitantly and look away. She’s waiting for me to give her an answer. Her eyes x-ray me.
“It’s more like a what than a who,” I tell her finally. It’s not a lie. I just don’t tell her, I am not running from them, but after them. To kill them all.
“A what?” she asks and walks up to me until she is so close that one of her legs pushes between mine. “Tell me,” she orders with longing in her voice.
“Demons,” I whisper as my lips trail along her neck. “Demons from the past.”
I know I said too much already. I revealed too much of me, too much of the truth, but my body doesn’t listen to me anymore.
“Me too,” she whispers in my ear, and I can’t believe she did. “Maybe we can run away together.”
Goosebumps spread over my skin.
I want to say yes.
Loose myself in her and become whoever she needs me to be.
But I can’t.
Because I can’t outrun my past.
I cup the side of her face with the palm of my right hand and look at her.
See me. See the real me. So this can finally be over, I tell her in my mind, while the words coming out of my mouth are entirely different.
“Look at me,” I tell her. “You are Lilian Anne Knightley. Whatever you touch works out. You and your privileged ass have all the possibilities in the world.”
A weak smile hushes over her face. One that goes straight into my chest.
“You are a boss baddie who does what she wants and goes for it. We all have weak moments. So get your ass up and become the predator instead of the prey.”
At this point, I fully hate myself.
Why the fuck do I build her up when I should crush her? Why? Why am I even here?
Lilian’s ice-blue eyes light up as her mouth tugs into a devilish smile—one that tells why I am here.
The fingers of my right hand brush back a strand of her hair and follow it back behind her ear.
Life would be so perfect if not for your sins, I tell her in my mind.
“My mother celebrates her birthday on Saturday next,” Lilian suddenly says. “You’re coming with me.”
No words come out of my mouth except stuttering.
“You wanted the family experience, there you go,” she says harshly. “You’ll beg me to leave once you’re there. I have hereby warned you.”
I can’t believe this is happening. She was supposed to be like Sutton. Drugging me. Using me. Pretending to get my papers. And now, she is inviting me to her mother’s birthday?
Or it’s the moment she gives you to her father, says a cautious voice in me. That’s more likely. And I know what I have to do.
I chuckle. “Parents generally like me,” I say. “Not my own, unfortunately.”
Lilian laughs wholeheartedly. Her rich laughter rumbles straight through my chest.
“My father likes no one; he just pretends to, so he can get either more money or more blowjobs from young women and way too young girls,” she says darkly.
“You don’t agree with him there?” I ask as we finally reach the waters I needed her in.
“Agree with him? Absolutely not. I have to, because he makes me. But—” she stops, wide-eyed, and the mask slips on.
I don’t know what to make of it.
“And your mother?” I ask to distract her. “What’s she like?”
“My mother, well…she is a very talkative, annoying, lonely lady with the sole hobby of annoying as many people as possible with details about my father’s and her own extracurricular activities.”
I snort.
“Sounds like a normal family to me,” I say, and have to bite my lip not to tell her what my real family was like in comparison.
A moment of silence passes between us.
“What are you doing to me?” Lilian finally asks before she kisses me. Her lips feel so wonderful on mine.
“I don’t know,” I say, because I have the same question.
I don’t even know why I am here.
My hands wander around her; every cell of my body needs her, wants her, longs for her. Her scent, her touch, her eyes, her skin, her energy, her bossiness, her protectedness, her everything.
I close my eyes as our bodies press into each other between heated breaths and roaring desire. I want to lose myself in her. My lips kiss up her neck, and I nibble her ear while my hands explore her body. She feels so wonderful underneath my touch.
Suddenly, Lilian freezes. Her body becomes rigid, and she lets go of me like electrocuted.
My eyes flash open, and her eyes are focused on something behind me. I turn around to follow her gaze.
“What’s going on?" I ask because I see nothing out of the ordinary, just some people doing their office jobs.
Lilian strides out of the office without answering my question. She walks up to one of the employees with a desk close to her office, and I linger behind, listening to what is going on.
“Show me your phone,” she demands with a dangerous undertone. Her entire body switched into something predatory.
“You have no right,” says the guy, white, something between 30 and 40, blonde hair to the side. Something about him gives me the ick. I don’t like it. Maybe his eyes. Hard to tell from a distance.
“Actually, I do,” says Lilian. “Your contract and vetting process for governmental development allows me to request access to everything you bring to work in case of suspicion, and you hereby are. You photographed something, and you will show me right now, or the full force of our legal team will come down on you.”
A broad smirk appears on my face, damn girl. Hot.
“I am allowed to take photos at work,” says the guy, as he gets up. I am ready to get in between if he makes a move. He has aggressions in him; I can see it in his body language.
“Insensitive things, yes. Neither screens nor people. Our surveillance will confirm what I saw,” Lilian says, harshly. “Sit down right now. You will not move an inch.”
Two security guards are already on their way, behind them her watchdog Hannigan.
“Is there a problem, Lil?” asks Hanningan.
“Yes, he photographed something, I believe me. I requested access to his phone, which was denied.”
Hannigan walks over to the man and threatens him with cops and arrest if he doesn’t comply, and simply takes the phone from the guy.
They unlock it with his face.
“It’s a private phone,” says Hannigan. “Without a guard on it,” he continues. “And yes, he photographed you, and—“
Hannigan stops talking and holds the phone for Lilian to see. I can’t tell from a distance what it is. What I can see is how the employees' faces switch, and I know what comes next.
And sure enough, the guy jumps at Hannigan, pushes him back off his feet with a caught leg, grabs the phone, and runs.
He doesn’t come very far. The security guards tackle him into the glass door leading to the office, which vibrates dangerously close to breaking, and Hannigan handles him roughly.
Lilian watches from a distance, and I walk up to her from behind.
“What was that about?” I ask.
“He photographed us,” she says without looking at me. “There was an entire folder about me on his phone.”
“You think he has something to do with the—um—You know, the shooting?” I ask in a hesitant, insecure tone, as Ella would.
Lilian looks at me. Her eyes narrow, and for a moment, I fear she suspects me, but then she turns and gets the phone that lies on the floor next to the guy, with Hannigan and his knee in the back.
Lilian takes the phone and returns to her office. There, she gets out a second laptop from her desk and plugs the phone in. I shadow her, watching. How she operates, acts, thinks.
“What are you doing?” I ask, trying to get close. I want to see what’s on it. I also want to know who the guy is.
“What do you know about my company?” she asks, typing in a password.
“You develop government software. I read something about super surveillance via AI in an article,” I say, reinforcing my cover.
“That covers it on a surface level, yes. I can match the data from this device with all our other information. Imagine this phone here, there is all sorts of data on it, location logs, messages, contacts, browsing history, images with faces, and location tags in metadata. I can feed it into Zeus, and it cross-references it with our existing and available governmental data,” she says and types in several queries.
“This enables us to build whatever we need,” she continues. “Contact spreadsheets, movement maps, and even predict the likelihood of certain decisions. Currently, I am building a comprehensive profile of him within a secure system for testing purposes.”
My heart beats faster as I watch her do what she does for exactly two reasons.
One, I need to get my hands on that laptop.
And two, a nice body is great, but that mind of hers, her intelligence—I blow everything I came here to do in the wind as I grasp her chin and pull her up.