CHAPTER 35
“I wanted to kill you. I wanted to kill you so badly.”
—Not You’ve Got Mail
John.
Last seen running chest first into who I now suspect was a machete-wielding Billie in a commendable act of self-sacrifice.
I am dumbstruck as he stumbles up the stairs toward me, the neckline of his shirt gaping.
The material over his left shoulder, the whole sleeve, has turned cherry red from the wound I’d tried to stanch earlier.
Even if he could manage to get the stain out, he’ll never be able to wear this shirt again because there’s a long slash down the torso.
It’s the artful kind of tear I wished I’d seen across Wes’s shirt before Billie actually gave him one.
The exposed skin beneath reveals John is…
more than lean. He’s strong. Muscular. So much so the word “misleading” comes to mind when I think about how he looked at the beginning of the night.
Everything that’s happened so far has taken away any desire to be horny in this kind of situation, but I do reconsider the “belongs in a lecture hall” category I placed him in.
Especially since I realize after quite a delay that he’s alive.
He quickens his steps as I gape at him, stopping a safe distance away, always mindful of personal space, and sighs, “Jamie, you’re okay.”
“John… We—I thought—” I thought he was dead. He should be dead.
Even with how pale he is, even with how he winces with any movement of his arm, that crooked smile pulls up the corner of his mouth.
“I thought so, too.”
He should be dead, though. He ran into a fucking machete. He should be lying in pieces downstairs, but he isn’t and it’s impossible.
“What—How…”
He moves closer, his injured arm extending and cupping my face with his palm. There’s a swoop and pull in my gut as the divining rod I thought was finely tuned finally kicks in.
Oh… Oh, no.
“It’s okay,” John murmurs, his gaze imploring, his hold on my face tightening as he steps into me.
Leans in. I’m hit with a cloying, semi-familiar smell and it makes my breath catch when I place it, like someone’s spilled a cocktail down my back.
My body goes rigid against his, heart thumping behind my ribs, blood rushing in the space between my ears.
“It’s okay,” he says again, wiping his thumbs across my cheeks because tears are falling freely. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. His hand is soft and warm against my skin, and the touch makes me aware that I’m not just crying. I’m shaking.
“John, you—”
My brain finally catches up with my body.
“You did this for me,” I manage to choke out, scared stiff against the wall.
His steel-blue gaze holds my own, eyes crinkled in that entreating stare.
He wants to kiss me. I can tell by the way his thumb strokes down my cheek, how his gaze drops to my trembling lips, and I know, to the very core of my being, I do not want him to.
“No, Jamie,” he says before he captures my lips in a soft, extended sweep that turns into a firmer press.
For the record, nonconsensually kissing a scared, crying woman while doused in corn syrup you used to fake your own death?
Big red flag.
He pulls back, a whisper away from my mouth, and I hope he thinks I’m shaking from unbridled passion rather than the real reason: I’m scared shitless.
Because Billie was right. It is always the quiet ones.
His eyes open, crooked smile looking a lot less appealing than it did earlier tonight when he says, “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for us.”
“John,” I say, but he’s already shaking his head with a moony, lovestruck “look how far we’ve come” expression on his face. The grip he has on my cheek drops, and I try not to sigh too audibly when he’s not touching me anymore.
“Do you believe in fate, Jamie?” he muses, looking at me from under his bangs before he threads his hands through them and stands back to take a good look at me.
His eyes trace over me like we’ve met by chance on the top of the Empire State Building or on the Manhattan Bridge or in the middle of Riverside Park.
Not in a deep, dark corner of a trap he set.
I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t know how to make sense of any of this, so I ask, “Have we—”
He moves forward slightly, eyes alight with that unnerving affection as he waits for me to finish the question.
“Have we met before tonight?”
I consider myself to be a person who is pretty aware of their surroundings, and since John does fit the look of my usual type—which is very much no longer the case—you’d think I would’ve noticed him if our paths had crossed before, right?
“In another life, maybe.”
Holy shit, man.
“But you called to me, Jamie. Tonight. As soon as you walked in and I spotted you from the mezzanine, I just… I knew.”
I think back to when I entered the club with Laurie. I did see a silhouette leaning against the railing. But it didn’t cross my mind again for the rest of the night. It didn’t have much of an impact on me, but for him… for him it was everything.
“And then when we had our date, I knew we were perfectly matched. We just… aligned.” He lets out a chuckle. “You don’t scare easily.”
I’m sure as shit scared now.
“I knew you would appreciate someone like me. I had to be sure, of course. I’ve been wrong before and it’s just ended badly. That’s why I knew it had to be different this time. I knew I had to make her see the real me from the very start. I knew she’d be here—you’d be here—looking for me, too.”
What was it he told me?
I don’t take a lot of risks. I plan things out. I stay in my lane.
Well, the five women he murdered before tonight and the countless bodies he’s left strewn across the club would attest to the fact he’s pretty comfortable in that lane. “Billie wasn’t so sure. She can be kind of negative sometimes, but—”
“Billie.” Her name is pulled from my lips before I remember I should be too scared to speak. A flash of her bent body slumping over the bar jump-cuts across my mind, cutting through the fear, and I have to blink it away.
The corner of his mouth quirks up when he mistakes the furrow between my brows for jealousy.
“She’s just a friend,” he assures me, moving forward so he can tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, and it takes everything in me not to recoil. “I met her at a singles cooking class a few months ago.” He scoffs at the memory. “Can you believe she followed me home?”
Yeah, actually, I can. Her psychopathy recognized his psychopathy—like attracts like. And the idea that these two people found each other and worked toward tonight’s common goal (even if Billie had a goal of her own) is terrifying.
“She’s been helping me ever since. We’re kindred spirits more than anything. Friends.” He stresses the word and then shrugs ruefully. “I mean, sometimes I think she might want more, but—”
“She does.” Now that I’ve said something and he hasn’t immediately stabbed me, it’s easier to convince my mouth to make sounds. Even if my throat closes around them, even when they tremble on the way out.
Tonight has been about John finding and winning over the One, but Billie already wanted that role.
That’s the reason the sight of me looked like it left a bitter taste in her mouth.
She didn’t hate me. She was jealous. She was trying to figure out why the man she wanted was doing all of this for me and why he wouldn’t do it for her.
That’s why I needed to be last, so she could have a chance to show him I wasn’t the one he wanted.
She was. All he had to do was look at her after the dust had settled and the blood had dried and realize she was there all along. Right under his nose.
I guess for Billie this was a My Best Friend’s Wedding situation. My best friend’s bloodbath, if you will. And I bet she would’ve used the same kind of lines at the end of the night if she hadn’t fallen over the railing.
Choose me. Murder with me. Let me make you happy.
But just like My Best Friend’s Wedding, it didn’t end with her getting the guy, and even after all she’s done for him, he hasn’t even noticed she’s gone.
He doesn’t know.
“She did want more,” I say.
“Oh.” He’s well versed in how people turn into past tense—he’s been the reason they have all night—and there’s only a second of surprised comprehension, momentary disappointment, and then it’s gone as quickly as it came. He doesn’t need friends when he has me.
“Well, you had nothing to worry about. I knew you were what I wanted the first time I saw you.”
Like, what? Four hours ago?
Did he think the same thing about the other women? How long did it take for him to fall in love with them, realize they were a “mistake”—ones he could easily erase and dispose of—before looking for the next “one”?
“Those women,” I say. “The ones before this—”
He shakes his head, moving a palm to his heart as he concedes, “I know I have a history. I’m sure you do, too, but that doesn’t matter now that we’ve found each other.”
“But you—they—” I can’t comprehend it. He’s talking about them like they’re failed relationships, like they’re exes we can mutually agree to never talk about again, instead of what they really are: innocent women he killed in cold blood, like everyone else who’s crossed his path tonight.
“I was wrong about them, Jamie. I was wrong about what I wanted.” He moves his palm from his chest to my shoulder and I flinch.
He thinks I’m hurt there were others before me, and it makes him double down on the besotted stare.
When he brushes his fingers over the strap of my dress, rubbing one of the small panels of sheer material between his thumb and forefinger, I have to grit my teeth to keep from screaming.
“People always show you the best parts of themselves at first, but when things start to get tough, they show you who they really are.” I think his version of things getting “tough” in a relationship might be a little different from most other people’s.