Chapter 2
Izzy
I’m not stupid enough to be oblivious of my surroundings this late at night. A man is following me.
I almost hope he tries to catch me so I can use the alarm or the knife in my handbag. Almost, but not quite. I’m also not stupid enough to want it to happen. The fantasy is me knifing him, not the other way around.
The rented apartment is not where I expected it to be. I really should scout the location before I drive to a new city, but this info leak was too good to miss.
I could scream if he gets too near, but in this neighborhood, I’m unlikely to flutter anyone’s interest. They’ll watch while he dances on my corpse.
One-handed, I search for my phone in my bag. Nudging aside my paperback of Marrow, I glimpse its blue flowers-and-ribcage cover. It shines when I turn on the screen. I set the phone up for an SOS, and what if that vanishes after a minute? I imagine myself jabbing at a black screen and getting nowhere while my throat is cut.
Seriously, imagination, calm the fuck down. Again, I shift things to check the interior, and the large pocketknife rattles against the phone.
The irony of that book does not escape me. I’m reading Marrow, a romance about two killers. My favorite dark theme could be my epitaph. My journo instincts feed me a headline: she died doing what she loved.
I pass an alley that smells of piss where a black cat scampers out to disappear ahead of me, so maybe it’s not human-variety piss.
I’m here. Next building.
The guy following me has faded. Thank you, gods.
Ahead and to my right, the long frontage of the building climbs in what, by daylight, must be a dirty, rundown fa?ade. A third of the windows glow as does the glass doored entry. Shadows move behind the glass, though I’m too far away to see details. My place is three stories up and at the side, so I’ll have a grand view of a brick wall.
According to my informant, Montez Flores is in the city for one more day. I would’ve refused to come if I hadn’t been told this was big. Alice is scared of emailing it. Not that any method is safe, but a dead drop in a nearby park seems so last century. I’m going to need some anxiety meds when I do that. A bomb in Montez’s underwear would be better than this scrabbling about for facts to smear him and hopefully send him to prison.
Killing him is a recurring dream and has me salivating like a Pavlovian dog. Yesss.
I visualize him on his yacht, turning into a black smoosh on the horizon. A geyser of water and flame and flying bodies.
Footsteps sound nearby, closing in.
While I was drooling over that fantasy kaboom, I forgot my street awareness. I walk faster, jog a little, and almost sprain my ankle as my shoe catches on a hole in the pavement. The door into the apartment complex is five or six long strides away. Ankle aching, I hobble forward, plunge my hand into my bag.
The door squeaks inward, light sweeps the pavement. The voices disturbing the night are a mix of male and female.
I’m saved. Or he is. I am not allergic to stabbing someone who gets in my way. I pull the folded knife from my bag then begin to turn so I can face this asshole. Keep the fuck away hovers on my tongue.
He might be innocent, but I’m a woman and suspicion is wise.
Halfway into my turn, somebody scuffles out that door then my follower lunges and his hand clamps around my throat. He drags me into his body, tightens his hand on my neck.
I gasp but am too strangled to manage more than a startled grunt. My nails scrape at the notch on the knife. Open! One-handed, it’s fucking hard to do. He catches my wrist and strangles it, too, until I nearly drop the knife.
Don’t panic. My mantra since the Night of Fire. His stubble rasps across my cheek, and blood thuds hard behind my eyes as my heart strives to cater for the crazy situation.
I shudder when he speaks, grating out words like they’ve traveled over rocks, “Beethoven, Izzy.”
I freeze. What did he say? He knows my name.
“Beethoven. Remember? If you don’t, I will have to punish you.”
The threat is bizarre, but I remember… I do. Beethoven was the word, five years ago. I remember the ancient filthy promise I made to that guy. Dead guy. Or the man I thought was dead.
The night flowers with evil promise, where the dead grab you and whisper madness in your ear. His hand is real. His breath is too. He’s wearing aftershave. Can this really be him?
To the side, two men and two women have spilled into the night and seen our little show. They’re staring at us. I stare back, confused, scared, annoyed at being made a spectacle.
Dead Guy shakes my throat. I try to raise my knife hand and claw at him, but I’m wrapped up in hands and body. I can only wriggle. He’s bigger, taller, much stronger, and must be made of pure muscle beneath that buttoned shirt and dark jeans.
His mouth moves on my ear. He wraps one denim-clad leg around the front of mine. While they watch, he slowly licks me, his tongue moving the lobe, sucking, infusing me with pulsing heat. It’s intimate, and it jars me into this weird space where I’m halfway into imagining murder, halfway into fantasy sex…because all the delicious killers in my dark books do it. Then I get horny, and now I’m absolutely certain I’m FUBAR—fucked up beyond all recognition.
Still. What rapist assaults a victim in public, in view of others? How dare he—even if it is him. Dead Beethoven Guy. Except our agreement was for precisely this. Public humiliation, public sex, even. Nastiness. Now that I consider it, those are things that can get you jailed for indecency. I was high then.
I’m not high now, and five years have passed.
It cannot be him.
“Are you okay?” one of the strangers asks.
Am I?
“Beethoven?” I gasp, his hand having relaxed enough to let me speak. I yoyo-swivel my focus from striving to see his face, to the people watching us, then back to him, the man I can’t quite see.
“Mmm. Hello again, Izzy.”
His exhalation warms my cheek, my neck, fuses with the warmth from his hand on my throat then funnels southward, as if burrowing in my muscles, my veins. My nipples peak, rudely.
Excitement blossoms into heat, lower down.
“Let’s go. She’s fine.” One of the men grabs the wrist of his girlfriend and tugs.
I blink furiously, my thighs tensing as my Dead Guy flattens his spare hand over my navel, my stomach, sliding it downward, fingers spreading. Freed, I raise my pocketknife hand toward the strangers, still unsure, for it would be ridiculous to assume this man is safe.
Dead Guy’s wrist appears before me, and something swings off it. “See this.”
The silver bracelet’s beads reflect the streetlights. I know that bracelet in an instant. While I’m still rocked by this new knowledge, he plucks the folded knife from my grasp.
The group is leaving. They’re laughing, shaking their heads, eyeing us like we’re aliens and tossing insults at us.
His fingers treadle my throat at the front then slide into my cleavage, beneath the neckline of the dress and into my bra where he settles his grip around my breast.
“Heyyy,” I say in a hushed tone, fascinated by how his hand vanishes into my dress. I am unwilling to make a fuss over whatever the fuck is happening to me.
This is how women die. My toes curl as his finger and thumb find and clamp onto my nipple.
I can breathe. I could even scream. Like a statue caught in mid-flight, I’m frozen in mid gesture. He’s only lightly holding me now.
A second later, he spins me to face the wall and presses me to it face first, grinding his obvious erection into my ass. He holds me there with his bodyweight, my arms locked high at my back.
“They’ve gone. Now it’s just us.”
I should have yelled, of course I should have.
This hurts my shoulders, and I cannot explain why I’m still not yelling except I asked for this, once upon a time. I asked for it, and I’ve dreamed of what might have happened, through books, through daylight fantasies, so many times since then.
I grunt in discomfort.
“Five years ago that was. I could have you arrested,” I splutter that out. I still don’t scream. He said the word. He wears the bracelet. Why? How? And greeting me like this? Even if I still wanted this, even if I am turned on a little…or a lot. Even if. It’s insane. “You’re dead?”
As in, aren’t you dead? Laughable.
In the weeks afterward, the incident vanished from the news as if it had never happened. No one was jailed, charged, or sent to prison.
“I can tell you remember me. What a good girl.” He bites my shoulder. Fuck.
I sag into the wall. I suck back a groan. I asked a question, and he bites me?
Fuck, I don’t recall that guy being this sexy. I’m melting inside while I’m being assaulted in the middle of the street with bystanders…okay they’ve gone, but I let them leave and said nothing.
“In here.” He lets me up and hustles me, pushing, urging me into the nearest alleyway. A dark freaking alley, and I let him.
When I pause a few yards in, he grabs me again, shoves me into this new wall. Hard brick presses the side of my face, my lips, my nose, as he rummages among my clothes, pushes aside the coat. He pulls and lifts cloth until my ass is bare to the night air and to his gaze.
I hear him inhale. “Nice.” Only nice? I’m insulted. “This ass is going to take my cock, but first, you are going to beg me for it.”
If this isn’t that dude from way back…
I don’t remember his name. Am I sure this is him? Even if it is him, who comes back from the dead after five years and jumps into OTT sex? Psychos, that’s who.
Jumps in, grabs me as if this is five years ago.
Don’t panic. Breathe. Yes, I am still breathing, and that’s a plus. The not panicking is a whole other thing. I’ve always thought I was smart but maybe I’m the dumbest bitch ever. I’m turned on and stupid.
“I don’t remember”—I take a rasping breath—“who you are. I mean your name?”
“My name doesn’t matter.” Then he lets me turn, and I see his face for the first time, tonight.
Dark hair, cropped short. Scars writhe and spill over two thirds of his face. Distorted skin skews one eyebrow aloft, makes his mouth pucker on the left. His cheeks are battlefields, his nose is unaffected, and his eyes are perfectly normal. They’re a fathomless black, but normal otherwise.
“The fire did this. Maybe this is from your fire. Maybe your friends brought this on me? Maybe I should blame you?”
I’m shaking my head, wondering why he’s saying this. It’s not true. “No. No.”
“But what if it is. Have I come to seek revenge? You wanted terrible things done to you, that night. Bad things. You wanted me to hurt you. Well then, this is why.”
I frown. He’s making up something, a story, I guess. A way to scare me. I see that now. He has to be even crazier than I am.
He puts his hands to the wall to either side of my head, leans in. He kisses my forehead, my jawbone, the side of my mouth, casually, then raises himself and shows me my pocketknife. It’s been opened.
My knife at eye level revolves in the dull light, the blade gleaming, slick and sharp.
“Not that sort of hurt.” I gulp. How did I manage to get myself here. I retrace my actions and come up bare. Yet…there is a thrill coursing through me, an awakening I’ve never felt before. I’m in an alley being talked to like he’s going to slice me open.
I’m sick. This story of his is his entry into my private dreams.
I lick my tongue across the seam of my mouth, stalling, searching for sanity. “I never said a knife. I never said do it to me after five fucking years pass, and I did not make the fire happen. My friends died too.” One did, to be exact. Not Dead Guy, never a friend. He was an arrangement, nothing more. Until now.
Tears threaten, lipping the edge of my eyelids. Grief sometimes hits me like this.
As if I said nothing, he continues in a monotone. “I might nail you to the wall with this through your pretty hands and fuck you while you squeal.”
Inexorably and in spite of my struggles, he brings my hands to the wall above my head, locking them there beneath his hand, in a chilling echo of his story.
I gape, shocked. “No. Don’t?—”
He kisses me, fully, on my open mouth. Then he uses the knife tip to mess with me, cutting threads on the dress, drawing the edge over my breast—light enough to not pierce, firm enough that I felt it run across my nipple. He halts it there, pushes, circles, toys with that precious part of me.
I hiss in alarm, wide-eyed. “You…you can’t.”
“I can’t? No? Why? Explain it to me.” He kisses me again, works his teeth down my exposed throat.
The knife tip pricks through the dress into the underside of my breast. I feel the sting of a cut, a minute cut that surely bleeds.
“Your face was seen. Kill me here, and they’ll remember you.”
“Say the other word, if you wish to.” He purrs that as if this is a new threat, dark and low, creeping into my flesh.
The other word? Did we have one? He means the word to end it all if I want to stop everything. I don’t know it, but the question is important. That he asks it tells me he must be that man. Am I still doubting? And he must be ready to stop if I say so. So he won’t truly hurt me, says the logic.
This is a play within a play, a very, very unhinged play.
I remember his story. I hesitate then I think to offer my own continuation of it. I don’t know why. I’m here in this city for everything but sex. I shouldn’t. No one would. It’s just…
“Maybe…” I jerk out the first word. “Maybe you’ve come for revenge? For the fire. Maybe you’re going to cut me, just a little, paint my stomach with stripes of blood. Make me cry while you fuck me hard.” I lick my lips again, nervous.
He stills. A line appears between his eyes, then smooths flat. I’ve puzzled him by playing the game. I’ve ruined it.
My mouth is an O, but my tongue betrays me, sneaks out, just the tip, and I crane my neck to look upward where his hands squash my wrists to the brick. I flex my fingers and feel how impossible it is to budge them. Nice. I shut my eyes for a moment, open them, wait.
Slowly, a speculative expression colors those darkened eyes. “Maybe I’ll do worse. I might fuck you then leave you here, lifeless, your legs spread and spilling blood and cum from your holes.”
The imagery is violent, and yet I’m in. I am in. This is a page from my darkest books, and my clit has risen, is pressing hard against my panties. Sick, sick, sick.
I inhale deeply. “No.”
“No? Why?” A bleak smile is granted, then vanishes a moment later. I’ve amused him by playing along.
The knife has gone somewhere, his pocket, the ground, and while I stare and process, he’s bared me again, gathered up my dress, ripped at the lacy panties. They slip past my thighs and down my legs to drape over my shoes. If I were to run, I’d have to kick them off first.
“Why. Because…I’ve seen you but so did they. Those people. They’ll ID you to the cops. You need to leave me thinking this was just an accidental encounter. Just Dead Guy returned, and it’s all fine, until one day you track me down and?—”
“Maybe.” He shoves my dress higher, before parting my thighs by running his hand between them, curling his fingers upward and along. They easily slip inside me, the rest of his hand jamming at me, stuck between my legs, setting everywhere thrumming. I gasp, shocked at this first overture, squirming to get away, or to get him closer, deeper.
“Fffff…” The back of my head taps the wall and I huff and moan as he pumps his fingers in and out, stroking along, circling my clit before entering me again and repeating the exercise.
I’m in an alleyway being assaulted, being fingerfucked.
A harder thrust then another, another, and I’m arching though it sometimes hurts. The wet sounds of my arousal are obvious.
He pauses with two fingers lodged in me, high. My eyelids have fluttered downward, and I almost miss his next words.
“You’re drenched. What a messy little cunt this is.” He sounds surprised.
He’s objectifying me. One of my favorite kinks. Am I in Heaven? Of course I’m not. I make stupid noises when he works his fingers around, plays some more. I fucking want his cock inside me, and that begging? Please, please, command me.
He introduces another finger and shoves them higher, lifting me onto tiptoes so my shoes slip off. I’m almost off the ground. I choke, cry out. If I was standing, I’d be collapsing at the knees. Instead, my pussy is clamping onto those fingers and I writhe, somehow slipping myself deeper. Wetness dribbles onto my inner thighs.
His chuckle is almost inaudible. “I tell a girl I’ll nail her hands to a wall, and she gets wetter? What will I do with you? Knife you? Cut you? Choke you until the life is all gone and the light fades in those pretty eyes?”
I whimper. I might come here, suspended and impaled, just from those words.
The tension builds until the air feels ready to crack. He waits, staring. One hand stretched above and clamped on my wrists, one below. Those three fingers are so far inside me I might have a religious revelation when he pulls them out.
I open my eyes wider, panting. I wriggle a little, and he offers me that brief flat smile. Our gazes lock in some creepy dark connection.
How dare I get super horny over this screwy situation—being fingerfucked in an alley, being told a story only a serial killer would like to enact.
“And if I shove your knife up here?” He thrusts me an inch higher up the wall using those fingers, and my mouth drops fully open. My dress has caught on brickwork, my ass is scratched, and I’m moaning while he watches me squirm and kick. There is an excitement in those eyes, I swear, that was not there before.
“We are sick,” I say miserably, but above, where he traps my wrists, my fingers stretch to touch his. I love his heat, his strength, the hardness there in his hand muscles and bones. I caress him with one fingertip, and I shudder. “Fuck me? Please?”
“You think?” he says in a subterranean purr. “I’m going to leave you here, thinking, wondering, and wet.”
Then he steps away, releases me, and lets me drop to my knees. I look up to see he’s being truthful and is walking away. An empty drink can lies squashed on the ground as if to punctuate how dirty we are. His hand is at his mouth, and he’s licking at those wet fingers. Me, he’s sucking me off those. I clench below and shiver. The knife is gone.
He must have it.
Should I run after him? Beg for more? It seems as if he plans to play a long game.
“I may not be here, tomorrow. Come back? Please?” My plea is just plain awful and humiliating. Yet, this too I love.
“I know how to find you, Izzy.” He tosses that out as if it’s a happy birthday card greeting.
My hand is shaking when I put it between my legs. I pause then slip my fingers into the place where his were, where he violated me. I’m so sticky. I suck in a gasp then moan as a shockwave of sensation runs through me from that lightest of touches when my fingertips slip into my entrance.
I so need to get off. Here though? Here? My room is only around the corner and a quick trip in a lift.
He’s gone. No one can see. Trash cans are lined up further along, and the alley keeps going into some black pit of god knows what. I shouldn’t. What if someone comes in and sees me touching myself? And that’s so unlikely I should buy a lotto ticket.
Unlikely doesn’t make this place less ominous. My shoes ended up a few feet away, toppled over and stark in their loneliness. All this setting needs is some crime-scene tape.
That ominous feeling builds. I shiver and trail my fingers in an achingly slow, slickened circle.