Chapter Twenty-Seven
Blood on His Hands
The cut opened her throat in a single, continuous draw.
Kenzie's hands flew up too late—always too late, Allie thought, watching from three feet away.
The fingers that had texted lies and counted Vivian Caldwell's money and sealed an envelope full of death pressed against the wound as if flesh could argue with steel.
Blood pushed through the gaps between her knuckles in hard, arterial pulses that matched the rhythm of a heart that had maybe twenty seconds left to beat.
A sound left the ruin of her throat that was not a scream.
Screams required intact vocal cords. This was wet and astonished and entirely involuntary, the noise of a body discovering in real time that it had already been killed.
Toro held her hair through the full duration of it.
His grip did not loosen. His expression did not shift.
The same dark, absolute focus he had brought to every folder and every command and every inch of Allie's body was now trained on the woman convulsing in the chair, and Allie understood that this was another kind of fidelity.
He had promised her Kenzie. He was delivering Kenzie.
The blade had been clean and the angle had been surgical and the result was currently painting itself across the concrete in a pattern that would require industrial solvents to remove.
The crimson spray hit the floor first in a bright, arterial fan, then slowed to thick rivulets as the pressure behind it faded.
Kenzie's cream coat bloomed crimson from collar to hem.
The transformation was hypnotic—the way the expensive wool darkened in real time, soaking up evidence, turning the careful costume of the grieving best friend into something that belonged in a slaughterhouse.
Her eyes remained open and fixed on Allie, and the terror in them was the last thing that left.
When the body finally sagged, Toro released his grip.
Kenzie folded out of the chair. Not dramatically.
Not with the slow-motion grace of cinema death.
She simply stopped being upright and became a weight dropping onto concrete with a wet, heavy sound that Allie felt in the soles of her bare feet.
The pool spread outward in a dark, gleaming circle until it reached Allie's toes—warm, then cooling, then cold where it touched the edge of her skin.
She did not step back. She looked down at the body of the woman who had sat across from her at brunch and laughed about wedding colors.
The woman who had sent voice memos and texts and tagged her in photos captioned "best friend since we were babies.
" The woman who had taken money from Vivian Caldwell and handed it to a stranger and said make sure she doesn't come back from Miami without a single tremor in her voice.
Kenzie Morales was now a cooling shape on the floor of a soundproofed room, and Allie felt the thing that moved through her chest and recognized it as something closer to satisfaction than grief.
The blood smelled sharp. Metallic. Alive in a way that sex was alive, in a way that salt was alive, in a way that the aftermath of violence carried its own dark perfume.
Allie lifted her gaze from the corpse and found Toro watching her.
He stood behind the empty chair with the blade still loose in his right hand.
The steel was wet to the hilt. Blood had run down his wrist in thin, branching tributaries that followed the paths of his veins and disappeared into the dark fabric of his pushed-up sleeve.
More blood marked the side of his jaw—a single streak where the spray had caught him mid-cut, a comma of red against the sharp bone of his cheek.
His dark eyes were steady on hers, and what burned behind them was not satisfaction and not triumph.
It was assessment. The same careful, unblinking attention he had used when he was still deciding whether she would leave this room breathing.
He was waiting to see what the woman wearing his collar would do with the gift he had just placed at her feet.
Allie crossed the space between them in three strides.
Her bare feet left red prints on the concrete.
She did not care. She did not even feel the cold of the floor anymore.
Her body had gone superheated in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and the sensation that flooded her limbs was not shock and not fear and not the delayed panic that would probably arrive later in the quiet.
It was hunger. Pure and immediate and so intense it bordered on pain.
She grabbed the front of his shirt in both fists. The dark cotton was already spotted with Kenzie's blood, and the damp heat of it pressed against her knuckles as she pulled his mouth down to hers.
The kiss was not gentle. She bit his lower lip and tasted copper where the blood on his face smeared against her mouth.
Toro made a sound low in his throat—half surprise, half something more dangerous—and his free hand came up to lock around the silver ring of her collar.
He used the leverage to hold her exactly where he wanted her while his tongue pushed past her lips and stroked deep, claiming the inside of her mouth with the same relentless ownership her body already knew.
The blade clattered onto the metal table.
His bloody hand was suddenly free. It shoved the hem of the black cotton shirt up around her waist and then higher, dragging across her ribs and leaving a wet red smear from hip to sternum.
The sensation of blood on her skin—Kenzie's blood, still warm, still slick, still carrying the heat of the body it had just abandoned—sent a shudder through Allie's spine that was not revulsion. It was the opposite.
She arched into his palm. Her nails dug into the dense muscle of his shoulders through the shirt.
The silver cuff on her left wrist caught the hard industrial light and threw it back in a sharp, glinting arc as she pulled at his clothes with the same ferocity he was using on hers.
Buttons scattered. Fabric tore. The sound of it was lost under the wet, frantic rhythm of their breathing.
"Now," she said against his mouth. The word came out rough and broken and utterly without negotiation. "I need you now. Don't wait. Don't make me wait. " Toro lifted her onto the metal table in one motion.
The surface was cold against the backs of her bare thighs.
The edge bit into the soft flesh just below her ass.
She did not notice. She was already spreading her legs and pulling him between them, her heels locking behind his hips, her hands fisting in the back of his shirt to drag him closer.
The table's contents scattered—the phone still recording, the empty water glass that had sat beside it, a pen that rolled off the edge and splashed into the dark pool spreading outward from Kenzie's body. Neither of them looked at it.
Toro shoved the shirt up past her breasts and bent his head to take one nipple into his mouth.
The wet heat of his tongue was a shock of pleasure that traveled directly to the aching place between her thighs.
She gasped. Her head fell back. The blood on his jaw left a dark print on the curve of her breast, and the sight of it—his mark layered over the evidence of what he had just done for her—made her cunt clench around nothing with a desperate, involuntary pulse.
He felt it. Of course he felt it. He was already sliding two fingers inside her, and the slick, ready give of her body made him groan against her skin.
"You are already soaking. " His voice was rough at the edges, the accent worn soft as river stone but the control fraying.
He withdrew his fingers and brought them to his mouth, licking her wetness from the blood-streaked digits with a slow, deliberate motion that made her hips buck against the table's edge.
"You watched me kill a woman and it made you this wet. " The admission left her without shame "Yes. You did it for me. You did it to her. I watched her bleed and all I could think about was you inside me. "
His mouth crashed back onto hers. One hand fisted in her hair, pulling her head back to expose the long column of her throat and the leather collar wrapped around it.
The other hand guided the broad head of his cock against her entrance and then he was pushing inside—one long, relentless thrust that seated him to the root and forced a broken cry from her lips that echoed off the concrete walls.
He did not pause. He did not let her adjust.
He fucked her on the metal table with deep, punishing strokes that made the steel legs scrape against the floor.
The sound of their bodies meeting was wet and loud in the stillness of the room—the slick percussion of his cock driving into her over and over, the soft involuntary sounds she made every time he hit the deepest place inside her.
His bloody hand stayed locked around the silver ring of her collar, holding her in place, and every time he pulled her forward to meet his thrusts the leather bit against the sides of her throat in a way that made her vision narrow and her cunt clench harder around him.
Beside them, Kenzie's blood continued its slow spread across the concrete.
The pool had reached the leg of the table now.
Dark. Gleaming. Still releasing the faint, coppery heat of a body that had been alive three minutes earlier.
Allie could smell it—the iron and the salt, the wet animal reality of what violence did to flesh.
It mixed with the scent of Toro's skin and the darker, muskier smell of their fucking, and the combination was intoxicating in a way she would never try to explain to anyone who had not been in this room.