His (2 page)

I’d prepared almost everything this time for my spring kill. I’d cleaned out the kitchen, gotten everything set up. I had to pick up some new batteries for my alarm system, but that could wait until tomorrow. I still had another week before the man would return to this same library.

I stepped into the elevator and picked up the books the library worker had dropped, setting them back on the cart for her. There was something in the way she looked at me that gave me pause. Did she recognize me? Had she seen me following the steps of the man I was about to kill?

I glanced again out of the corner of my eyes. She was staring at me like she knew I was a killer. Fear beaded on her forehead. I turned to her, and she swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” I said politely, consciously relaxing my jaw. “Do I know you?”

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I...I have to do this.”

     Kat    

I threw myself forward, my eyes closed.
God will forgive me
, I thought
, but Jules never will if I don’t kiss this guy.

The man didn’t even flinch as I pressed my lips to his. I smelled the subtle touch of his aftershave on his cheeks, and his skin was soft against mine. I expected him to shove me away, to yell at me, to get me fired—
oh, Lord, I hadn’t even thought about that!

I expected, that is, just about any reaction other than the one that actually occurred.

He kissed me back.

As soon as I felt my lips touch his, a spark flashed through my nerves, drawing me close to him. One of his hands gripped my wrist and the other gripped my waist. He wasn’t pushing me away, he was simply holding me as though there was nothing strange at all about a girl throwing herself into his arms. His lips pressed back on mine, seizing me, and dizziness seized me, making the walls of the elevator spin as he kissed harder, harder, sucking the breath out of me.

Yes, I’ve kissed guys before. No, I’m not a virgin. I’ve dated around, and even had a couple of one-night stands. This, though—this was different. There was a ferocity in his kiss that swept me up completely, a brutal hunger that spoke of a desire no other man had ever revealed. Maybe no other man had ever felt it. Whatever it was, it shocked my entire body so much that I couldn’t respond, couldn’t do anything but keep kissing him back.

This was what I wanted – the way he held me so completely in control. The way he pushed harder against me, brutally. In that instant, I imagined him taking me wholly, violently, making all of my dark fantasies come true...

Then the elevator stopped and so did he.

As he stepped back, I had to lean on the cart to keep from falling over. Swooning, I guess they would call it in a romance novel. His eyes searched mine, and a chill went through my bones. From up close, I could see his eyes, and they were flat, a green-gray swirl that stopped on the surface. It was like looking into the eyes of a statue: lifeless. Disappointment trickled down at the back of my mind. For me, it had been the best kiss I’d ever had. For him, though, it seemed like nothing at all had happened.

The elevator doors opened, and still I stood there like a dummy. The doors had started to close when his hand shot out to hold them back.

“This is your stop?” he asked.

“I—oh—yes, I—” I stammered. I moved slowly, like I was underwater. One of the library cart wheels got stuck in the elevator gap and I shoved it hard to get it going. It was only when I finally got the cart out of the elevator that I realized what the overall goal of this whole thing had been. I turned around to face him.

“Uh, I—that is, would you like to go out on a date?”

“Sorry,” he said, smiling just as politely as before, the skin around his eyes smooth and soft. “I don’t date.”

With that he let go, and the steel elevator doors closed slowly over his gorgeous face, his flat empty ocean eyes.

Jules came running over from the staircase. My heart was pounding so fast that I thought I was going to have a panic attack.

I pulled out my backup pills from my pocket and swallowed them dry. Panic attacks were no fun, and they definitely weren’t fun at work - I was sure Sheryl was already looking for where her assistants had run off to. If I could just breathe normally until the anti-anxiety meds kicked in, I’d be fine.

“Are you okay, Kat?” she asked.

I gulped and pressed my lips together.

“Fine. I’m fine. Totally one hundred percent fine. Just need to calm down a little.”

“And? Did you do it?”

I shook my head, blushing hard as I pushed the library cart into the stacks.

Why did I lie? I don’t know, not really. I didn’t want to provoke myself into another anxiety attack, that was one thing. Reliving the crazy kiss that had just happened… well, just thinking about it sent me into a dizzy spin. But that wasn’t everything.

There was something else that I couldn’t talk about, not with Jules. I was sure she’d mock me mercilessly, but I couldn’t explain what had come over me and I definitely didn’t want to explain to her how he’d kissed me back and sent my heart racing, and my mind down a road of dark, sensual daydreams. And then left me without so much as a phone number.

Anyway, there was no way I would ever date that guy. Apart from the fact that he was way out of my league, he apparently didn’t date. And the way he looked at me was... weird.

“No,” I said, picking a book up to reshelve it and casting one last glance over at the closed elevator.

“Kat, how could you do this to me? That guy was like, Fabio. You passed up the chance of a lifetime.”

I shrugged my shoulders, trying not to give myself away. Lucky for me, I blush at the drop of a hat, so Jules could believe that I was all hot and bothered by nothing more than standing at Fabio’s side in an elevator. I knew differently. That kiss was something I wanted to keep a secret. For some reason, I thought that the man with the cold gray-green eyes would feel the same way.

“Guess I am boring after all.”

CHAPTER TWO

     Gav    

I reached the fourth floor and passed by the man I was going to kill later. His cologne was horribly overpowering; I could smell it as I crossed behind him, one aisle of books away. The shadow came with me, urging me on. I pushed it back. Patience. Yes. We would have to be patient. But as I walked down the aisle, I thought that maybe I could kill a week early. He was going through exactly the same motions as he had the week before, and the week before that.

Maybe an early kill. If the parking lot was clear. If I had the opportunity. I smiled, glad that I had thought to bring the syringe with me. I tried to make every tracking as much like the real thing as possible. Preparation. Yes. That’s what separated the good killer from the great.

I picked out a book at random and opened it up, holding it in front of me without seeing the words. The man shuffled his feet and stood, indecisive, in front of the shelves.

Pick one,
I thought.
You won’t get to read it, anyway.

The smell of the book in my hands was an old smell, the smell of paper rotting into dust. Libraries were resting homes for all of the dying books. Dead books, dead authors. Incredible, that characters could live so much longer than the people who wrote them. A character in a book might live forever, as long as there was someone there to read him and remember him.

We, though, are mortal, and I do not expect anyone to remember me.

And certainly, nobody will remember him.

The man took a book from the shelf and I followed carefully, taking the stairs on the opposite side. I didn’t want to see the girl again, for she might remember me. The girl who kissed me.

I remembered only her eyes. They were brown and sad. I cannot tell you anything else about her, though. She came and went like any other woman in my life, in and out before I could care enough to remember. My thoughts were only on the syringe in my pocket and the man whose life I would steal away before he harmed the world any more than he already has.

Maybe his wife will remember him
, I thought. I smiled. I thought of myself as a kind of assassin, one who worked for free. A pro bono hit man. Charity work, not murder.

We were down the stairs. I followed him to the counter and out the door. He had the book in his hands. He would never get the chance to read it. Poor characters in the book. They would die too, being left unread.

He crossed the parking lot and I followed him, checking around the library. Nobody was there. I could do it tonight, yes. The preparations were nearly done. Why not? I deserved a bit of respite from the shadow.

Sometimes the world makes itself just right. The wind blows a certain way. People walk with puppet strings attached to their limbs, and I feel like the puppet master. That was how he walked, across the parking lot toward the place where I would take him.

I had made up my mind. I would do it tonight, a week early. It was the perfect opportunity, and I would not pass it up.

He was at his car and I was there at my car next to him where I had left it, trunk unlocked. Before he could open the door, I spoke out loud, angrily.

“Did you see who parked on the other side of me? Some
asshole
keyed my car door.”

The man raised his eyebrows and came around to my side of the car. He was curious. Perfect.

We’re all excited to see destruction, of course. We all want to stare at the damage someone else has caused. I’m just more honest than everyone else. I don’t wait for the damage to come to me. I go out and find it.

Oh, the man. Yes. Him. One plunge of the syringe was all it took, and he was already unconscious. It only took a second more to toss him into the trunk. The book went on top of his limp body.

Patience had gone out the window. I was so lucky to have had a clear shot, and the adrenaline that rushes through me when I took it – it was like nothing else.

Excitement pumped through my veins as I got into the car and drove away, the body in my trunk. Tonight I would cut off his abusive hands and carve a knife deep into his skin until the tendons pop. I expected that he would cry. Most of them do. I expected that he would beg for mercy. The shadow would retreat with the sounds of his screams. I would hurt him for myself, and for the people he had hurt. He would beg me to let him live.

And then, later, he would beg to die.

     Kat    

Jules was right. I was boring as hell. I wrote my phone number down on a scrap of paper and ran downstairs after the guy to give it to him, but I couldn’t even bring myself to follow him outside. It looked like he was going to talk to that other guy, the professor with the creepy mustache who always checks out the legal thrillers.

I didn’t want to bother him. Bother them. I didn’t want to be a bother to anyone.

When I die, they’re going to write it on my tombstone:

Here lies Kat, the boringest girl ever and totally chickenshit. At least she didn’t bother anybody.

I don’t know if you’re allowed to swear on gravestones, though.

Sighing, I threw the rest of the audiobooks down into the crate to go out for interlibrary loan. Stupid me. I should have run after him. Even if he said he didn’t date. That night I lay in bed and thought about his eyes. Thought if I should have gone after him. I’d never felt that kind of chemistry with any guy before. What if he was my one true love, and this was my one chance to get with him? Okay, maybe that was a bit melodramatic, but still. I started looking at every guy who came through the library doors to see if it was him. He didn’t come back.

The next day, I felt somewhat better about not giving him my phone number. What kind of a guy kisses a girl back in an elevator? Even if I did start it, , I told myself that I needed to kiss another guy and get over it. There weren’t any cute guys in the library, though, and the only person who got on the elevator with me was a sixty year old professor with white hair tufting out of his freckled ears. I sighed and pushed the cart back into the storage room.

“Still thinking about Fabio?”

“Ugh, Jules, shut up.”

“He dropped something up in the stacks yesterday.”

“What?”

Jules pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it over to me.

“I was just going to throw it away, but you’re mooning over this guy hard. Maybe if you see him again, you can give it to him.”

I unfolded the slip of paper. It had a few lines of numbers written down on it, a code or something. Next to one of the lines, the word
important
was underlined twice.

“What is this?”

“Beats me. Maybe you can ask him to explain it to you when you see him.”

“I’m not going to see him.” I’d already resigned myself to not ever finding him again. Okay, yes, I was boring. But I also wasn’t about to go chasing a guy who had already told me he didn’t date. What kind of guy didn’t date? It was the politest brushoff I’d ever gotten.

“If you see him, then you can talk to him again. How about that?”

“How about you butt out of my beeswax?”

I crumpled the paper and stuffed it into my back pocket.

“Sure, I’ll butt out. So you’re going to keep it?”

“Shut up.”

“Shutting up!” Jules grinned and took the carton of discard books from me. “Shutting up right... now!”

Later I came into the back room to find Jules staring at the television in the break room. With a pile of old textbooks in my arms, I came and stood in front of her.

“Get out of the way!” Jules kicked out with her foot and knocked a textbook off the top of my stack.

“Earth to Jules, we work in a library. What are you doing watching TV?”

“You’ll never guess who got murdered,” she said.

“The president,” I said.

“No.”

“Your mom.”

“No. Jesus, Kat, that’s insensitive. What if my mom
was
murdered?”

“Who, then?” I let the pile of textbooks slump to the table near me and turned to the television screen. If our boss wasn’t around, I guess a bit of TV wouldn’t hurt.