His (9 page)

Then his hand came down along my side, and my consciousness was jerked back suddenly to the touch of his hand on my bare skin. I jerked back.

“You said a kiss. Only a kiss,” I protested.

He turned to the door, and I thought he would leave, but instead he swung the door shut. We were submerged in darkness, the only light the one thin slit coming from the stairs.

I breathed hard as he stepped forward, his body blocking the light. When his hand reached out to touch my hip, I grabbed it with my one free hand.

“You said—”

His hand took mine and twisted it up over my head suddenly. His body slammed against mine, pinning me to the wall. His cheek was pressed against my temple, his mouth at my ear. I could feel every bit of his strength, and my entire body was immobilized under his.

“Kitten, you never answered my question,” he whispered.

In the dark his lips moved, kissed my temple. His one hand still held me back, and now the other one came running along my bare side, brushing against my shoulder, my arm, my breast. A deep shiver ran through me.

“I’d say you owe me more than a kiss,” he said. He shifted his weight and I felt his leg shove between my thighs, pressing against me down there. I gasped at the shock of pleasure that coursed unexpectedly through me.

He kissed my neck, his teeth grazing my skin only slightly. I twisted under his grasp but every movement from me only made his hold stronger, more permanent. And the motion of my legs only caused him to press harder. When his head bent to lick between my breasts, I strained back on tiptoe.

Another mistake. He took advantage of the position to push up harder, lifting me so that all of my weight was resting on his thigh between my two legs. The sudden pressure made me whimper, my body clutching into itself hard.

“Do you like this, kitten?” he asked. The words whispered in the darkness seemed to surround me.

My feet kicked out but my toes only scraped the floor slightly, and the rocking motion sent my body into a hard shudder. God damn him, the ache of pleasure there!

“Please…” I choked as he eased in slightly, sending another ripple of pleasure through my body. My hips bucked forward instinctively and I struggled to control myself.

His hand caressed my hip. Then his fingers went lower, cupping the curve of my ass underneath my panties. He kneaded my muscles there, and I couldn’t help it.

“Ohhhhhh
,” I groaned.

“It sounds like you like this, kitten,” Gav said. “It sounds like you
want
this. This is the best way, isn’t it? In the darkness. You can pretend I’m anyone at all. Pretend I’m the hero in a romance novel. Pretend I’m the cute guy in your math class—”

“No—” I started to say, but another push from him sent my body into a hard shudder, his hand still kneading the spot where my ass met the back of my thighs. Oh, God, but it felt good! My protest trailed off into another whimper.

“You were so eager for another kiss,” he said. I bit my lip and shook my head, but in the darkness I knew he couldn’t see.

“So eager to give in again,” he said. His fingers slipped farther in and I tensed up, then relaxed as his knuckles dug deep into my muscle there, his fingertips almost touching me where I most wanted it.

“Already so wet. So
wanting
.”

I moaned as he pushed again, and then his lips found mine and I couldn’t help it, God, I couldn’t help it. I arched against him as he kissed me breathless, rocking, wanting the pressure, needing it—

Then it was gone. He broke the kiss and stepped away so abruptly that I would have fallen to the floor had he not held my up by my arms. My legs wobbled underneath me, my entire body melted with the desire for something that he’d taken away in an instant.

“No—” I croaked.

“No? You want more, kitten?”

A sob choked my throat. It was true, I wanted more. My body would not let me deny the sharp thrills of desire that he drew forward in me. And yet, my mind recoiled from the horror of this man, of everything he was. I shook my head and could not speak.

“I have to go now, little kitten,” he said. His hand caressed my cheek in the darkness and I flinched at his cool touch, the touch of a lover. “I’ll be back soon, and then maybe we can do another trade. Another bottle of water, another kiss. Maybe another question. Would you like that?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he let me go and I slumped to the ground on the dirty blanket. I drew the blanket around my shoulders and cried, not caring how many tears I wasted. I cried in self-pity. I cried for myself, for my mother who I had tried to forget and for all of the time I had wasted out in the world.

And I cried, too, because I wanted him and did not want to want him. The memory of his kiss played again and again in my mind and made me ache so badly. So badly that I touched myself and orgasmed immediately, coming hard against my hand in the dark dirty room. Stifling my moan against the blanket, I tried desperately to forget him, forget his touch, forget how much I had wanted him.

Who was worse? Was it him, the monster, the killer, the freak? Or me, who could not help but desire him despite all his darkness?

CHAPTER EIGHT

     Gav    

It started out as manipulation, kissing her. But her moan made something inside me shiver. It scared me, as much as anything could scare me. That she could have seen what she had seen... and still desire me.

It was the reaction I’d wanted, so why was I so disturbed by it?

Trying to get out of my own head, I went to the library to look up news about my kitten, to see how much information about her disappearance was floating around out in the world.

No, not
her
library, I wasn’t that stupid. A local branch, far away from the university.

Despite my otherwise opulent house, I kept all kinds of technology far away from me. No television. No computer, save for the security system. No phone. It made things simple. It kept me safe from being tracked in any way. And it made it easy for me to leave my victims in the house without worrying about them finding a way to contact anyone outside.

Now, I searched for my kitten’s real name and came up with a slew of news stories. To my surprise, only some of them were from the past week. I scanned the most recent ones and made sure that the police hadn’t gotten any new information from that friend of hers. Even as I went through the motions, a bubble of curiosity was floating up inside of my brain.

Nothing. There was nothing incriminating me. Nothing even to indicate that the police investigation was treating the case as an abduction.
Missing girl. No further information
. I licked my lips. The fear was already seeping out of my muscles.

Perfect. No push for a large investigation. I’d thought that a missing girl would be a thousand times more interesting than the missing businessmen and lawyers I normally killed. I suppose that my kitten was just lucky.

Or maybe there was more to it than that.

I went back to the older entries. The first headline sent an almost erotic thrill down my body:

Missing Teenage Girl Found

A local teenage girl thought to have been kidnapped was discovered last week…

No wonder no one actually cared.

She’d run away at fifteen years old, it seemed. I scanned through the rest of the article. No mention of her suicide attempt. Maybe it had been later, or maybe they’d managed to keep it out of the paper.

The other articles gave up some small pieces of information. Her parents’ names, their hometown. So much for her refusing to give me that information.

My kitten had managed to keep her parents from finding her for over three weeks. She’d apparently filed to claim independence from her parents once she’d been caught.

“Kitten,” I murmured as I paged through the text, “why did you run away from home?”

Another question to find the answer to. But at least I knew that I was safe, and with this information, I was even safer. The pieces clicked together in my mind like a puzzle of armor keeping me safe.

She’d run away once... she could have run away again.

     Kat    

He left me alone again, and I slept, goosebumps chilling me as I clutched the blanket over my shoulders. I didn’t know how long had passed, but when I awoke my bladder was full to bursting and I was hungry again and thirsty, though not as thirsty as before. I sat up in the darkness. He’d come for me before when I screamed. Maybe it would work again.

“Gav? Hello?”

A pause. No sound from above.

“
GAV!
” I yelled louder.

The light came on outside the door and I heard his footsteps on the stairs. Suddenly I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to come down. The last time he’d come to help me, he’d wanted a trade. I hated asking for more - I was scared of what he would demand in return.

The door opened, and I steeled myself. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his chest was broad, blocking out the light.

“Yes, kitten?”

“I need to use the bathroom,” I said. “And I… I need some clothes. Please. It’s cold down here.”

“You need a lot of things,” he said. He came closer, and I shivered. Because of the cold, or because of him? I couldn’t tell.

“What do you have to give me?” he asked.

“I won’t tell you my parents’ names,” I said. I’d decided that I couldn’t give in. Not for a bathroom, not for clothes or food or water.

“No matter,” he said. “I already have them. And their address.”

My mind went blank.

“How—how…”

“A lot of information on public record, you know. And your birthday— my, that’s soon, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

That’s right. My birthday was in two days. I’d forgotten. Tears welled in my eyes. I’d planned to go out with Jules and get trashed, dance until dawn and celebrate my hangover with an omelet at Manny’s diner. I wouldn’t be celebrating anything now. And my mother—

“You’ll be twenty-three,” Gav said, pacing slowly in front of me. “That’s a bit old for a college student, isn’t it? Or are you a grad student?”

“No,” I said, blushing even in the dark.

“Again, no matter. Schooling is overrated. I haven’t used my medical degree in years. Well, I suppose I’ve used it a bit. Helps to know a tibia from a scapula when you’re pulling limbs off of people. But med school was overkill. I might have done as well learning how to be a butcher.”

I thought of the professor on the table, the saw coated in blood.

“Don’t hurt my parents,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“Yes, you will. You’ll do whatever I ask regardless. But don’t worry, I have no need to kill. Not for a while, anyway.”

“Then why did you ask about them?”

“Ah, kitten!” He bent down, crouching. “I was curious. Like you were curious, kitten.”

I closed my eyes. I had been curious. Too curious.

“It smells down here,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

“Please,” I said. “I’m dirty. I’ve been pissing in paint cans. I can’t...”

I trailed off. He tilted his head.

“I wondered why you hadn’t asked to use the bathroom.”

He reached forward, and I flinched, but he only unlocked the handcuff from around my wrist. He offered a hand.

“Come upstairs. Use the bathroom.”

I looked up at him suspiciously. What was this, a trick?

“Do I need to threaten you to do this? Come on.”

I stood shakily. My hands were both bandaged from the cuts, but he took my arm and helped me up the stairs.

The light upstairs was so bright it made my eyes swell with tears. I wiped them away clumsily with my hand. We walked slowly through the living room, then up a set of stairs. He didn’t try to rush me, only held me gently with one hand. I suppose he knew that he could kill me easily if I tried anything.

I peeked over once at him. He had a blank expression on his face. His chest was smooth all the way down to his bellybutton, and then a patch of dark hair led down beyond the top of his pants. I bit my lip and looked away.

There was a lot to look at. This place was a mansion. Everywhere I looked, opulent furniture filled the rooms and expensive-looking oil paintings with gold leaf frames decorated the walls. At the top of the stairs, a crystal statue of a four galloping horses greeted us. Their manes shimmered like glass.

“This isn’t the end, kitten. Keep moving.”

I couldn’t keep the wonder out of my voice.

“How do you have all this
stuff
?”

Gav chuckled.

“One man I brought here tried to bribe me. He had a few million wired to my anonymous bank account. Ended up being very helpful. Right through here.”

I headed down the hallway he’d gestured to, leaning on him a little more than I had to.

“Did you still kill him?” I asked.

“Of course. He’d seen my face.”

I stopped mid-stride.

“What is it?” he asked.

“
I’ve
seen your face.”

“Yes, you have,” he said. “But I didn’t bring you here to kill you. Regardless, you’re not leaving anytime soon. You are not leaving ever.”

I looked ahead with a steely gaze.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.

“Right in here,” he said, pushing open a large oak door. “Through the bedroom.”

     Gav    

I watched as she walked into my bedroom. Her eyes darting everywhere, so curious. Her gaze picking across my bedstand, my dresser, my walls. It was strange to see the room as she saw it, with new eyes. I saw myself reflected in her sight: a clean monster. A tidy villain. A serial killer with good taste in linens.

In the bathroom, she rushed to the window and I almost yelled out. She stood there silently, though, her fingers on the sill, looking outside. The pine branches in the nearby forest waves slowly at us.

“It’s a two story drop from this window,” I said from behind her. “Don’t try to escape.”