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15
EXPOSITION
Q
Irip the voice distorter and the connecting earpiece from my face and crush the delicate tech in my fist. One piece of it breaks through my skin, but the pain doesn’t register. It’s buried far too deep beneath the Everest of deadly rage.
Striding to the trashcan next to my desk, I open my hand and let the fragments fall. Turning my hand over, I see three bright spots of blood dotting one finger. I rub at it with my thumb, smear it across my palm. All too soon the capillaries close up, my body’s natural defenses rushing to seal the wound. Regret flickers like a heartbeat on a monitor before it flatlines. My gaze traces up my bare arm to the almost invisible scar on my inner elbow.
The doctors did a fine job. But they were instructed on pain of death to leave no evidence. Not even for me to find.
But at times like this I don’t need a visual aid to feel the scar. It pulsates with a life force of its own, an open invitation to lose myself. To surrender to permanent darkness.
I reject the invitation, close my fist and lay it on my desk. The other hand falls flat beside it. The strains of “Vissi d’Arte” fill my head. I count the sequences off one by one. Over and over.
Sweat pebbles my skin, drips down my face and neck and onto my bare torso as I count, my finger tapping faster and faster. But the dull roar in my head doesn’t abate.
It started the moment I saw her wrist. That blemish, there on her skin, was nearly my undoing.
My true undoing came the moment I touched her. That flame, searing and illuminating …hurt. It awakened. And alarmed.
Enough for me to contemplate giving in to the compulsion to end it all tonight, now. It writhes through me like a coiled snake, striking, ripping poisoned holes through me I make no attempt to staunch.
The temptation is overpowering.
But this isn’t how it ends.
I can’t let him get away with it.
I drop, drained, into my chair and stare into the gloom. In the near darkness my gaze finds her picture on my desk.
Mama.
Smiling. Always smiling. Trusting. So trusting.
I take a breath and it moves through me like a rejuvenating tide. Or as close to one as a soul existing in a vacuum can experience.
Except I didn’t feel that way this afternoon with Elly. Not when she stared at me with defiance and surrender. Or when she begged me to draw her deeper into my obsidian web. The vacuum shifted then, attempted to make room for fuck knows what.
I don’t want her soul. I have no use for her heart. Or her feelings.
But her body is mine.
And she dared to withstand it being, hurt…marred. To brush it off as nothing, the skin I’ve touched, the skin wrapped around the body that will bring an orchestral ending to a decade-long plan?
I surge to my feet, once again fully enveloped in my most comfortable suit of moral bankruptcy and scalpel-sharp focus.
No, not quite scalpel-sharp. That edge was dulled today courtesy of bottomless green eyes and a plump, quivering mouth that just begged to be fucked.
I thought my focus was back. But the conversation ten minutes ago…
The poison is acid-sharp, eating at my control.
I need something specific. Something to take my mind off Lucky. And Elly.
XYNYC is shut on Wednesday nights. I think about the Punishment Club, the underground club Axel opened five years ago. It’s most likely where I’ll find what I need, but I don’t think it’s a good idea tonight. For one thing, I don’t want to spend time hunting my prey. If I choose wrong, my state of mind will get worse.
For another, the Punishment Club is in Hell’s Kitchen, a defiant three blocks from the loft where I stashed Lucky. Letting myself into her space and bringing everything to an end isn’t a scenario I’ve mastered ruling out.