Page 25 of Beyond Hate (Beyond #3)

London

C onditions came in the form of a list .

First, we were going somewhere better than the hotel I’d rented.

As much as I wanted to protest, Otto promised he had more than enough money to handle it.

He’d been given an allowance from Nathaniel West, and he’d gained access to hidden funds during his sessions with Marco.

It made sense that Marco had been the kind of person to have secret accounts, and when Otto had accessed them, they were full of enough money to make life easy, he’d assured me.

Either he was lying because he hated the coffee, or he meant it and money actually meant nothing to him.

I’d never imagined a world where money wasn’t an issue—there were months at a time when I only had one meal a day. It felt normal.

Being with Otto apparently meant finding a place that had an actual kitchen.

He shot down the idea of going back to my apartment, even though I told him it might look suspicious if I wasn’t there.

When I asked him about the house he’d been renting, he shrugged and said something about not wanting to go back to where those memories were.

Memories.

Memories of Hudson attacking me, or memories of Otto killing him in front of me?

When he told me no one was going to find Hudson’s body, he sounded so confident that I believed him. I wasn’t sure how he’d had time to so thoroughly clean up what he’d done that it wasn’t going to come back on us, but he seemed sure.

I wanted to tell him that what we’d done after was a memory too, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit aloud exactly how fucked up I was. He probably already knew… but…

That meant we ended up going a bit out of town and finding another house that we could rent for a few weeks. When I asked him if that would be long enough, Otto assured me that he was going to figure out who was trying to hurt me before then… and then we were leaving.

It wasn’t a question.

It wasn’t an option he was giving me.

Just… we were leaving.

If there’d been anything holding me here other than my fondness for my job, I probably would have argued.

That just left his last condition… and it was that particular one I was stuck on. I was standing with a knife in my hand, Otto a few feet in front of me, and he was looking at me with a small frown on his face.

“You have to attack me, London.”

The handle of the knife in my hand felt slick, and I wasn’t sure if my palm was sweating or I just wasn’t used to it. The thing clicked out of the hilt like a spring trap, and I was pretty sure I was just going to hurt myself with it instead of someone else.

I wasn’t sure if I could hurt someone else, and I knew I couldn’t figure out how to do it with Otto.

Not when the knife in my hand was so sharp.

“Why aren’t we doing this with… I don’t know… sticks or something?” I tried to hand the knife back to him, and a slap came down on my wrist hard enough that my fingers went numb and I dropped it to the ground.

“Because a stick won’t do you any good, London. You tried to kill someone with a makeup brush… and I’m pretty sure if you’d been somewhere alone, he would have laughed at you and taken you to whoever is sending those fucked-up notes. You need something that’s actually going to make a difference.”

When I just stared at the blade on the ground, Otto bent down and picked it up. The way he moved toward me was all predator, all danger, and my instinct to back away as fast as I could left me stumbling into the kitchen table and scrambling across the room until my back hit the wall.

The room was filled with the smell of meat cooking in the oven, there was sunlight pouring in through a pair of pretty blue curtains… and Otto was coming at me with a knife in his hand and a dark look in his eyes that made my entire body go haywire.

How did someone who insisted on making sure you had proper food look at you like he wanted to kill you half an hour after he’d painstakingly prepared dinner?

“Otto, I don’t think I can—”

The knife was suddenly at my throat, sharp enough that I could feel the sting of it at the catch of my jaw… and Otto pressing his body against mine while he held it there shouldn’t have made my head swim with anything other than danger.

“You have to. I know the person you used to be is still in there somewhere, deep down in your bones, even if it’s just muscle memory. You need to remember how to protect yourself, London, unless you want me to burn down the entire fucking world to make sure no one touches you ever again.”

The entire world.

“You’d do that?” The knife was still at my throat, his body was still pressing me against the wall… and I couldn’t think around how it felt to have him this close, how the feel of his danger running along every line of my body proved to me that I really did have shit survival instincts.

“London, I’d kill everyone to keep you close. I’d burn the entire world to the ground and build you a bed of ash and bone to fuck you on until you couldn’t move. You’re mine… and nothing else matters.”

When I leaned toward him, it forced him to jerk the knife back or slit my throat, and he actually sighed against my mouth when I came up on tiptoe to press my lips against his.

“It’s like you want to die.”

The exasperation didn’t stop him from kissing me, and the heat of his tongue delving between my lips so he could sign his name on the promises he’d just made against the roof of my mouth was enough to make me forget what we were doing.

Which was probably why he managed to press the knife back into my seeking fingers when I tried to reach for him.

“We’re going to do this until you get it right. If you don’t want dinner to burn, I suggest you start paying attention.”

Somehow the thought of me ruining all the hard work he’d put into making me a meal was more motivating than him threatening to kill everyone and everything I’d ever known. It was enough to make me nod and sigh, lifting the knife between us carefully.

“It’s not about being good, or even quick. With a knife like this, you don’t have to be fast.” He was careful when he took my hand in his, showing me how to load the blade back into the hilt and click the button so it snicked out again.

He was right—the force behind it was enough that it would drive the sharp edge into skin if I had it pressed against someone’s body.

“I don’t know if I could hurt anyone.” I whispered softly.

“You just have to hurt them long enough for me to get to you.” It was another promise, soft and deadly and so real it made me shiver.

He’d always find me, wouldn’t he?

“I can do that.” I didn’t sound confident when I said it, but I let him carefully guide my wrist to just beneath his chin. He pressed the flat of the blade there.

“People can survive having their throats slit, but I’m pretty sure if you do it, they’re going to be more concerned with that than taking you anywhere.”

I knew what it looked like when someone had their throat slit, because of him.

“I don’t know if I can…”

He carefully dragged my arm down when he spoke, pressing into me while he did it and angling the knife to sit flat between us.

“You’d be surprised what you can do when you’re actually threatened, rabbit.

Trust me, it’s all instinct. Like here.” He shifted even closer, and I could feel the metal between us.

It made me afraid to move, but Otto didn’t seem to have the same qualms. He leaned in and brushed his lips across the little dot of blood he’d left just beneath my chin, the sting of his tongue dragging a soft sound from my chest. “We’re all capable of violence, London.

Even you. Some of us are just better at it than others. ”

“I don’t want to be capable… but…” I shifted the knife slightly, pressing the flat of the blade to his shoulder. “I can learn how to pretend until you come for me.”

The heat in his eyes at those words just made me want to try. “That’s good, rabbit.” He kissed beneath my jaw, his tongue playing against the cut again. “So good. Now show me where you’d put that knife if you had to.”

It sounded too sensual for what we were actually doing, and a part of me wondered if the flirting was intentional to make it easier for me.

“Here?” I kept it on the curve of his shoulder and he shook his head.

“Think lower, London. That would hurt, but you want to do the most damage you can with one stab.”

I caught the edge of the knife against his shirt, not quite bold enough to slide it into the fabric, even though the smallest part of me wanted to cut the damn sweater from his chest just so I could see his skin.

“Lower?” My voice only sounded a little strangled.

“Mmm, think.” Even as he said it, his fingers were trailing up along the curve of my spine, drawing me closer to him.

“What about here?” I couldn’t quite control the way my voice was shaking when I dragged the knife down and pressed the flat of it against his side, but I was watching him when his pupils contracted and dilated again in such rapid succession it almost seemed unreal.

For a moment, his eyes were nearly all black, ringed in a soft halo of bright green.

Just as quickly as it happened, he shook his head and dropped his forehead to press it to my shoulder.

“If you punctured a lung, they’d be pretty distracted.” His head turned and the heat of his breath playing against my neck was just a little too fast, a little too sharp.

Something was wrong, but when I opened my mouth to ask, he scooped the knife from my fingers like I hadn’t had a tight grip on it and clicked the blade back into place.

“Be careful with this, but always keep it on you.” Otto searched my face slowly and frowned. “You never know where the monsters are lurking, London.”

He stepped away from me, and the sudden lack of proximity was enough to make me shiver. I didn’t have to question him to realize he wasn’t just talking about the world around us when he spoke of monsters.

Otto’s eyes were dark and fathomless, an endless void of haunting recollections I didn’t know… that I couldn’t touch.

There were monsters in the room with us—ghosts and memories with teeth and claws that seemed more than ready to tear into Otto whenever they had a chance.

If I could learn how to kill anything, it would be them.