Page 29 of Bird on a Blade (Hunter’s Heart #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

SAWYER

I can’t believe I did that to her, my Edie, my fucking treasure. Can’t believe I came before she did. But fuck she looks so goddamned beautiful right now, her clothes in tatters and her skin smeared with both old blood and new, the three cuts I made still oozing, glistening, and wet.

“It’s okay,” she keens, her words slurred with lust. She squirms on the altar, her body writhing with desperation. “You can finish me off with your hands. It’s fine. Or your mouth. I don’t care. Just do something .”

I don’t want to use my hands or my mouth, though. I want to make her come with my cock. I want to make her come with something that fucking matters.

And then it sparks in my head, what I want to do.

I grab my Bowie knife. Edie’s eyes go wide, and I make a little shushing sound, trying to calm her. The knife feels good in my hand. Heavy as the erection she gave me when she begged me to cut her.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I tell her, and it’s true. But I am going to fuck her with the one thing that’s an extension of me.

I flip the knife, catching it by the blade. I don’t care when it slices into my hand; I could use a bit of pain, to ground me. The handle is nearly black with sticky blood. But I know just how wet she is, my perfect prey, and I shot a heavy load inside her.

I know she can take this.

“Spread your legs for me, baby.” I don’t want to force this. I want her to take my knife as willingly as she does my dick.

And Edie, perfect, precious Edie, does exactly as I say.

“It’s just the handle,” I murmur to her as I spread her pussy wide, admiring the glossy pink of her. She gives a nervous laugh and I look at her as best I can through my mask. Part of me wants to take it off so I can drink her in. But I leave it. She’s my prey, and I want her to see what my victims see.

I want her to see who I am.

“It better be,” she says, voice breathy and nervous.

I run my thumb over her clit in response. She cries out, hips jerking.

“Hold still, baby.” I press the flat edge of the knife handle against her sopping-wet opening. “The blade’s still here.”

I don’t tell her I’m blocking the worst of it with my palm, that my blood is dropping down on the handle as another lubricant, the pain from the cut as bright as sunlight. Instead, I nudge the handle inside her cunt, going slow. She moans, hands pressing down on the altar. Her blood-streaked stomach and tits rise and fall with her quickened breaths.

“That’s it,” I tell her, sliding another inch of the handle inside her. It’s smaller than my cock and not nearly as long, but she moans like it is me, especially when I work it around in little circles, trying to hit the places inside her I know she likes.

“Sawyer,” she whimpers, and I get that warm melting feeling in my chest. I don’t let it distract me from my work, though, which is to kill her. To make her come.

“You like that?” I looked at her through my mask. She’s wrecked, the way I like her. Sprawled brazen on the altar, sweat gleaming on her brow, completely covered in death .

“Yes.” Her answer sounds like a sigh.

The handle’s in as deep as it can go, and I twist it so the handguard will rub against her clit. Then I start to pump it, slow and sensual, making sure to get steady pressure on her clit. She’s making all these wonderful tortured noises, little animalistic grunts and groans, and I want to listen to them for the rest of my life. Her leg muscles tremble. Her feet brace down into the altar. She lifts her hips, ever so slightly, and I move with her, still working her with my knife.

“Sawyer,” she gasps out. “Sawyer, don’t stop. Please. It feels so good?—”

“Course it does.” I squeeze the blade a little tighter, drawing out more of my blood. My hand is slick with it, and the pain electrifies me. “If anyone could take my knife and survive, it’s you.”

I don’t know if it’s what I said or if it’s just because the knife’s handguard is grinding up against her clit, but Edie comes. She lets out a perfect, bloodcurdling scream and arches her back into my knife, working her hips in fast, frantic circles. I fuck her through it just like I would with my cock, drawing out her pleasure until her whole body goes limp. And then I fuck her a few more times for good measure before I pull the knife out and set it reverently aside.

My hand is screaming from where the blade bit into my flesh, but I still press my cut hand against her cunt, marking her with my blood. She gasps when I touch her, and I massage her pussy for a few minutes, making sure it’s completely covered and she’s shivered through the last of her aftershocks.

It’s only then that I take my mask off: when my perfect prey is stretched on the altar, sated. I peel the rubber away and toss the mask down on the ground and study her, running my still-bleeding hand up her thigh and over her hip, admiring the way my blood looks on her skin. She turns her head toward me, eyes unfocused, and lifts one of her hands, although there’s no real strength in it. I killed her too well .

I catch her hand, though, and gently pull her up to sitting. We made a mess, me and her. There’s blood everywhere, and I don’t know how much is hers, how much is mine, and how much belongs to that corpse currently stiffening in my front yard. There’s so much cleanup I’ll need to do. Got to get rid of the body. Clean the blood and brain matter off Edie’s car. Scrub the blood out of the altar carpet.

But all that can wait. Edie snuggles up against me, her breath soft against my throat. She needs a good cleaning, too.

“Come on,” I murmur into her hair. “Let’s get you into the shower.”

She nods, her movements slow and lazy. I help her up to her feet and walk her into the hallway. Her steps are shaky, and she clings to me like I’m her whole damn world.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

I stroke her hair with my good hand. “You know I like making you come.”

She laughs a little. “Not that. I mean—saving me.”

The warm melty feeling she gives me? It immediately calcifies into something cold and hard and black. “I told you I would. But we got to talk about what he said to you.”

I guide her into the bathroom and turn the water on so it can heat up. She leans up against the counter, hair falling into her eyes. “You mean about how he was here to kill me,” she says softly.

“Yeah.” I strip out of my clothes one-handed, never taking my eyes off her. “I won’t let that piece of shit keep sending men to hurt you.”

Her eyes flit around like she’s considering what to say, and then land on the cut on my hand. “You’re bleeding!” she cries, as if the two of us aren’t drenched in blood, as if there isn’t a trail of blood leading from the front of the church to this bathroom. Before I can respond, she darts over and grabs my hand, lifting it to examine the cut. I can’t deny it’s an ugly one, slicing diagonally across the full length of my hand, the skin red and inflamed.

“You did this,” she says softly. “While you were?—”

“You’re changing the subject.” I tilt her head up by her chin so I can look down into her soft golden-brown eyes. The water’s hot and steamy, making her hair curl in the humidity.

“I don’t want to talk about Scott,” she says firmly. “Not right now.”

“Fine.” I step into the shower, sighing as it hits my back, then hold out my good hand to help her in, too. “But later.”

She nods as she steps over the edge of the bathtub and pulls the curtain closed. She picks up my injured hand again. She frowns down at it, then guides it over to the stream of water, washing the blood away. That blood joins all the other blood streaming off our bodies.

“Come here,” I say softly, pulling her up to me so I can kiss her under the showerfall. That fucking we just did, it wasn’t the sort that lends itself to kissing, but she’s so beautiful right now, flushed and breathless and sweet, in the way she’s so worried about my hand. I don’t give a shit about it. Making her come on my knife handle was more than worth any pain.

Edie winds her arms around my shoulders, melting into me. I nuzzle the top of her head, and it kind of reminds me of the moment before that cop shot me. But better. Because no one’s gonna shoot me now.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Edie whispers, breaking the spell. “All these people you’ve—” The slightest beat of a pause “—killed, they can all be traced to me. I’m an accomplice , and?—”

“And I’m a Hunter.” I pull away so I can gaze down at her, the fear in her eyes gorgeous and tantalizing even if I don’t necessarily want her to feel scared. I just like what I like, that’s all. “The cops aren’t gonna do shit to you. To either of us.” I run my thumb along her cheek, over her lips. “And I know you don’t want to talk about him, but neither is that ex-husband. We’ll figure something out.”

Edie’s eyes are glossy. “I’m scared.”

I smile. “I know. I can smell it on you.” I kiss her before she can say something about that, and then I taste her fear, too, a spiced sweetness that reminds me of Christmas. “But I’m here, baby.” I ghost her lips with my lips, breathe in the steam that smells entirely of her. “And I’m not leaving you to the wolves.”

She shudders against me and then kisses my neck.

We don’t talk much after that. I wash the blood off her, rubbing my thin little washcloth over her skin until all the blood is gone. She does the same to me, her movements slow and measured. When we get out of the shower, I pick her up, still wet, and sit her on the edge of the tile counter so I can tend to the cuts I made across her chest.

“Your hand is worse,” she starts, but I shush her. I dig out the witch hazel Mama taught me to always keep on hand and rub it over her cuts to clean them. Then I pat them dry and dress them with some thin bandages, kissing the tape into place. I won’t lie that it feels fucking odd to dress someone else’s wounds. I’ll dress my own, sure, but I’m more interested in splitting flesh than putting it back together. But Edie’s different. Of course she is.

Only when I’m finished do I let her look at my hand. It’s still oozing blood a little, and it burns like hell, although I’m numb to that kind of mild pain most of the time. It gets worse when Edie looks at it, somehow. I spread her knees so I can settle between her thighs as she rubs cotton pads of witch hazel over the cut, dropping them aside as they fill up with my blood. Then she winds my hand up with a bandage with this determined look on her face, like she doesn’t want to mess up.

“Feel better?” I say when she finishes.

She looks at me. “You were bleeding everywhere.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot more than just my blood to clean up.” I grin at her, and she blushes and looks away .

“I can’t believe I asked you to do that.”

I’m not sure if she means me cutting her or me killing that asshole who attacked her. But when I make her look at me, my response is true in either case. “And I hope you ask me to do it again.”

Her lips part; her pupils expand. I’m sure she’s leaving a streak of wetness on my bathroom tiles that has nothing to do with the lingering humidity from the shower.

“I think,” she whispers, trembling. “I think I will.”

Lust courses through me. I get down on my knees for her, hoisting her thighs onto my shoulders, and press my mouth to her cunt. It’s somehow wetter than I was expecting. Edie slides back, tilting her hips to give me access, and I eat her like I’m starving to death, plunging my tongue up inside her pussy and flicking it over her clit. She grabs at my still-wet hair, pressing my head into her cunt and holding it there. I like it, that forcefulness. How different it is from that first night I made her come, when she was still scared of me. When we both still thought I might kill her for real.

She comes on my tongue, her moans echoing through the bathroom. I barely let her come down before I slide my cock inside her, fucking her one more time before I have to go out of this steamy bathroom that smells like my perfect prey and face the mess and the body and whatever comes next.