Page 20 of My Girl

I keep our eyes locked as I lick her juices off of my glove. Tangy. Sweet. A spicy pineapple, ripe and waiting for my tongue.

Her thighs twitch, her lips open in hunger. It’s going to be harder to seduce me than that.

I zip up my pants. Rae takes a long, slow inhale, leveling herself.

“What’s your name?” she asks, her tone back to business.

“You can call me Crave.”

“Crave,” she whispers. “Crave and Rae,” she says, louder this time, processing the information like it’s a clue. Like there’s meaning there.

A name is just a name. A couple of letters that produce a sound. A string of symbols which make it easier to communicate. She can use any name for me as long as she knows that I’ll always be in control.

“Do we have a deal, then?” she asks.

I keep her locked under my stare. The lust is still there, but it’s dampened by the authority in her stance, her determination to get what she wants. There’s a hunger inside of her that surprises me. A confidence someone like her shouldn’t have. A power she doesn’t know she has yet.

She startles herself out of the daze.

“There might be more evidence that the police overlooked. I’ll find out where the police keep the evidence for the Hall murders, and then I’ll tell you how to steal it,” she says with a brusque voice. “Until then, search this place.”

She walks up the stairs. Her ass bounces under her short skirt, her legs subtly trembling from the skull fucking. The scared little girl is trying to reassert her control again.

Rae thinks she’s strong, thinks she’s smarter,betterthan everyone else. And she thinks that the truth will prove her superiority.

I love seeing a woman like that suffer.

One day, she’ll bend to my will, and I’ll lose interest. That’s when I’ll kill her. When she accepts—truly fucking accepts, with her body, mind, and soul—that she’s a killer, just like me, then that’s when I’ll end her.

It doesn’t matter where you come from or how you’re raised: sometimes violence is inside of you.

She disappears behind the basement door, and I rub my cock through my pants. An experiment like this takes time. When you savor a possession for as long as I have, you make every second count.

Chapter7

Rae

With every breath,my senses heighten, as if something was awakened inside of me in the Galloway House. Still, I put on my normal face and walk through the employee hallway in the back of the mall. It’s an act. I’m wearing a mask too—my normal mask. The one where I pretend to be a good person when I’m just as sick as any criminal.

Am I as sick as Crave?

No, I’m not. Even if I wear a symbolic mask, I’mnotas bad as Crave. I didn’t kill anyone. I just happen to have footage of Crave killing people, and I happen to have clear footage from last night. He’s wearing a mask, but it’s better than before. Soon, he’ll do something horrific in front of me again, and I’ll have somethingrealover him.

I knock on Ned’s office door. The door opens, and Ned’s blue eyes widen, fluttering in approval as he scans me from head to toe.

“Hey, beautiful,” he says. “You’re early.”

“Well, you did all of this for me,” I say. “It would be rude if I were late to these interviews.”

He laughs brightly. “You? Being rude? Impossible.”

I let myself into his office, then plop down on the suede chair in front of his desk. An older picture of his family is framed on the wall. Ned and his brothers, back when they were teenagers, stand with their parents in front of their ranch-style house on the rich side of Pahrump. Everyone is smiling, their blue eyes brighter than the sky. You can almost smell the barbecue cooking in the background. A picture-perfect life.

Or so it seems anyway. Maybe they wear masks too.

A set of keys shine on Ned’s desk, each of them labeled with colors and destinations, except for one: a gray key with a small brand name etched into the head.

With Crave using those bolt cutters last night, Ned must have replaced the padlock. This gray one has to be the new key.