Page 12

twelve

I could scream.

I should scream, even. If I scream, then someone out here is going to hear me, and even if he tries to make good on the threat of cutting out my tongue, at least?—

“Do you know what the bystander effect is, lovely girl?” He cuts off my train of thought, the knife point still pressing my face upward, so I’m looking at his mask. Huxley’s voice is cold, and I suddenly doubt my own impressions of him from the other night.

“Everyone born in the last fifty years knows what that is,” I breathe, unable to even move. I’m frozen in place with my hands pressed flat to the smooth wooden planks behind me as coldness seeps into the bottoms of my feet.

God, I wish I had shoes on.

“If you scream right now like you’re thinking about doing, the bystander effect is going to come into play. They’ll hear you”—he moves the knife, flicking it toward the house behind me, then the ones on either side—“but they won’t come out to check on you, even if it does wake them up. Surprisingly, the only one who might care is your favorite across the street neighbor. But she won’t come back here to save you. She’ll just bang on your door and threaten you with fines or violations or whatever.” I swear I can sense his eye roll behind the mask.

“Someone might call the cops.”

The knife is back a second later, and I close my eyes as if I can distance myself from the sting of the blade on my skin. “Look at me, Kai.” He doesn’t speak again until I open my eyes, making myself do just that as I stare up at the frightening red and black mask.

“No one is going to call the cops for you if you scream. Do you know why?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Because you’ll only get one chance. You’ll scream once, if that, then this night will become a lot less fun for you. I’ll carve out your pretty tongue.”

“I can still scream without a tongue.”

“Then I’ll slit your vocal chords and fuck your mouth while you bleed out in the grass.” His snarl is sharp and unexpected, and I flinch away from him as the mask’s grin tilts to the side. “Oh, that was really scary of me, wasn’t it?” Huxley laughs. “Sorry, pretty girl. I get a little carried away, sometimes.” He sheathes the knife, his gloved hand coming back to grip my face in his long fingers. “This is new for me, you know? Playing with someone without the intention of…” he trails off pointedly, but I don’t need him to finish the sentence.

I know what his normal intentions are by now.

“Is there an incentive for me to run?” I look up at him again, my voice soft as my heart threatens to slam right out of my chest. Honestly,I can’t blame it. I’d also like to find a way out of this when he says shit like that.

“Would you like there to be?” Hux chuckles. “I figured the incentive was you being awake when I fuck you this time. That the incentive would be the pleasure of my company. I didn’t realize you needed something else.”

“You have to…” I trail off. “You have to answer my questions. I get to ask you what I want, and?—”

“You’re turning this into something it doesn’t need to be.” His fingers tighten, and he yanks my face up to him. “If you ask me questions—and actually want them answered—you won’t be able to pretend I don’t exist. You’ll be too involved, Kai.” There’s a warning in his words I don’t expect. Something that isn’t entirely selfish. “Curiosity killed the cat,” he tells me, mimicking my words from yesterday.

“Until satisfaction brought her back.”

“And how do you know I’m willing to satisfy your curiosity instead of just killing you for it?”

Fuck, I don’t know. There’s no way for me to know for certain, or even to form a reasonable hypothesis on what he’ll do. “Because you’d be bored,” I say finally. “Because…you wouldn’t get to play anymore.”

His mask tilts one way, then the other. “I can play whenever I want.”

“This isn’t the same,” I disagree. I know I’m pushing it. Especially when he drums a finger against my jaw while he thinks about my words.

“We’ll see,” Hux says finally. “No promises, but I’ll consider it. Now are you going to run , or am I going to have to give you a reason to scamper away from me, little bunny?”

The nickname makes my stomach flip in both terror and anticipation. His grip loosens, and I tear away from him across the yard, glad there’s nothing back here for me to cut my feet on. Still, I’m so cold by the time I stumble back to the patio, and I yank open the door before whirling around to slam the heavy glass closed.

Or try to, anyway.

Huxley is there before I can shut it, his shoulder shoved between the door and the frame as he cackles, then asks, “Trying to lock me out?” he goads. “What? Think I won’t break the glass, Kai?”

“I think that’s a lot more work than you’re willing to put in,” I gasp, trying to wrestle him for control of the sliding door. I’m so close, and if I can just get him to take a step back, I’ll be able to close and lock it.

I figure that’ll give me a chance to decide what the hell I’m going to do now that he’s here.

Absently, I glance down at the patio chair by the door, expecting to see my phone I left behind. But it isn’t there, and I have a sinking feeling that yet again Huxley has been smarter than he has any right to be. I wouldn’t be surprised if my phone is in his pocket, so I can’t call the cops. He’s clearly better at this game than I am, and I reel back from the door, smacking at his hand and getting barely a snarl in reply.

“Do better.” Hux laughs, throwing open the patio door so roughly I can almost hear it bounce off the track. Both of us glance at it, and he shrugs his shoulders. “Don’t look at me. I’m not your handyman.”

“No, that would be too convenient.” I whirl and grab the first thing I can—which happens to be a plastic pitcher from my counter that needs to be washed—and chuck it straight at Huxley’s face. He knocks it away easily and lunges for me quicker than he has any right to be until I’m shoved up against the wall next to the door with his mask inches from my face as I pant against it.

“Why a knife?” I gasp as I fight his hold on my throat. “Why not a gun?”

“Too loud.” He lets me go and I bolt again, making it to the sofa as he prowls after me. “Guns are too easy. And in a bad situation, I’d rather my prey get my knife than a gun. I can overpower you with a knife, but a gun could level the playing field.”

I launch the tv remote at him, which he simply lets hit him in the shoulder as he tilts his head to the side. “Yeah, okay, but give me points for my continued enthusiasm.”

“Sure, pretty girl. Next question?” In a surprisingly graceful move, he leaps over the back of the couch in one smooth movement, and I trip back toward the coffee table.

“Why the drugs? Why the…?” Fuck, I’m going to butcher the name of it right now with most of my brain focused on keeping some kind of distance between us. I’m not quite as afraid of him as I was the first time, but he’s certainly not safe by any means. There’s no way for me to be sure he won’t decide to kill me.

Or that it hasn’t been his intention all along, and he’s not just lying to me.

“I swear I’m going to write it on your hands next time. Midazolam. Say it with me. Mi. Da. Zo. Lam.” He sounds it out like I’m a toddler he’s teaching a new word, and I throw a nearby book straight at his face, which he knocks away with his hand. “Because I’m a paramedic, and I know my way around sedatives.”

That brings me up short. I stop tripping around my living room, instead staring at him with a perplexed expression that causes him to stop as well. “What?” Hux asks, confusion in his voice.

“Paramedic?” I repeat. “Like, an EMT? Like, rides in an ambulance, saving people?”

“Uh, yeah?” He reaches up to pull the mask off of his face, dropping it to the coffee table a bit carelessly. “You got a problem with that?” Again he tilts his head to the side, brows raised, and I swear I can see his attitude bubbling to the surface. He looks almost indignant, and a bit offended, like I’ve really ruffled his feathers with this question.

“No. Nope.” I raise my hands in surrender, studying his face now that I can see it. He’s just as attractive as I remember, with tousled dark brown hair and a scarred mouth that only adds to his appeal. His dark brown eyes are almost sweet, rather than malicious. Though right now he’s giving me a look that tells me he’s definitely unhappy with my disbelief about his profession. “But come on. You can’t be surprised that I’m, uh, shocked?”

He tilts his head the other way, eyes on mine and very unimpressed. “What? You think I can’t save lives if I also take them? I’ll have you know I’ve never, ever murdered anyone I saved. That would be against, like, the universal moral code.”

Right, because murder itself isn’t.

“I’m not defending my life choices to you.”

“I’m not asking you to!”

“And what the hell is your job, anyway?”

“I’m an assistant.” God, I feel so defensive when I snap the words at him. “I’m a personal assistant to three public companies. Specifically, their CEOs?—”

“So you don’t save people.”

“Well, I save their image .”

That makes him just look at me, and now it’s my turn to roll my eyes. “Yeah, okay. Moving on. I was just asking about the drugs, okay? I wasn’t passing judgment on your life choices.”

“You really still can’t say it, can you? Midazolam.”

I can’t, but I really don’t want to admit it. For some reason, no matter how many times he says the word out loud, and even though he wrote it down for me, my brain only hears a jumbled mess of words. Instead, I glance toward my front door, which is locked at this time of night, and Hux’s gaze follows my eyes. He groans, one hand on his hip.

“You’re really going to make this harder than it needs to be, aren’t you?”

“You’re the one who told me to run.” Without waiting for whatever reply I’m sure he has ready, I bolt toward the front door, hand out for the knob.

I don’t really expect to make it. But it’s still a surprise when Huxley snarls and grabs me around the waist, jerking me off of my feet and throwing me over his shoulder. A yelp leaves me, especially when my body hits his, and the air is knocked out of my lungs. “Nope.” He pins my legs together against his chest before I can kick him, and I can hear his boots on the floor as he walks across the living room toward the hallway.

“You’re such a problem, you know that? It really would’ve been so much easier for me to just kill you.” He flips off the lights as he goes, including the hall light, but when he gets to my room, he turns on the fairy lights I prefer instead of the overhead light that I’m definitely emotionally allergic to.

“Why didn’t you?” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, and he doesn’t answer. At least, not right away. Instead, he tosses me down onto my bed so hard that I bounce a little, and when I catch myself with my hands to stare up at him, Hux is just…standing there.

Just looking at me with surprise on his face, as if that’s not the question he expected. But then again, it’s not the question I really thought would come out of my mouth either.

“Should you really ask that?” As I watch, he prowls over to my desk, where he peels off his gloves and then kicks off his boots. “Isn’t that a conversation you should stay away from— Little bunny, if you get up I’ll pin you there with my fucking knife through your hands.”

His words hit just as I start shifting toward the end of the mattress, and they make me freeze. The cold, sharp vitriol sends a tremble through me, and all I can do is glare up at him instead.

“Good girl.” His shirt comes off next, but not his dark jeans. Instead, once he’s peeled off his shirt to expose his toned, smooth chest, Huxley strides back over to the edge of the bed where I’m sitting with my fingers clenched in the comforter.

“Such a gorgeous girl, aren’t you?” he coos. His hand comes out to cup my chin, pulling my face up to his. “Terrible survival instincts, by the way. If I wanted you dead, you’d be bleeding out on your floor right now. No offense.”

“Full offense taken,” I manage to murmur, making him snort. His fingers tighten around my jaw, and he leans forward to brush his lips to mine.

“Oh, little bunny…you have no idea how much I want to wreck you.” Without warning, he shoves me back on the bed once more, and a feral grin spreads across his lips when a gasp leaves me.

“And I’m looking forward to you learning how much you’ll love it when you let me.”