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TWENTY-FIVE

It wasn’t difficult for him to find out where she lived. She wasn’t careful when she fled the car, allowing him to follow her easily. That told him that she was just playing hard to get. Everything was a game to her. She enjoyed playing with him. But she wouldn’t have gotten into the car if she didn’t want something. Something he was more than happy to give her. It was hard to ignore the way she’d trembled under his touch, the way her eyes had widened. The gasps that slipped from her parted lips. Even now, standing at the edge of the parking lot where her car waited, arousal stirred at the memory of how she’d reacted to him. He hadn’t seen her in a long time.

All his prior attempts to find her had failed and he had tried very hard to locate her.

Like a ghost, she’d vanished. Wreaked havoc on his life and disappeared as if she’d never existed. At times, he wondered if she’d been a figment of his imagination. If he was like a character in a movie with multiple personality disorder—or whatever they called it now—and she was just one of his others, whispering lies into his ear. Eventually, he’d given up. But he’d never forgotten.

His eyes swept over her body as she emerged from the building. It wasn’t safe for him to take her now, not from her own building—in broad daylight with cameras everywhere—but that didn’t stop the exhilaration from pinging through his veins. The encounter in the car had breathed life back into his hollow soul. Fingers twitching, he imagined all the ways he could make her repay her debt to him. He’d finally get to show her what she had done to him, what she had made him. Then he’d find someone new. After all, there was already blood on his hands. Lots of it, and, if the past had taught him one thing, it was that he was untouchable.