Page 57 of Vile Pucker
“I wanted to be ascholar.”
Gabriel was leaning against the stone wall, smoking out the open window. He hadn’t showered after the game tonight and there was still a slick sheen of sweat on his chest, his dark slick curls curving over his ears and the strong lines of his throat.
“I’m all the study you need, baby girl.”
“You won’t tell me a thing about being a psychopath!” I cried. “You never give me serious answers.”
“What do you want to know? You want me to tell you all about the mind of a psychopath? So the police can catch him? It’s the easiest damn thing to understand this one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Psychopaths don’t give a shit about anything. Don’t care if anyone we see lives or dies. Until. . . we find that one thing. That one thing we finally give a shit about. For this dumbass, it’s killing women and keeping totems. It’s the only thing he truly gives a fuck about, so he’s got to keep doing it.”
“Hmm,” I said, but I felt a little burst of excitement. It was the first time I had actually gotten anything like an insight out of Gabriel.
Maybe there was something to being able to study a psychopath up close.
“But not every psychopath has a totem. You don’t.”
“I do,” he said, scything out of the window and walking toward me.
The sweatpants hung low on the deep v of his hips, his cock hanging thick between his legs.
“You’remy totem. Every inch of you.”
He kissed me, one hand on my belly, as it often was.
Waiting. For that first kick, that first flutter of movement.
Was this 22-year-old psychopath actually planning to. . .be agood father?
“I need some fresh air,” I gasped, rushing over to the window.
It was all too much to process.
As I tried to relax my breathing, I put my hand on the same stone I’d grabbed dozens of times before, to carefully lower myself into the padded window seat. But this time when I did it the stone slipped out of my hands and down the side of the manor house, falling five stories down onto the jagged rocks below. . . and I was pitched forward right after it!
I didn’t even have time to scream as I fell headfirst over the ledge, the rolling fog melting away to reveal the deadly rocks and unyielding ground.
No! My baby!was the gutdeep terror that flashed through my brain.
And I couldn’t lie to myself any more.
Then I felt a hard hand on the back of my pants, and I was yanked back into the room until I slammed hard into Gabriel’s chest.
My knees collapsed, and I was startled to feel his heart pounding against the back of my head.
“The fuck?” Gabriel said sharply, and keeping a hold of me, he stepped closer to the ledge, his strong tanned hand probing at the gap where the stone had been.
“How—” I asked, my whole body trembling.
“I came up here as a teen to smoke cigarettes,” Gabriel said, and his voice seemed to come from miles away. “That rock has never moved a fucking inch. This was not an accident.”
He set me carefully down on my feet and I looked up at his face. My husband’s lips were pressed together in a harsh line and his voice was ragged and raw.
“This means,” and he put one hand on the heavy bookshelf. “That someone deliberately tried to kill you.”
With a sudden, savage motion, he ripped the entire bookshelf from the wall and shoved it out the window, the huge heavy piece of furniture falling with heart-stopping speed and then shattering loudly on the ground.