I didn’t want to be part of this life, I thought.
But as soon as I had a thought like that, I would remember Alaric’s body against mine, the way he held me, the way he had looked into my eyes just days before.
And then I would remember why Eric was here, babysitting me.
A cold fury would start up in me again.
Eric set a plate with eggs on a bed of greens in front of me. It looked delicious, but I wasn’t about to just do what he told me.
“I’m not hungry,” I said quietly.
Eric’s mouth turned up in a sneer. “Eat. Your breakfast.”
I took a fork in my hand and I gripped it tightly. Eric’s eyes fell to look at my hand, and he smiled. “Don’t think of doing anything funny.”
I thought about it defiantly, but if I was going to get away from Eric, I would have to do it some other way.
“Eat.”
I cut into the poached eggs. I had to admit, the guy was a good cook. For an evil assassin type.
“What will he do to her?” I asked, after taking a bite. I couldn’t stand the silence, Eric’s terrible glower bearing down on me. Especially not while, right now, my friend was being murdered.
Eric just stared at me with the same unreadable expression on his face.
I dropped my fork. “Is there some reason you can’t tell me? It’s not like I don’t know what he’s doing.”
His face didn’t change.
“What do you get out of this?” I snapped.
Eric shook his head ever so slightly. “I owe Alaric a favor. This is it.” He leaned forward and picked up some of the spinach between his fingers. “If it were any other way,” he said, stuffing the spinach into his mouth, “there isn’t any amount of money he could pay me to get involved in this shit.” He looked down at the spinach. “Finish that off. It’s fucking brilliant.”
It was, but I tried my best to look mad about having to eat it.
“Lucy’s my friend,” I said, and I didn’t even expect myself to speak before I did. It just sort of erupted. “I owehera favor. Can’t you just...” My eyes welled up with tears.
Eric rose up to his full height and looked at the ceiling. “Alaric’s a clean killer,” he said coldly. “This girl won’t even see it coming.”
The sob that swelled up inside of me came from deep inside and rushed like a wave against the confines of my body. But I didn’t want to cry anymore in front of Eric, so I tried to keep it inside. I stood up, and he looked at me with a cold curiosity. I wanted to go to my room, to lock the door on him, to hide away. I looked around the kitchen, and saw the knife he had used to prepare the food. It was small, but if I could just get it, I would be—
The grief of imagining Alaric, moving like a panther toward the helpless Lucy to kill her, however painlessly, however ‘clean’ he might be, ripped through me again.
I had stopped breathing. The sob inside of me was trapped there, and I couldn’t inhale. I hadn’t for almost a minute, and the pain of not breathing mixed with the pain of the man I loved being someone I needed to hate...
I wasn’t thinking clearly as I stepped toward the counter with the knife. Stars began to creep into my field of vision, and I felt my stomach moving, trying to force my lungs to breathe. Ididbreathe, and then I was breathing too much, and then, suddenly, everything was black.
* * *
It wasn’t the firsttime I had woken up tied up, and I was surprised that my body had learned so quickly that I could lie there and be awake, while taking in my situation with my ears, before opening my eyes.
I was tied at the wrists, and by shifting a little, I could feel that I was most likely not tied at the ankles. My arms were in front of me, and I was on my side, with one leg over the other. I was on a hard surface.
I could hear the ocean in the far distance, and feel a light breeze, the kind that came eternally through the windows here. For a moment, I was able to pretend that I was waking from a nice nap, and that I could get up, walk down to the beach, and find Alaric on his boat. He would see me, smile at me, and hop onto the dock.
That was the fantasy I carried around with me, and as the memories of the long and terrible evening and morning with Eric rose like a tide inside my head, I was dragged down and away from my fantasy, back to the nightmare of loving a man who was a bad man, a man who killed, a man who kidnapped. Warm, wet tears built up behind my eyelids. How could I still have feelings for him? How could I have ever been so stupid as to fall in love with him, or to believe that he had fallen in love with me?
And now I had his child inside of me.
