“There’s only one way you stop a man like Elias Slater,” he murmurs in my ear as the high consumes me, my walls spasmingaround his skilled fingers. He’s relentless, just like Knight, and his fingers work me like a fucking magic wand. Then, just as I reach my absolute high, he says three little words that send me crashing back down to earth. “You kill him.”
I suck in a gasp, suddenly feeling cold, and as my body stops trembling, he pulls his fingers free of me, and I fix my sleep shorts as I press away from the wall and spin to face him. Only he’s no longer standing right behind me. He’s clear across the room, staring at me with his head tilted, looking like the perfect masked psychopath.
“What did you just say?”
“You heard me, kitten. There’s only one way you end this, and it’s with his life in your hands.”
I swallow hard, my chest heaving for a whole new reason. “Do I really have it in me?”
“You killed me, didn’t you?”
A softness appears over him, and I suddenly realize that I can see straight through him, and every passing second, his body becomes more transparent.
He’s leaving, and this time, I think it might be for good.
“Wait,” I gasp, a desperation clutching my chest, feeling as though I still have so many questions to ask, so much I still don’t know or understand. “What’s your name?”
A soft breath sounds through the room as I settle my gaze on his fading eyes, a brokenness I’m entirely too unsure about settling into my chest. “I don’t have a name, kitten. I am you. I exist only for you.”
And with that, he disappears out of the living room, leaving me standing here all alone, my body trembling with unease as I take deep, heavy breaths. My hands shake, and I can’t help but feel lost. It felt so real, yet I know deep down that was just a hallucination. Just a warped reality my brain made up in order to deal with the stress of everything that’s been going down.
I take a moment, waiting for the uncontrollable shaking to fade from my body. The moment it’s gone, and I’m finally able to put one foot in front of another, I find myself racing to the kitchen, a whole new kind of panic surging through my veins.
Reaching up above the fridge, I grab the little canister of pills before hastily tipping one out into my hand, and before I even get a chance to fill a glass of water, I pop it into my mouth and swallow it dry.
Now that I’ve gotten exactly what I need, I won’t risk myself again.
“Doll?” Knight’s voice sounds from behind me. “Everything good?”
I whirl around, my eyes wide as I find Knight watching me with a deep suspicion in his eyes, his gaze locked on the open canister of pills in my hand, and I don’t doubt that he sees the crazy in my eyes, the madness of my hallucination still pulsing through my veins.
“All good,” I tell him a moment later, fixing the cap back on the canister. “Couldn’t sleep, and realized I hadn’t taken one of these today.”
He nods and slowly approaches me before taking the little canister from my hands and placing it back up onto the high shelf for me before closing the cupboard. “You sure?” he murmurs, his fingers brushing my messy hair back off my face.
“Promise, I’m perfect,” I whisper into the darkened kitchen before pressing up onto my tippy-toes and brushing a gentle kiss over his lips. “Can you take me back to bed?”
Knight captures my lips in his, deepening our kiss as his arm scoops behind the back of my knees, folding me up into his strong arms as he turns on his heel and stalks out of the kitchen.
“My pleasure,” he tells me, and as he makes his way back down the hall, I hook my arms around the back of his neck, more thanready to spend the rest of my sleepless night losing myself to him.
32
HARPER-RAYN
As everybody slips out of the morgue for lunch on Tuesday, I glance up at today’s protection detail, Hunter Olsen. “How do you feel about taking a walk up to the patient wards?” I ask, already feeling guilty for even considering taking this poor, innocent soul anywhere near my mother, but I can’t help it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about my baby sister. I need to know how she’s doing.
Hunter shrugs as though he couldn’t care less. “Lead the way,” he tells me in a gruff tone that makes me wonder if he’s Diesel’s clone. They look nothing alike, but damn, their attitudes are identical.
If I had to guess, I would say that Hunter is mid to late twenties, my age, maybe, and as far as I can tell, he seems to have his shit together. He’s that guy who just wants to go to work, get his shit done, and then go home to chill out. He doesn’t want to be involved in other people’s drama or get roped intobullshit that he doesn’t belong in. I haven’t seen him in action yet, but considering he’s one of Knight’s men, I can only assume he’s a force to be reckoned with.
“I have to warn you, it’s my mom I’m going to see, and I can assure you, it’s not going to be pretty.”
“Not my business,” he says.
I nod and indicate with a flick of my chin for him to follow along, and before I know it, we’re weaving our way through the long corridors of Blackstone Private Hospital, passing colleagues and friends that I would have been more than happy to avoid. I know a lot of these people were part of the team that nursed me back to health after Elias stabbed me, but before that, I was the crazy morgue girl who was committed to a seventy-two-hour psych hold, and despite being released and sent on my way with a pat on the back, the whispers are hard to ignore.
As we approach her door, an ugly nervousness begins creeping through me, filling my veins until I’m slowing my pace, not having the nerves to even reach for the handle.
