“So… what’s the plan here, champ?” She lifted the bowl for a long sip of artificial fruit-flavored milk.
“To keep you safe.” That flat, modulated voice grated against her nerves almost as much as his answer did.
Lowering her now empty bowl to the floor, Cecilia crossed her arms. “You said that already, but that’s not a plan. Try again.”
There was a long pause. She could almost feel his gaze searching her face, trying to determine exactly what kind of response she wanted. It was almost as vivid as the sensation of his flat, raspy tongue sliding along her throat that just wouldn’t leave her.
“You will stay here until it’s safe to leave,” he amended.
“What or who are you protecting me from, exactly?”
He had an answer to that question immediately. “Everything.”
Cecilia took a deep breath. “Okay. Right. So let’s just… start from the top. You’ve been stalking me for at least a year, right?”
“Guarding you,” he corrected.
“Right,”she dragged out. “Following me to and from work. Watching me through my windows. Other creepy shit, I’m sure.” Cecilia looked at her hands, which rested in the folds of her bunched up mini dress. Picking at her sparkly pink nail polish, she muttered, “I noticed.”
His helmet seemed to scrub his voice of all inflection, but she still thought there was an edge of disbelief in it when he said, “Impossible. I’m very good.”
“At killing things, maybe, but not hiding from a woman’s intuition. Weknowwhen we’re being followed, champ.”
The faint sound of creaking leather drew her gaze to his fist curling against the concrete floor. “If you knew I was following you, why did you continue to meet up with strangers in secluded places?”
Cecilia slapped her thigh and let out a crow of satisfaction. “Iknewit! I knew you were messing with my dates!”
Ever since her last disastrous attempt to satisfy that danger-loving desire that seemed to want to destroy her life — in this instance, a brief and toxic relationship with an orcish biker namedCrash,of all things — she’d vowed to find a good, normal man. She wanted to be a teacher in the cut-throat world of San Francisco’s education system, then to have a home and kids. Chasing the worst man in the room at every opportunity was incompatible with those dreams.
But the dates stopped calling her back. Then they began to reschedule. And then they stopped showing up altogether.
It felt like paranoia to suspect her phantom, but after the third man stood her up, Cecilia couldn’t think of what else it could possibly be. She was a dyed in the wool charmer and bon vivant.
It certainly wasn’ther.
So it was deeply satisfying to have her theory validated when Sloane leaned forward and replied with absolutely zero shame, “Men are threats. I eliminated them.”
The dizzying high of getting an answer to a question that had plagued her for months was quickly squashed. Blood draining from her cheeks, she whispered, “Oh gods, you didn’t kill them, did you?”
She really, really didn’t like how long it took him to answer.
“No. There was no need. It was easy to convince them it was in their best interests to leave you alone.”
I bet it was,she thought with a shudder. Her last potential date was with a math teacher, of all things. She couldn’t imagine what it must’ve been like for someone like him to be confronted withSloane.
Rubbing her eyes, Cecilia muttered, “I’m a normal person, Sloane. I’m not under constant threat. Those guys were justguys.Ones I specifically picked because of how nonthreateningthey were, I might add. I don’t need whatever protective duty you’ve decided to slap on me.”
“You were attacked in your home,” he replied, so fast it seemed like the modulator momentarily struggled to keep up with him. Those powerful shoulders bunched around his ears, pulled up by an invisible string of tension. “You were beaten and threatened by three vampires. If I hadn’t resumed my post, you could’ve been killed or worse — therefore making your statements are untrue.”
Cecilia ran her fingers through her hair. They still trembled faintly, though she couldn’t tell whether that was a result of an adrenaline crash or a side effect of Sloane’s handy sedative.
She hadn’t exactly had a minute to really digest everything that’d happened with Duke and his gang of bullies. It seemed a lot less immediate than the fact that she’d been drugged and kidnapped by the man who’d ripped them to pieces. But when Sloane said it like that, she was taken back to that moment in the chair when Duke raised the pistol, and the crack of it when he struck her cheek.
He would’ve done worse to her. Whatever was necessary, in his mind, to get what he believed he was owed. And then when he got it, he would’ve killed her to get revenge on Dahlia.
A wave of nausea forced her to draw up her legs and place her head between her knees.
He would’ve made it an awful death,she realized, swallowing bile.
