Kicking the door shut with a bootheel, he carefully placed two bags on the floor. They were huge canvas rucksacks apparently stuffed to the brim and cinched shut with a draw string at one end.
A little uncomfortable with how oddly… body-like the bags looked, she cautiously inquired, “Whatcha got there, champ?”
“Your possessions,” he answered, tucking his hands behind his back in that rigid stance he favored.
Cecilia’s eyes widened. Lurching off the bed, she momentarily forgot to be wary of getting too close to him as she hurried toward the bags. “You got my things?”
“Correct. While you were sedated, I returned to your apartment. The bodies have been disposed of and your valuable possessions collected.” He didn’t move away when she knelt at his feet, her hands already scrambling to loosen the drawstring on one bag.
She’d done her best to clean the blood off her skin-tight mini dress in the bathroom, but the possibility of changing intoclean,warm clothing made her acutely aware of the fact that it hadn’t done much good. She never wanted to see her work uniform again, let alone wear it.
Which shouldn’t be a problem,she realized, suddenly a little queasy,since my boss is dead.
Shunting that thought aside as something she would have to deal with later, Cecilia thrust her arm into the bag’s opening and began tearing out every neatly folded article of clothing he’d stolen from her home. He made an odd sort of grunting noise as she carelessly flung her things around her.
An explosion of comfort rained down around her — a sea of pinks, pastel purples, precious vintage finds, and things she’d stolen from Dahlia over the years. When one bag emptied, she moved onto the other one.
The moment she shoved her arm into it, her fingers met a hard pebbled surface. Cecilia’s heart stopped.
She knew what it was by feel alone, but she still couldn’t believe her eyes when she extracted the small bedazzled urn.
“You… grabbed my cat?” she choked out.
She barely registered the way he slid into a slow, predatory crouch beside her. His wrists balanced on his knees in a deceptively casual pose when he answered, “That is not a cat.”
Holding the ugly urn she’d tearfully bedazzled in a reverent grip, she carefully turned it so he could read the name she’d spelled out in clear crystals. “Yes, it is,” she insisted. “This is Oyster. I found him as a kitten when I was fifteen. He died a couple years ago and I… Why did you— I mean, how did you even?—”
Sloane cocked his head to one side. “You sleep with it beside your bed. It appeared to hold sentimental value to you.”
She didn’t mean to laugh. The sound that came out of her wasn’t even true laughter. Instead, it was a kind of disbelieving huff crossed with baffled delight. Sloane was so strange, so unreadable, and their situation so outrageous that hearing him talk about any sort of emotion was deeply bizarre.
Only half-joking, she said, “So you understand sentimental value, huh?”
He nodded slowly. “I do.”
Taken off-guard, she searched the smoky reflective glass of his visor. He was close. Very close. Her own image was stretched and distorted in the surface, but she swore she could just make out the dark shape of his face beneath it.
In a softer voice, she asked, “What holds sentimental value for you, Sloane?”
“Anything you touch.”
Oh, he’s a disaster,she thought, facing flushing. “That’s not an answer. That’s a pick-up line.”
Those terrifying claws curled and uncurled, seemingly unconsciously, between his bent knees. “Are you requesting specifics?”
Gently setting Oyster aside, she gave herself an excuse to look away from him and began pulling out the rest of what he’d brought. Her makeup kit and several pairs of shoes tumbled out when she replied, “Sure. I want to understand you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are currently holding me captive,” she answered bluntly, “and you seem to know everything about me. Also, you licked my neck. It only seems fair.”
If she expected an apology for the neck incident, she didn’t get one. Sloane replied, “I have a sweater.”
Cecilia paused. Looking at him dubiously, she noted, “You don’t really seem like a sweater kind of guy.”
There was a beat of silence before he asked, “What kind of guy do I seem like?”
She really didn’t know how to answer that. Not because shedidn’thave an answer, but because she wasn’t sure it was smart to say aloud.
