“We need to visit her.” Key hopped into the room, pacing delicately around my contained crime scene. “This is well done, brother.”
I took the rare compliment from him with a nod. “We can touch her? Finally.”
His soft laugh left me rock hard in my pants. My natural state during the end of a deal that ended like tonight’s has. More than once I’ve let myself finish over a victim, release the pent up energy. Beau Bennet has been present for several of those occasions as he often feeds our desires. But that little habit is too much, even for the head of the Kingsman fraternity at Rippton U. The college where the country's richest sends their offspring to study, socialize and fornicate while their parents tend to business deals.
Deals that their children will one day replicate, in turn. A closed social infrastructure. It’s a hideous net, and by culling the undesirables, I suspect we are simply doing our part. Unfortunately for us, dear old daddy never got to explain his part in the grand scheme, apart from the obvious, and that little habit stops with his grave marker.
“You want to see her? Helia.” Key’s lips wrapped around our obsession’s name like a caress.
I was instantly jealous of his ability to turn that single word into something so much more. “I want to touch her. Tonight. She needs to know us.”
Key looked me up and down. “We have a lot of work to do. Cleaning.”
“Fine. Only because he pushed too far.” I finished tying the head off and double bagged it. Blood had a bad habit of leaking out, especially when the object inside was—-ha, pun—a dead weight.
“She was kicked out of her art class tonight." Key let the words out casually.
I blinked. “She was what? Magnus.” That man was a bane. I added him to my mental list. Helia was far too decent a talent for his mentorship and that wasn’t simply my obsession talking. “What happened?”
Key shrugged and bent to help me with the torso. “He didn’t like her sketches. Something inane and cutesy.” A grimace curled his lips. “Not her usual, but she earned hate for it. Anyway, they had a fight after you left and she walked out, leaving him holding his limp little duck while the rest of her class watched on.”
A warmth started low in my chest. “She owned him,” I breathed, suddenly so proud of my girl. Our girl.
Key was right. Helia did Magnus a favor by walking out of his classroom, not in the least because she could now seek a new class to fill her timetable with. But also because while ever I was distracted in following the girl of my literal dreams, then I wasn’t in his office, discovering a digit to dismember or another part of his body to damage.
“Indeed.” Key directed the rest of the clean up and I took to it, lost in my head. After my shower in the other man’s bathroom, and cleaning that too with bleach I didn't need to use, I transferred as much as I expected the bribe to be worth for the local police unit before I called the murder in.
What? I didn’t want to keep the parents worrying. There was a responsibility here after all Key dis agreed with that last part, not about calling it in but alerting the parents. But if that was my child, I'd want to know.
Not knowing what happened to someone I loved? That might be the scariest damn thing in the world.
“This is done.” Key stretched languorously as flashing lights approached campus. “There. They’re coming. Happy now?”
“Immensely.” I smiled and shook my head. “The roommate is fucking a few doors up. We should vacate.”
He paused, and looked at me. “You want to see her.”
I checked the clock tower that sat in the middle of campus. It was well past midnight and I hadn’t heard it strike a single hour. “I’ll see her whether you’re with me, or not.”
Key nodded. “Then we go together.”
CHAPTER THREE
HELIA
I left my painting on campus, but I kept the concept in my mind. The darkness, the shadow. The blacks and grays. Halfway through painting it, I tumbled into bed and passed out. Even my insomnia couldn’t fight through the mess of today. Perhaps I should be grateful, but I hated it. Because that simply meant that I'd get a handful of hours of sleep, at best and then…the rest of my day would be spent in a literal haze of insomnia fueled brain fog that I wandered about campus in.
And I was already vague and artsy and now I had dropped a class in the middle of semester. I’d be lucky if anyone would take me on, and there was no chance that I was going to call darling daddy like a thousand other girls on campus would do in order to pull a favor.
That wasn’t the way my world worked.
As it turned out, I didn't need to make the call. Because the call found me.
I picked it up on the third buzz, my fingers covered in black paint, at a quarter to midnight. That should have been my first clue. The second was the pause before the voice spoke on the other end.
And the final was that anyone called me at all, outside of my regular Taco Tuesday not-date.
“Hello?”
