I swallow hard, still resolutely turned away from her as the blood boils in my veins.
“You’re not going to let the murderer kill me next, are you?” she asks, misinterpreting my reaction.
I try and fail a number of times to force my words out past the layers of rage lying thickly in my throat. But at last I manage, “What do you mean, he killed your parents while you were in the shower?”
She raises an eyebrow in surprise. “Huh?”
I turn around slowly, glaring at her so viciously that she shrinks back against the wall. “What do you mean, Piper, you were in the shower?”
She gulps a few times before stammering, “I mean, he killed my parents when… when…”
“Did heseeyou in the shower?”
“Of course not!” Suddenly appearing to understand my reaction, she straightens her back, throwing my glare right back at me. “Officer Jones told me that’s when it happened. My parents were probably still alive when I came home. It happened while I was in the shower. That’s all. Do you seriously care more about whether he saw me naked than whether he intends to kill me? What the hell is wrong with you?”
So much. So much is wrong with me.
I let myself breathe out in relief, but I’m still furious that a man was in the same house as her when she was naked. Even if he didn’t see her.
Too bad I never got around to putting cameras there. I’d really like to slowly skin and dismember the asshole.
The insect has her eyes glued to mine, carefully studying my reaction. I guess she can tell my anger has shifted, because she walks up to me and lays a hand on my arm. The sudden contact makes me want to jump back, the same way I did the first time I visited her at night at the beginning of senior year, but I’ve gotten a little better at controlling my reactions. I steel myself, not allowing any part of me to show how the nerve endings where she touches me are going haywire.
“Are you going to allow another man to kill me, Quill?” she murmurs. “Or are you going to protect me?”
That word again.Protect.
She used to tell me about that silent protector shit. Back when I thought she loved me, and we spent every second of our free time in her bed or mine, our limbs entwined, as I listened to hertalk.
The sound of her chirpy voice soothed me, then. For one year, I loved it, and even found myself missing it when she wasn’t around. I was perfectly happy to lie still beside her, listening to her blather on for hours about things I had no interest in.
Except I did, because they wereherthings. And everything she said, everything she did, everything she thought, mattered.
They were the only thing that mattered.
She spent a lot of time harping on the silent protector thing. How she’d known I was her silent protector from the moment she laid eyes on me when we were in elementary school. How no amount of bullying in high school had really changed that deep conviction of hers.
I let her believe I was her protector. It made her so happy.
She never realized the only one she had ever really needed protection from was me.
Now, she’s looking at me with pleading eyes, as if trying to find in me the illusion of her childhood. If I had a heart, it would be melting right now.
But my heart was ripped from me the night I got the picture proving what I would never have believed if I hadn’t had the evidence in front of me.
A thousand emotions are surging through me, and I can tell she sees them all as she keeps her eyes fixed on mine, not even breaking contact in the moments that my chest compresses with fury, before it just as quickly dissolves, replaced by another, all-encompassing emotion. It feels like I’m drowning. I wouldn’t even be able to say a word if I wanted to.
She’s standing so close to me that I can smell her citrusy shampoo, and I can’t tell if it makes me want to throw up or fuck her right then and there on the floor. Or both. Probably both.
She takes another step toward me and I just as hurriedly step back, the doorknob digging into my back as I face her.
“Please, Quill.” She swallows with difficulty. “I’m being vulnerable right now. I shouldn’t be. I should be closing myself off from you, but I’m letting you in. I believe you didn’t do it. But someone did, and I don’t understand why I’m still alive. Please. I need your help. I need you. I’m scared.”
The space where my heart should be twists and cripples under the burning intensity of her blue-green eyes. I feel the insane pull as she lifts a hesitant hand toward my face, then thankfully, thinks better of it and brings it back down.
She’s got it all wrong. She shouldn’t be scarednow. She should have been scaredthen.But ever since I conquered my urge to kill her, the only threat to her is gone. Nothing bad will happen to her.
I’ll make sure of that.
