Darren glared at Aiden. His expression contorted into something hard and hateful as he seemed to drop all pretense.What was going on?Darren’s mind was struggling to catch up. He’d expected a night of fun where Aiden finally gave in, yet this seemed… anythingbutthat.
Swallowing hard, Darren shoved aside the fear and the worry. Was this… some kind of a new game they were playing? Was Aiden a dominant? He considered that option. Yes, the warden’s attitude implied the possibility of it, but his reactions when Darren touched him, the way he let Darren be in charge suggested otherwise. And those eyes… They seemed different. Even in the gloominess, he couldsee a spark of something cruel and detached, something icy like the tone with which Aiden had just spoken.
Something violent.
It enveloped Darren’s lungs and squeezed them and invited something he’d not felt in years.
Fear.
“I see you’ve familiarized yourself with my file,” Darren said, agitation making his own voice snappy.
“You are a monster.”
Darren’s mind whirled. He gritted his teeth, muffling his scoff.What was this?Had Aiden taken him here to lecture him about the crime he’d committed?Afterall this time? Why wait so long? Why pretend? What for?
“I’ve been called worse.” Darren slumped his shoulders to mitigate the pulling of the restraints even if just by a little. “Why are we really here, warden?”
“I’m here to get answers and then kill you,” Aiden said calmly, matter-of-factly. It was a statement said without emotion. It was detached. Practiced.
Darren hung his head back, closed his eyes, then reopened them and faced the other man again. Stared at him and studied every angle of his face, every plane, every feature, and in doing so finally cracked the reason for his familiarity.
Ah. It made sense, suddenly clicked into place. Aiden’s face, his strange, contradicting-at-times but still so alluring behavior. And that haunted look in his eyes, the one that Darren found himself drowning in even now as the man whose world he’d ended was here to end his own.
He should’ve pieced it together. He shouldn’t have ignored that little voice warning him to stay away. He’d never met the man across from him and he didn’t know hisreal name or if this was how he really looked, but he knewnowwho Aiden Kelsey was.
Because there could only be one person who would come here to kill him.
Claudia DuLaurent’s ex-fiancé.
“Is that why you seduced me? To lure me here alone?” Darren spat out. Aiden said nothing to that, his lips pressed in a firm line as the rest of his features let the anger show. “Not because you are just as attracted to me as I am to you?”
“Attracted toyou?” Aiden raised his voice, his eyes blazing in outrage.
“Your body can’t lie as well as you think it can,Aiden Kesley.”
The golden flecks stirred in those hazel depths, burning with more hatred. “You are the man who murdered Claudia DuLaurent, my fiancée,” he said with conviction. And pain and anger too, though half-suppressed like he didn’t know how to fully let them out.
Darren’s stomach knotted as the words confirmed his suspicion. It brought back the haunting memories of that night on Mars and everything that had led to it. He had tried so hard to forget, to pretend he was over it, that he’d given up. That he’d accepted his fate and made peace with rotting in prison until his end came.
“I couldneverbe attracted to you,” Aiden snarled, banging his fist on the table.
Yet part of you inevitably is. A part you don’t want to acknowledge. And it’s killing you on the inside, isn’t it?“I see. So this is about revenge.”
“No, not just revenge, Darren Howe. It’s justice.Myjustice.”
It was impressive. The lengths to which Aiden Kesley had gone so he could have the knife to Darren’s throat tonight. So he couldfixthe mistake of the justice system and make Darren pay for the crime he had committed. But… Darren squinted at Aiden, saw the man behind that expertly maintained mask for the first time ever, and realized that Aiden wasn’t here simply to kill him.
“That’s not all. You aren’t here just so you can kill me, warden, or you would’ve done it already.”
“I want answers,” Aiden stated, the intent to get them clear in his tone. No matter what it took.
Seeking answers from a murderer—what a silly thing to do.Then again, desperate men did silly things all the time.
Darren let his attention leave the other man and studied the many twinkling white specks beyond the glass. “What makes you think I will give them to you?”
“What reason do you have not to?”
Darren chuckled without humor as he shifted his gaze back to Aiden. “I suppose you are right. One way or another, that thing up there”—he tilted his chin up, realizing now what the loosened steel beam he’d noticed was for—“is dropping on my head. So, yes, I guess I don’t really have a reason not to answer your question if I’m going to die tonight.”
