No music from the first-floor apartment. No dog barking down the block. Even the streetlight on the corner is out, the one that usually buzzes loud enough to hear from my window.
A gulp snakes down my throat.
I try to ignore the sense of impending doom as I dig through my bag for my keys. Then I feel it.
A shift in the dark.
Not a sound. More a displacement, a disturbance of the air around me.
My fingers tighten around the strap of my purse.
I tell myself it’s nothing. A neighbor, a cat, a shadow playing tricks.
And then a hand closes around my throat from behind, not squeezing, but the fingers spread wide across my windpipe, thumb pressed into the soft space behind my ear.
A split second later, a large body presses against my back. The world tilts sideways.
“Miss me, baby?”
The voice is low. Close. His lips brush my ear, and every cell in my body goes cold.
I know that voice. It lives in the worst part of my memory, curled up in the dark, waiting.
Landon.
He smells the same. That cologne, expensive now, not the cheap stuff from when we were dating. I guess business is good. Destroying people must be especially profitable these days.
“Let go of me.” My voice comes out steady. A miracle.
Still, his hand stays on my throat, tightening until I can barely breathe.
“Now, that’s not very friendly,” he practically purrs, his voice almost sweet. That’s the thing about Landon: he barely ever raises his voice. He doesn’t have to. He makes everything sound like a lullaby, and you don’t realize until it’s too late that the lullaby was a funeral song. “I came by to check on my investment.”
I try to shrug him loose. No luck.
“I’m not your investment.”
“No?” His thumb moves. A slow circle against the side of my neck. The way you’d stroke a dog before putting it down. “Your heartbeat says otherwise. I feel it right here.” He presses slightly. Not enough to hurt, but enough to remind me that he could. “Going so fast, Ellie. What are you afraid of?”
“Let go.”
“When I’m ready.”
His other hand finds my hip and slides across my stomach. Slow, a cartographer mapping territory he’s already claimed.His fingers spread over my abdomen and pull me back against him. The full length of his body meets mine, and everything in me turns to stone.
“I heard something interesting today,” he murmurs against my hair. “You quit your little teaching job. Walked right out. Very dramatic. Very you.” His hand flattens on my stomach. “I also heard you had lunch with Maren on Monday. At that café in Lincoln Park. Le Petit Coin.”
My blood freezes.
“Oh, you didn’t know I knew that?” I hear the slimy smile in his voice. “Baby. I know everything. I know what you eat, where you sleep. I know you sold your car for three thousand two hundred dollars and sent every penny to my accounts, which I found sweet but also insufficient.” His hand slides higher. Ribs. Just beneath my breast. Testing. “I know you haven’t been with anyone since me. That’s loyalty. I respect that.”
Bile rises in my throat.
“That’s not loyalty. That’s disgust.”
His hand tightens for a second. A flash of pressure across my ribs that makes me gasp.
“Careful.” His voice drops. The sweetness is gone. What’s underneath is flat and cold. “I let you have your pride, Ellie. I let you have your little job and your little apartment and your little fantasy that you’re going to pay this off and walk away.
