Page 28

“You’re damn right. I’m not afraid to say it. I don’t want to be implicated.”

Her expression hardens, eyes like beads in her skull. “They wouldn’t come for you,” she mutters. “They wouldn’t dare. You’re—you. You look like—well—you know what I mean.”

“They would. In my experience, it’s the beautiful woman who gets the knife in her back the fastest.”

She grits her teeth, a muscle in her jaw tightening. “Let me guess: they’d never suspect me, though, because I’m ugly?”

Oh, I’ve hit on a deep hurt, and for that I am actually sorry. My eyes brush down her face, her body. Does she not look in a mirror? How could she not see how effortlessly breathtaking she is? It’s not like wine affects me anymore, I know what I’m seeing.

“Lacie, no. You’re lovely. A dream.” My fingers itch to curve the line of her jaw, so I clench them into a fist. She blushes and I hurry on. “You have … placed yourself in the crosshairs by raising Laurel’s disappearance with Dean Shea.”

She startles, a hand to her lips. “You heard that?”

“Walls are thin.” I grimace. I hadn’t meant to give that eavesdrop away. Taking a beat, I smooth my features. “Understand it’s a good thing I did hear. It’s the truth: you aren’t in the clear here, either.”

This time her fury is warranted. “You’re right. Goddamn it, I hate that you’re right.”

I hate it for her as much as she hates it for herself. But I don’t say that. Instead I watch her slotting everything together in her brain, and I wonder where I sit inside there. Am I simply an annoyance now—just another asshole who leads by punishment? I don’t want to be.

I soften. “Lacie, love, there will be time later for grief. For now, I need you to trust me. I might have just arrived, but I’ve known … so many men. Dealt with so many terrible old men. Their secrets can be found out. They can be crushed. It’s not nothing, to reverse an injustice. However small.”

I might be a monster, but I have a moral code. I don’t destroy the vulnerable, not if I can help it.

“You talk like you’ve done this before.”

My mind travels to the beginning of my hurt, the death I bury deep, and I clench my teeth together in a hard smile. “I’ve tried.”

“Did it work?” Lacie’s eyes glitter. She wants me to say yes. She wants me to tell her that I was able to set it all to rights.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was too weak to fix it, and now it’s a broken stake through my heart. She doesn’t need to know that.

“It can this time,” I finally say. “Once we know who did this, we can exact retribution, however you’d like.”

“And when this is over, we just … continue on? Be friends?”

She must truly be desperate, to want to know someone like me. “We can be whatever you want.”

Truth is, she won’t like me after this. Not once I have blood painted on my skin and we’ve delivered a punishment of our own.

I’ll try my best not to be the predatory being I am, but in the end, I’ve found, it always wins out. The only promise I make myself is to not drink from her, no matter how easy or sweet. No matter how hungry I get. No matter how hungry it makes me.

Not yet anyway.

Lacie smiles. Her depth perception is fucked, I can see it in her pupils, and she steps even closer, her pace wavering. The heat of her breath, the powdery scent of her deodorant, the pulse of blood in her jugular … Swallowing hard, I tighten my hands until my nails bite my palms.

I don’t know what I want, and it terrifies me.

“Understand, Lacie,” I say, my voice smooth as glass, cushioned as velvet, “once we know, once I know, I won’t let it lie. I don’t suffer cruelty, not like this.”

Her eyes flick to mine, and inside I see that rage, that vivid, luxurious feeling, flare. Slowly, something not quite a smile curves her lips.

“Fine,” she whispers. “I’m in.”

SEVENLacie

I wake up in my own bed.

Part of me is surprised, part of me disappointed.