Page 50

Rhys looks at me like the ground has gone out from under his feet. There is no heat in it, only horror, and for a second he says my name as if it might turn into someone else.

“Cruz.”

“Yes.”

He takes a step back with the mask hanging from his fingers, bone-white, mesh over the eyes, my sweat still on the inside of it. He looks at the grey coverall and the gloves and my hair, wet the way it gets after I train him, and finally everything starts to sink in.

“No. You were in my building. You were in my parking lot. You were in my house.”

“Yes.”

“You killed them?”

“Yes.”

He swallows hard, and still does not drop the mask, because even now he holds on to what he can use.

“How long?” he asks. “How long have you been doing this? How long have you been planning this?”

I could lie, but I don’t.

“I have wanted you since the first month I was in that gym. The rest of it started when I understood I was not the only one looking.”

He laughs once and there is nothing funny in it. “You murdered people because someone looked?”

“Not someone. Them. The ones who would have taken you apart if I let them get close enough.”

“You don’t get to decide that.”

“I did.”

He points the mask at me like it is a person.

“Why? I want all of it. Every name. You stand in my house and you tell me the truth, Cruz. I want why. I want when. I want each one. Do not leave out a single detail.”

I pull the hood down. I leave the gloves on. If I take them off, I will touch him, and I am not ready for him to pull away.

“It was for you,” I say. “All of it. That is the sick part, and it is the truth. I wanted you. I wanted you without them standing in the way. I wanted you to hear my voice and not know it was me until you were already in it. I wanted you hard in your own tower while I told you what I was going to do to you. I wanted you searching every floor for a stranger and never guessing it was the man who trains you. I have loved you. I have loved that mouth and that body and the way you walk through a room like it already belongs to you, and I was going to have you. No matter what it took.”

“That is not love,” he says.

“It is the only way I know how to love you.”

He stares at me. He is still horrified. Something else is there too, and he hates it.

“Noah,” he says. “Start there. And I want to know everything, Cruz.”

His voice is already tighter than it was at the door. He says the name like he is back on nineteen with his jacket in his hands.

“Noah Brennan booked me twice this month so he would look good for Rafe Ortega. I put my hands on his back and counted in his ear and he still watched the door in case you walked past. Tuesday night he left his office door open for you. Tie loose. One shoe under the chair. Two inches. He wanted Rafe in the file room. He also wanted you to see him. That is not nothing. That is a man splitting himself in two and giving you the half that gets people killed. Then he went down to nineteen.”

“So you called him?”

“I called him like Rafe. Filthy, the way Noah liked it, because I knew how the two of them talked. I sent him down to nineteen and I put the mask on so he would think it was a game. He asked what was with the mask. He stripped because I told him to. He was hard when I went to my knees. He thought I was going to put my mouth on him. I opened his stomach instead and I kept my hand on his cock while he tried to hold himself together. He came. He said a name that was not yours, and then he tried to say one that was. I told him he was pretty when he bled. He was.”

The color drains from Rhys’s face. His mouth goes tight. He swallows as if the room tastes of something bad. For a second he looks past me at nothing, the way a man looks when he is seeing a dead body again.

“I covered him with my jacket.”