Beware of Me (Dark Obsession 4)

“Baby, baby, please, talk to me.”

She blinked and saw Ethan’s face right above hers. He was staring at her with desperate eyes. A desperate Ethan—a sight she didn’t see every day. “Wh-what do you want me to say?” A crazy man just attacked me. He scared the hell out of me. That pretty much summed up the last ten minutes of her day.

“You’re bleeding.” His hand flew toward her collarbone. “Sonofabitch. It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay.”

“Ethan…”

“I have to see how bad it is.”

She almost didn’t want to know. Not if it was bad, anyway. “He’s…getting away.” The man she’d never seen—the man in the mask. The man who’d said that he’d been waiting for her. Waiting with duct tape and handcuffs.

Suddenly, the threats that Ethan had mentioned were horribly, terrifyingly real.

Ethan kept one hand on her collarbone even as he yanked out his phone with the other. His fingers flew across the screen. “Charles, I need an ambulance. Yes, I said a fucking ambulance. No, no, shit, I didn’t kill anyone. It’s Carly.” His fingers pressed a bit harder to her skin. “Some bastard attacked her. We’re in the parking garage. He’s getting away. In a black van, late model, driving hell fast. Find the SOB. Stop him.” Then he dropped the phone. “I’m going to pick you up,” he told Carly. “I’ll take you outside. Charles will get the ambulance, and everything will be okay.”

“Liar.” Things were far from okay.

He lifted her into his arms. Held her carefully and turned—

“What in the hell is happening?”

She didn’t recognize that horrified voice, but when her gaze slid to the speaker, she saw a man in a guard’s uniform. Wait, was he pointing pepper spray at them?

“An attack just happened,” Ethan snarled back. “I told you to get the cops here. She’s hurt, and some jerk in a black van is getting away.”

The guard’s face went slack with shock. But, before he could say anything else, more men were rushing out of the stairwell behind him. Armed men.

Men in…FBI vests?

She saw Special Agent Monroe. He was at the front of that pack. He closed in and as he did, he aimed his gun right at Ethan.

“What the fuck have you done now?” Agent Monroe demanded.

***

The bitch. The bitch. The bitch.

He drove into another parking garage, moving as fast as he could, and he ditched that van. Just jumped out of it and ran into the shadows.

He wasn’t about to take off his ski mask. Not with the chance that his image might be caught on a security camera. It was a good damn thing he’d worn gloves. At least there wouldn’t be any fingerprints in the van—he figured the cops would find it, sooner or later.

He yanked at the handles on a few nearby cars, and alarms started peeling. Shit. He didn’t need this—

One car didn’t sound an alarm. One car…it was actually unlocked.

He glanced at the plates. Tourist.

Some people should really know better.

He jumped in the car, and, less than a minute later, he was shooting out of that parking garage. When it was safe, he ditched the ski mask.

His ribs fucking hurt from her hit. She’d pay for that attack. He was going to make sure of it. She’d be paying for everything that she’d done to him.

Did she think retribution would never come her way? Oh, it would.

Revenge. Punishment. Hell.

Carly Shay would get exactly what was due to her.

Chapter Four

The wound hadn’t been deep enough for stitches. Apparently, she just had a tendency to bleed like crazy. Who knew?

Carly sat on a gurney in the ER, a paper gown covering her body. Her clothes had been taken—where, she didn’t really know. Though she suspected the FBI had confiscated them. Probably looking for some kind of evidence on them.

Had the attacker bled on her? It was possible. She’d sure tried to hurt him. So maybe the FBI had his blood, his DNA. Maybe they could find out who the jerk was.

The curtains around her were pushed aside, and Carly gave a quick jump.

“Easy.” Ethan’s voice was low. “It’s just me.”

Her heartbeat didn’t slow down any.

Her bare feet flexed a bit and her shoulders hunched. “I figured the FBI would be hauling you away.”

He laughed and came closer. “They can’t. They don’t have any evidence to use against me. Story of their lives.” His hand lifted and he brushed back her hair. When she glanced at his face, Carly saw that his laughter was already gone, as if it had never been there at all.

His expression was so intent that her breath caught for a moment. What’s wrong now?

His gaze dropped to her new bandage. “I was scared as all hell when I couldn’t find you in that building. I went up to that idiot shrink’s office and found out that you were gone, but the guard in the lobby said you hadn’t left.”

She swallowed, then focused on breathing. Nice and easy. “So you came in, guns blazing, to find me.” She could hear the bustle of people around her. Doctors and nurses were working frantically just behind the curtain. She’d been told that she had to stay put, for a few more moments, until her doctor officially released her.

She didn’t want to wait, though. Carly wanted to cut and run.

Hospitals weren’t exactly her favorite spots.

“I should have been with you the whole time. I knew the threat was there. I knew that Quincy’s brother was looking for you.”

“You still think it was the brother?”

“I think his younger brother, Curtis, has been aiming to punish his brother’s killer for years. He might look clean on paper, but I know better—than just about anyone else—how easy it is to fake a clean cover.”

"I didn’t see his face. I have no clue who attacked me.” She gave a weak laugh. “The FBI agent grilled me, again and again, but I couldn’t tell him much. Just that the guy was big, close to your height. Strong. His voice was low, no accent that I could detect.” And all that was pretty much nothing. No useful info. “He had all of his killing supplies in the back of that van. He said he’d been waiting to get me alone—”

“He won’t get you alone again,” Ethan promised her.

“You can’t stay with me forever.”

“Don’t be so sure about that.”

The curtain slid back once more. This time, her doctor was there. And a male nurse—one holding scrubs and looking apologetic.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse began, “but you won’t be getting your clothes back tonight. The FBI—”

“Right,” Carly interrupted. “I figured that.” But at least the nurse had brought her scrubs to wear. She wouldn’t be heading out in the paper gown and flashing her ass to the FBI agents on the way out of the hospital.

That was one win for her.

Maybe.

“The wound wasn’t severe,” the doctor said. The doctor was a lady who appeared to be in her late twenties, maybe early thirties. A little too thin and with her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Just keep it clean. The last thing you want is an infection.”

Actually, the last thing she wanted was to be hunted by some psycho with serial killing supplies at the ready, but yes, an infection was bad, too.

“It may scar,” the doctor said. And as she said those words, the doctor’s gaze cut to Ethan’s face, then, quickly, she looked away. “Though scarring can be minimalized by—”

“I don’t care about scars,” Carly responded flatly. “I care about breathing. He missed my jugular, so I know just how lucky I am.”

The doctor glanced down at her chart. “You’re clear to go. If you have any issues, just give us a call back.”

Ethan had taken the scrubs from the nurse. A call back? Hopefully not.

The doctor and nurse left. Ethan put the scrubs on the gurney beside her. Voices drifted in and out.

“I need to change,” Carly

said. “So you have to leave.”

He put his hands on either side of her body. “You never look at my scars.”

His scars. The slashes that slid down each of his cheeks.

“You’ve never asked about them, either. Don’t you want to know how I got them?” He leaned in closer. “Daniel Duvato gave them to me. The man I’d trusted for years—he hated me. And he had been working to make my life a living hell. Anytime I got close to a woman, he attacked her. He was setting me up, you see. Making it look as if I were some insane killer. And at the end, when he snapped completely, he came after me. Stabbed me again and again.” He caught her hand. Pressed it to his chest. “I’ve got more scars than I care to count. He wanted the world to look at me and see that I was a monster. As twisted on the outside as I was on the inside.”

She shook her head. “You aren’t.”

“Ah, baby, we both know that’s a lie.”

“You aren’t.” And the other voices faded away. “You’re right—I didn’t ask about your scars. Mostly because I don’t see them. You’re handsome as sin, and you have to know that, Ethan. Women look at you, and I’m pretty sure panties drop. There’s nothing twisted about how you look. There’s nothing twisted about you.”

His face softened. “Oh, Carly, if only that were true.” He brought her hand up to his mouth and pressed a kiss to her palm. “I’ll turn my back while you dress, but I don’t want to leave. Now that I finally pushed my way past the FBI, I don’t plan to leave you for a very long time.”

Because he thought the attacker might strike again? Fear bloomed in her stomach and she hurriedly dressed. In her head, she kept sliding back into that parking garage. Kept seeing the man in that ski mask coming at her.

Ethan’s shoulders seemed so incredibly tense as he stood there, just in front of the thin curtain. She glanced down at her toes, feeling vulnerable in the scrubs. What was she supposed to do about her shoes? They’d given her some little sock things and she put those on quickly, but it wasn’t as if those were really going to help her once she left the hospital. “I need to get back to my place,” she said. “Will you get Charles to take me there?”