“Makenna, breathe.”
I feel his hands on me, bracing my back and shoulders. His voice is distant, buried under a torrent as the storm surges, dragging me under a crashing wave.
I shutter my eyes, my chest on fire with need for air.
Then oxygen blasts my lungs. I sense the press of his mouth to mine. My eyes flutter open as he gives me mouth to mouth. He forces another blast of air, and the feel of his lips sealed to mine makes me gasp in shock. He releases me, and I hunch over, dragging air into my closed lungs.
“Don’t touch me,” I pant out. “Get away.”
To my disbelief, he does, giving me space as I cling to the railing for support.
When the world rights itself, I blink hard, clearing my vision and clipping unshed tears. My sight blacks, flickers. Before I fall, his arms have me cradled to his massive chest.
I don’t fight it; I don’t have the strength. I let Luke Easton, the monster, the fiend, carry me into his cellar. Like some sordid fairytale.
He kicks over my canvas bag, lays me on the strewn clothes. Then he proceeds to bandage my hands. It’s so bazaar, how gentle he handles me, like I’m delicate, breakable. Yet my neck still displays the marks of his wrath—the proof he’s anything but gentle.
And I’m not breakable.
This is becoming psychological warfare. Who will crack first? Who has the power? Captor or prisoner?
How much time do I have before he snaps, and I’m drug from this room and encased inside a twisted, cemented figure?
He watches me a beat, mentally determining something as his forehead furrows in thought. He turns around, and I decide—no matter what the cost—I can’t be here alone. My only chance for answer and escape is through him. “Wait—”
He does. He stops far enough away I feel safe. For now.
“Don’t pretend.” I sit up, drape the towel over my legs. At the confused draw of his brows, I say, “Don’t be tender in order to manipulate me. You said you didn’t want to hurt me. But wanting doesn’t count. That’s a premature apology for what you know will happen.” He hasn’t moved, just stands there with his hands clenched, veins mapping his forearms. I say the next part quickly, to get it out. “And it’s for your benefit, not mine. So you can humanize yourself. I watched you murder in cold blood twice. You’re not human to me. You never will be.”
He moves quickly, as fast as he did in the alley. He takes hold of the back of my neck and forces me to stand. I reach behind my head, trying to remove him, but his hold is welded to me like the cuff he used to shackle my leg.
He drags me to the corkboard. My feet barely keep pace, my bare toes scraping the rough concrete. “Look at this,” he says, breathing labored. “Look hard. I’m not the one pretending. I’m not the one denying the truth that is literally right in front of her fucking eyes.”
He releases me, and I pull in a breath. I rub the back of my neck with a bandaged hand where it still feels like a vise squeezes. Through my teary panic, I blink in rapid beats to see the pictures pinned to the board.
Hudson.
He’s standing alongside Milton Myer in what looks like a building entrance. I don’t recognize the place, and I don’t understand why, when I made a case to investigate Myer Keystone Enterprise, Hudson was firmly against it—and yet he’s with the head of the company in this image.
I shake my head. “I was investigating Myer,” I say. “My partner must have been following up on a lead.” Without telling me.
I hear Easton’s frustrated huff behind me. “The date. Look at it. Your research only goes back for the past year.”
I glance at the bag of files. All the time I spent off the clock investigating…because of one girl. One girl that rattled me to the core. I couldn’t get the image of her out of my mind for days afterward; her broken body lying on that ER gurney. The medical report that detailed the extensive abuse she suffered.
She was only sixteen.
They’ll kill me, she said.
I tried to get her to talk, to tell me who had harmed her, but the trauma to her body and the psychological damage kept her silence firm. It was the they in her brief statement that shook me. And when, after a sleepless night of going over the lack of evidence, I returned to question her again, she was gone.
I breathe through the memory, my gaze lingering on the picture of Hudson and Myer, but not really seeing it. I can feel the press of Easton’s judgment from behind, like a dominant force towering over me, waiting for some miraculous revelation.
But I have
nothing.
Whatever this means to him…I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to.