Vanquish (Deliver 2)

His eyes glimmered. He liked that answer, and it made her insides flutter.

As he finished off the breakfast, she realized she'd stopped counting the bites when he prompted her to talk. Probably his intention. He didn't seem to do anything without an agenda.

There were still a few bites left, but her stomach hardened, way too bloated. She shook her head at the next forkful. “Tell me something about you. Something that's hard for you to talk about.”

The fork paused then lowered to the table. He glanced at the mudroom and back at her, his thumb moving restlessly along the edge of the plate. Then it stilled. “I'll show you.”

He stood, and without waiting for her, strode to the mudroom, opened the garage door, and stared into the dark hush, his features empty and distinct.

His expressions would never expose who he was, but judging by his sudden remoteness, whatever waited in the garage would.

A cold sweat broke out over her skin, but she rose to follow him, determined to know him. As she walked right through the middle of the smashed cereal without looking at it, her head tilted back, her arms relaxed at her sides, and her strides carried her to him with grace.

He glanced at her with cool, unreadable eyes, and she curled her fingers around his limp hand. Then she followed him through the door.

The fluorescents overhead buzzed in the darkness a half second before the garage flooded with light. Amber blinked rapidly, her lungs tightened, and her hand released Van's fingers with a jerk.

Where she expected chains, whips, torture equipment, and hell, maybe a car was something much more startling.

Dolls and mannequins in every size and state of repair lined workbenches and shelves, hung from walls, and overflowed crates and boxes. Detached arms and legs scattered the floor. Headless bodies slumped in piles with limbs tangled together, the hinged eyes and painted faces frozen in apathy.

The humidity in the two-bay garage stifled her breath, and a chill settled into her bones as she took in the largest collection of mannequins she'd ever seen. There was something very sad about their condition, the way they were tossed aside, neglected...yet kept all the same. A graveyard for broken dolls? Or some kind of a sick tribute?

He left her side and strode toward a large table in the center of the garage, its surface cluttered with paints and tiny tools and doll parts.

She didn't follow but instead walked a wide circuit around him on shaky legs, hands at her sides, her attention imprisoned by the horde of soulless faces. What would a man as virile and rugged and manly as Van want with dolls?

Her steps took her through a maze of baby dolls, toddler-sized dolls, and nipple-less mannequins, all bald and naked, most damaged beyond repair. Her stomach turned, but she wanted to understand the source of her apprehension. He didn't seem to have any friends or family. Were these...things a distraction from the loneliness when he wasn't abducting people?

The agony of being alone and feeling unwanted was a cruel affliction. It could make one desperate for any kind of connection. Maybe even a connection with the plastic replicas of the real thing. Or with deliverymen in the dark.

Had all those men she’d slept with been some kind of coping mechanism for her loneliness? That might’ve been part of it. Like a fourth of it. Yeah, and the other three-fourths of the reason was simply payment for her deliveries. It’d been a fair trade. She hadn’t been using them, right? Her ribs squeezed, and she shoved that thought away.

She passed a tall display cabinet with a glass door, the only one like it in the room. The two dolls inside... What the hell?

A plastic woman sat nude on a chair. She was similar to Amber's height and held a child-sized doll in a red-checkered dress. The woman's brown marbled eyes stared with a glassy, far-away look. Even more eerie was the red line hand-drawn from one glass eye to the pink painted mouth. A scar drawn exactly like the one on his face. She shuddered, gasping, and covered her mouth with her hand.

The dolls in the cabinet were the only two in the garage with hair, the strands intricately woven together in various shades of brown. Why weren't they damaged like the others? Why were they the only ones safely displayed behind glass? What did they mean to him?

They held answers. Shivering curiosity drew her hand to the knob on the glass door.

“Don't touch those.”

His harsh voice made her jump, and she yanked her hand back. Shit. She shook off her nerves and turned to face him. “You collect dolls.” Hollow-eyed, creepy-ass plastic people.

Perching on a wheeled stool, he rolled toward the table and placed his palms on the surface, staring blankly at the clutter around his hands. “I make them, collect them, and...break them.”

An emotionless response, but layers hummed beneath the words. He leaned back, knees spread, hands folded between his strong thighs. He watched her from beneath dark eyebrows, his full lips relaxed and pouty. He was somewhat childlike, surrounded by dolls, sulking and rolling on the stool. Yet he commanded the room with the intensity of his sullen temperament, all that muscle, and...the stretch of his jeans cupping his cock so erotically.

She jerked her gaze up. The man was fucking sexy as hell, doll fetish notwithstanding. She swallowed and continued her exploration around the perimeter, attempting to make sense of it. As she wandered, she peeked back every now and then, finding him tracking her every movement with hooded eyes.

A weight bench sat at one end, surrounded by a mess of mismatched dumbbells. She hoped to learn a lot more about him than the location of his damned workouts. When she reached the farthest corner, she faced him again. “Why do you break them? You don't sell them?”

His huge hands cradled a small headless body, his thumb moving over a two-inch hole punched through the torso. “I'm more interested in quality control.” He tossed it behind him.

She flinched as the doll skidded across the cement floor. He broke dolls for fun. Her heart crashed into a roaring panic. Had he harmed a real child at some point? Was this his way of dealing with that? Or maybe he had been the child?

Her spine crawled with millions of icy pinpricks. Her feet stuck to the floor, the span of the garage separating her from the darkness surrounding the man she might've gravely misjudged. “Why do the dolls need quality control?” Fear quivered in her voice despite her best attempts to stifle it.

He rose from the stool and walked toward a box of undamaged bodies with a terrifying calmness. Paralyzed, she watched as he yanked out the plastic mold of a baby—its limbs attached—and dropped it on the floor. Then his bare foot came down, smashing the body with one stomp.

She stopped breathing. Was this some kind of reenactment? Horrified, she wanted to look away, but she couldn't. She had to know.

The torso cracked beneath his foot, and the head popped off. Dizziness swarmed her head, sending her ears ringing in a frenzied pulse.

With hands on his hips and his head tipped down, hard eyes rolled up and locked on her. “That's why.”

She wrapped her arms around her waist, her fingers sticky and trembling. Quality control meant he was looking for flaws, right? Was he looking for a doll that could survive a heavy foot? That didn't make any sense. Oh God, she didn't want it to

make sense.

Breathing deeply from her diaphragm, she smothered her dread with a strong voice. “I don't understand. Why are you smashing them like that?”

He looked away, his lips in a flat line, seemingly refusing to answer. But he wanted to. She could see it in the rise and fall of his chest and in the shift of his eyes as they studied the collection, searching for the words.

Endless seconds passed, the stillness strangling, before his Adam's apple bobbed and his fingers twitched on his hips. “It was the first and last toy I owned. A goddamned doll.” He laughed nervously, his hand lifting to rub the back of his neck. “I don't even know how I got it. Probably from one of those missionaries who would pop in to deliver food and Jesus pamphlets.”

A clot of emotion gathered in her throat. Something had happened to him. She lowered her hands to her shorts, gripping them. “This was when you lived in the colonia?”

He nodded and crouched over the broken doll, glaring at it. “I was a nine-year-old boy. What the fuck was I doing with a doll?”

His tone was angry, at odds with the tender way his finger traced the jagged hole in the doll's torso at his feet. He seemed to be lost in memory, his silence hardening the lump she couldn't swallow. She stepped forward, aching to erase the distance, but the jerk of his shoulders halted her approach.

“He was a huge man. My mother was a whore, sold herself for the needle, and he was just some random john, but he was the first one I remember. He fucked her right there in front of me. She was so fucking high I don't think she was conscious.” A tremor shook his body, and he sat back, legs folded against his chest, his arms wrapped around his knees. “And there I was, curled up in the damned corner, hugging that doll, kissing her ratty hair like she was my only friend. Hell, she was my only friend.”

He put his hands over his face, and his shoulders hunched like a scared little boy. Her heart clenched painfully, and her eyes burned. She wanted to hold that little boy so damned badly.

Straightening the legs of her shorts, she moved with fast, quiet steps. Then she dropped before him and mirrored his pose with her arms around her knees.