Heartless (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy 1)

She shrugged. “So? Yeah, maybe he does really like me. Just as well I’m leaving him a letter then, isn’t it?”

I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and her eyes widened in the way I was coming to love too damn much to ignore.

“He’ll be getting a load more than a goodbye letter from you if you don’t join me down at the back of this building in fifteen minutes,” I told her. “If you take your own life up here, I’ll be taking his. If you tell anyone I’ve been here, I’ll be sure to make sure he’s dead before I handle the drama.”

Oh, those pretty eyes of hers. Widening even further.

“No,” she said. “No. You can’t.”

But yes. Yes. This was the answer. This had always been the answer. Taking her as mine with no exit and no limits was the prize I’d been chasing right from the start, without even knowing it.

She was mine.

She’d always been mine, from the very moment I’d set my eyes on her, the woman in gold.

“I’ll be outside,” I told her. “In the shadows to the right of parking, under the rear awning. You’ll be there in fifteen.”

“No,” she tried again, but it was weak. I didn’t even look behind me, just made my way out of her suite and back through her domain.

I walked through a whole tower full of fools ignorant to the menace going on within their world.

I still had a smirk on my face when I took a turn right at the foyer and followed the signs down for the rear parking lot. The security guards were around, and I could sense them, but I didn’t slow down in my paces, just kept my head up high. Terence Kingsley was leaving the building.

And then I waited.

I waited in the shadows for Elaine Constantine with a strangely hypnotic thrill rising up in my veins.

I checked my watch, ticking slowly. I looked up at the tower block, counting the seconds.

Waiting. Wanting. Planning.

Planning all the filthy painful things I was going to do to that pretty little bitch as I made her mine.

I was going to bind her, and brand her, and tear her apart.

I was going to take her soul, and her heart, and her secrets. Every little last one of them until she was bleeding her sins on the floor and begging me to end her life.

Elaine Beatrice Constantine was my paintoy little virgin, giving me every breath.

And there she was. A flighty shadow in the shadows.

Her wide blue eyes looked more scared than ever as she joined me under that awning with her arms wrapped tight around her chest.

She was skittish. Terrified.

Perfect.

“Don’t hurt Tristan,” she said as she stepped up close. “Please, don’t hurt Tristan.”

“You’d better be a good little girl for the devil, then,” I said, and took my little blonde dolly by the hand.