“I thought you said you weren’t going to hurt me,” he gasped, eyeing the blade I had angled at his chest.
“I won’t, as long as you answer my questions. Tell me what I want and you’ll walk away scot-free. Sound fair?”
“How can I trust you?”
“You really don’t have a good grasp on your options here, moron. Now, take a second to collect yourself.” I paused while he took a deep, rattling breath. Snot dribbled from his nose. “Okay, good. Now. I want you to think very carefully. When you answer, be sure to include every detail you can remember, got it? Start from the beginning. What did you see on the night of those murders?”
He started to talk in a slow, halting voice. “I was at home. I lived in the apartment building, the one where the shit happened. I heard a bunch of noise from across the hall. I was high, man, I was so high. I thought the cops were coming for me. I threw the deadbolt and the chain, but I was still freaking the fuck out. I looked out my peephole, you know? And he came running out of the lady’s room. He had blood all over him, so much blood, man. He looked like he was a fucking butcher!”
“Did you see his face?”
“Only for a second. He put the mask on pretty quickly as soon as he came out of the room. I just remember his hair. He had this crazy white hair, even though I thought it was a young dude. He put the mask on real quick. But that’s when he heard me. I, like, I fucking kicked a lamp over or some shit, I don’t even know. I was so high.”
“You mentioned that already,” I said dryly.
He licked his lips. “He musta heard it, because he came up to the door and looked right in the peephole. And his fucking eyes, man!”
“What about his eyes?”
I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “They were gray. Not just gray like the color, but like, gray. Like, haunting. Alien eyes. Out of this fucking world. I thought he was a demon or somethin’.”
Gray eyes. There were two people in the world with eyes like that.
There was Carmen Sanders.
And then there was her father.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Carmen
When I woke up in the morning, I was on cloud nine. It felt like my feet were barely touching the floor as I walked around the bedroom while I went through my morning routine. Ben had kissed me before he left, saying something about having to go to the clubhouse to check on the boys’ progress. I clung to him for as long as he would let me. I knew if anyone were looking on, they would have thought I looked ridiculous, like a little puppy unwilling to let his master leave the house. But I didn’t care. I wanted to keep his smell in my nose and his taste on my lips and the more I thought about it, the more I decided that anyone who wanted to get in the way of that could just go ahead and eat it. For the first time in a long time, I felt happy.
The shower was steamy and warm as the water cascaded down my skin. I closed my eyes and for a second I swore I could feel Ben’s touch on my skin, his lips on my neck. I opened them and shivered. He had already worked his way into my freaking nervous system, it seemed like. He was in my head, under my skin. I should’ve been freaked out, by all rights. And yet, I didn’t mind in the slightest. I’d never felt better.
I swaddled myself in one of Ben’s thick white towels as I stepped out of the shower. My skin was rosy from the hot water. I looked in the mirror and saw, in the middle of the peals of steam rising around me and the condensation on the mirror’s surface, that I was smiling a goofy, borderline manic grin. “Get ahold of yourself,” I scolded my reflection. “You’re being ridiculous.” I was. I knew I was. But I couldn’t help it.
I hummed under my breath as I sat on the edge of the bed and brushed out the kinks in my hair. There were a few things I could busy myself with around the house today, but nothing too major. Hopefully Ben wouldn’t have to work too long and we could go for a ride or something when he went home. Maybe I’d make up a reason to call him back early. I’d go to the store and get some new furniture that required a big, strong man to lift it into the apartment. I grinned again. The one voice in my head reprimanding me for acting so petulant and needy was waging a miserable, losing war against the thousand other thoughts that all revolved around Ben. I felt like one of those girls in the cartoons who sits in class and doodles things like Mrs. Ben Killmore in the corners of her notebook. I needed to get my hands working quickly before I started to do the same.