by Anne Stuart
She took a step backward, but it was too late. He caught her shoulders, and she could see the tattoo of thorns beneath the sleeve of his tunic. She tried to jerk away, but he was holding her too tightly, and she could feel the panic rise in her throat, strangling her. She couldn’t breathe, but she couldn’t let him know that, or he’d continue to hold her, closer, tighter, until her breathing stopped completely and her heart exploded and she was dead, dead like her mother, dead like Angel, dead, dying, lost …
He shook her, a short hard snap of her body, and when she lifted her head to glare at him he had already released her. “You wouldn’t recognize it if I showed you.”
“Recognize what?” Her voice was husky, her mind muddled.
“The peace that I could give you. You aren’t ready for it.”
It took every ounce of her strength to pull herself together, to stare at him with icy politeness. “Be sure to let me know when you consider me ripe,” she said.
“Trust me, Rachel,” he said, his voice a soft whisper on the night air. “You’ll know.”
7
She walked five paces behind him, like an obedient Muslim wife, but Luke wasn’t fooled. She was neither obedient nor wifelike, and if his instincts weren’t so well honed he might be expecting a knife between his shoulder blades.
Rachel wasn’t that obvious, or that direct. He’d grown up in a society where resentments and differences were handled with fists and weapons, and the weaker the opponent the more damage you could inflict.
He wondered if things had been different, just what he would have been like. His mother got knocked up when she was eighteen, falling for the raven-haired, blue-eyed traveling evangelist who got strong men down on their knees and strong women down on their backs. He wouldn’t have even known, if Jackson Bardell hadn’t delighted in telling him he was no kin. He was just some bastard his mother had been too stubborn or too stupid to get rid of.
He’d followed in his daddy’s footsteps—the father he’d never met. Hell, he didn’t even know the man’s name, just that he was killed a few years later by someone’s jealous husband. It was when his mother had heard the news that she had finally agreed to marry Jackson Bardell. The worst mistake of her life.
She found that out soon enough. And she paid for her mistakes, ten times over, before she finally put a stop to it with a rope in the old barn. And then there’d been no one to stand between Luke and Jackson Bardell’s drunken fists.
He used to think that anyplace in the world had to be better than southern Alabama. He had been wrong. The people of Coffin’s Grove were close kin to those in the slums of Chicago, and not that far off from the exalted rich who had surrounded Stella and Rachel Connery. Wanton Stella and her cold-blooded daughter. He’d never seen two women more unlike in nature. Stella got what she wanted through trickery and deceit, using her charm, her body, her money. Rachel fought for what she thought she deserved. She was going to lose this time. He wondered how often she lost. How much.
He took her around the back way, to the eastern entrance of the meditation room that led off his private quarters, and he stopped by the doorway, looking at her. It was almost pitch-black—there was no moon that night, and the clouds scudded across the starry sky like angry ravens.
“Did anyone see you come outside?” he asked. “Does anyone know where you are?”
She shook her head. “Not a soul,” she said. “Your followers seem to keep to themselves—I never see them unless they’re looking for me.”
“They have their own duties.”
“Well, you can murder me and dispose of my body and no one will be the wiser,” she said matter-of-factly.
He leaned against the outer door, watching her. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Because I’m an inconvenience.”
“Not nearly as inconvenient as you want to be,” he said, knowing it would infuriate her. “We’re very tolerant here—we make room for all sorts of awkward situations.”
“I guess that about sums me up. An awkward situation.” There was a note in her voice that caught his attention. Faintly bitter, it had little to do with her current circumstances. “I’m afraid it’s a lifelong habit of mine—to be where I’m not wanted, causing trouble.”
“Are you here to cause trouble?”
“Definitely. Does that surprise you?”
“No,” he said, pushing away from the door, and she backed up, skittish. “And who says you’re not wanted?”
He let his voice be deliberately, faintly provocative. Not enough that she could be certain of any innuendo, just enough to unsettle her. He liked seeing her nervous.
Besides, there might be someone close enough to overhear him. He didn’t want to be too obvious, at least not to the others. The effect he had on people, the sheer power of his charisma, was his stock in trade. He could elicit just about any response he wanted, with varying degrees of intensity, from most of the people he came in contact with.
Rachel was less easy to play. She was unwillingly fascinated by him, he recognized that with no false modesty. She also hated and distrusted him, which was perfectly acceptable. As long as her feelings were intense and unavoidable, he didn’t care how negative they were.
But what would prove her weakness, her final undoing, was the fear she had of him. She fought against it, but it was very strong, and sooner or later it would conquer her. That fear was entirely sexual, and he briefly wondered what had happened in her life to make her so frightened.
And then he dismissed it. He didn’t care why she was frightened of sex, and of him. It only mattered that she was, and how he could use it to his best advantage.
“I should go back to my room,” she said. There was no discernible stammer in her voice, but he knew that was only by rigid self-control.
“Why? You aren’t going to change your clothes, are you?” She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt again, in direct defiance of him. It would be a simple enough matter to make her change—the clothes she was wearing fitted her body much more closely than the uniforms everyone else wore. He could see the soft swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips. She thought her own clothes were part of her defense against him. He could show her just how vulnerable they made her.
Except that he liked looking at her tight ass in jeans. It had been too long since he’d been able to indulge that particular sin, and for the time being he had every intention of enjoying it. Until he got her to take them off.
“I … uh …” She was stammering now, a major coup on his part. “I just thought I could … freshen up …”
“You mean you have to use the bathroom?”
“No,” she snapped, pulling herself together. “If I had to pee I’d tell you. I just wanted a few moments of peace and quiet, some time to myself.”
“Peace and quiet we have in abundance here at the center. If you want time to yourself I’ll take you someplace where you won’t be disturbed.”
“Where?”
“My private quarters.”
From her expression you would have thought he’d said Alcatraz. “I don’t think so.”
“Afraid?” he taunted softly.
Her reaction was gratifyingly immediate. “Not of you.”
“Why should you be?” he countered. “And yet you seem edgy whenever you’re around me. I wonder why?”
“That’s not fear, that’s simple dislike,” she shot back.
He grinned. Maybe it was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it. She amused him, with her fuck-you attitude and her nervous mouth. He’d never known anyone who’d fascinated him more.
Which just went to prove he was overripe for a change. If he was going to become fixated on an angry young woman who was no more than passably pretty, then he better have a damned good reason for it. As far as he could tell, his only reason was boredom.
“Ah, I forgot,” he murmured. “But then, you’re here to give me a chance to change your mind, aren’t you? You want to learn to trust me, don’t you?”
He didn’t have to read minds to guess at her response. Over my dead body, her eyes said. But her mouth was still vulnerable beneath the angry edge.
“I want to keep an open mind,” she temporized.
Her mind was more tightly closed than her legs, and they were locked together tighter than the entrance to Fort Knox, but Luke didn’t mind. The challenge was half the charm.
“Of course you do. I’ll arrange for them to bring supper in to us so we won’t be disturbed. And we’ll start on helping you learn to let go of your fears. Learn to reach out.”
This time she didn’t try to avoid the truth. “I don’t want to reach out,” she said.
“And you don’t want to let go of your fears either. Why not?”
“Don’t you have any fears?”
She was surprisingly disingenuous when she asked that question, and he almost gave her a truthful answer. That his fears were all inside him. That he’d killed, and he was terrified he’d learned the taste for it. That he’d find a reason to kill again. And again. And again. Till he couldn’t stop.
Joliet Prison could warp a man’s brain, if it wasn’t twisted inside out already. He’d lived most of his life on the edge of society, accepting the unspeakable as everyday occurrences, but nothing had prepared him for the mind of Mallo Gilmer.
Mallo came to him sometimes in the night, when he couldn’t sleep, empty holes where his eyes once were, his teeth bared in a skeletal grin. That’s all Mallo was now—a skeleton, buried in the yard at Joliet. No one wanted to claim his body. No one wanted to claim kinship with an aberration like Mallo. A man who’d taken pleasure in killing, a true sadist, an artist of painful, prolonged death.
In the books about serial killers Mallo’s name always came up, listing the twelve men and women he’d killed, entirely at random, going into detail on some of the more grisly murders. But Mallo often used to moan that he’d never come close to the great ones in the annals of sin. Like Albert Fish, who killed and ate scores of children during the Depression. Or Ted Bundy, whose charm and intelligence drew people into his deadly web.
Mallo had no charm, and not so much intelligence as a certain evil cunning. He also wasn’t particularly interested in killing children—he preferred to choose more easily disposable victims. Hitchhiking students, hookers, street people. It was only when he got greedy and gutted a yuppie’s wife that anyone started making a concerted effort to stop him.
Once they began looking it was only a matter of time, and Mallo, knowing he was going to be put someplace where he could no longer practice his avocation, became wildly, gruesomely creative, crossing some invisible line that he could never go back on.
Everyone at Joliet was terrified of him, and rightly so. He looked like a balding Santa Claus—round-faced and jovial, with dark, merry eyes and soft hands. Calvin had belonged to him when Luke was first sent up, and since Mallo’s last three boys had been found dead in the shower room it seemed likely that Calvin wasn’t long for this world. Particularly since prison wasn’t a place that embraced diversity, and Calvin was about as diverse as they came.
Luke never knew why he’d decided to interfere. Some errant strand of human feeling, probably, one he hadn’t been able to eradicate entirely. Unfortunately rescuing Calvin from the thugs who were trying to kill him and wresting him away from his dangerous protector put him squarely in Mallo’s path.
It would have been simple enough if he’d slept with him—he’d done worse things to survive in his lifetime and he was hardly likely to waste time with self-loathing. But there was something about Mallo that filled Luke with an almost superstitious horror. And Mallo knew it.
Card-carrying sadist that he was, Mallo found a new outlet for his hobby. Luke was too pretty, too powerful, too smart. Mallo knew just what he needed.
It had been subtle at first, but Luke had been preternaturally alert. Sly hints, faintly whispered suggestions, about the erotic lure of violence and death, and Luke would listen, unmoved, a faintly supercilious smile on his face.
Ah, but Mallo knew human nature too well. The doubts that spread through Luke’s soul were like poisonous vines, weaving their way into his heart. It would have been kinder if Mallo had simply raped and killed him.
But Mallo’s pleasure came from destruction. And his wounding of Luke’s spirit was far more devastating than any wounding of his body could have been.
Even now, years later, he could hear his voice, softly whispering. “You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted blood, boy. And you will. Sooner or later, no matter how hard you fight against it. You’re a born killer, I can see it in your eyes. You know it too.”
Mallo had known, without asking. Guessed that there was more in Luke’s past than self-defense in a bar fight. He’d never asked.
Maybe it was a matter of time. Maybe Luke’s gift, his talent for calling people to him, was simply a way of luring victims. He hadn’t killed Mallo, though he knew that was what Mallo had most wanted.
But at night Mallo would come back to him, and his soft, lisping voice spoke of death and blood. And he was afraid it would happen again, and this time he wouldn’t stop. He’d killed Jimmy Brown in a bar fight over a botched robbery, a game of pool, and a blonde. He’d killed …
“You do.”
He’d forgotten where he was. He’d forgotten she was the enemy, looking up at him. His amusement was stripped down to annoyance. “Do what?”
“Have fears,” Rachel said. “I can see it in your face. The great messiah is frightened of something. Fancy that.”
Her pleasure was so obvious it blunted his anger. “But it’s up to you to find out what it is,” he said. “And the only way you’ll do that is to get close to me.”
Her happiness vanished instantly. “You’re too easy,” he added, pushing open the door. “As long as you’re afraid of me, you’ll never destroy me. And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
She started past him through the door, but he dropped his arms, imprisoning her. She couldn’t go forward or back without touching him. She stood motionless, and he was reminded of a white rabbit, facing certain death. She lifted her head to glare at him, exposing her soft, vulnerable neck. If he were a wolf he could tear her throat out.
“That’s why I’m here,” she said, defiant despite her fears. “If you knew that, why did you invite me?”
But she was no rabbit, and he had no interest in her throat, her life’s blood. He smiled down at her, oh, so gently, and he felt her shiver. “Maybe I was bored,” he said. “Maybe I wanted to see if I could get you off my back. Maybe I wanted to see if I could get you on yours.”
He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to put his mouth against hers and see what she’d do. She’d panic, of course. Especially when he used his tongue. It would be worth it, just to taste her shock, just to risk being seen by some of his blind-eyed followers. He leaned toward her, hungry. Like a wolf.
“Luke?” Bobby Ray Shatney’s voice was soft and respectful and faintly slurred from the Thorazine, and for a moment Luke didn’t turn his head, still concentrating on his victim. She was looking up at him with a lovely combination of surprise and anger, and if Bobby Ray hadn’t chosen to interfere she would have learned just what she had to be afraid of. He let the moment linger, then released her, turning to the newcomer. Rachel scuttled through the doorway like a startled crab, barreling into Bobby Ray.
“Blessings,” Luke said softly. “What is it?”
“Catherine sent me to find you. It’s time for the commitment.”
He’d forgotten. Angel McGuiness’s smashed body needed to be buried with all the new age pomp and circumstance befitting a lost member of the flock. He wondered for a moment whether Rachel felt any remorse, whether he should force her to come with him and see what her curiosity and thirst for vengeance had wrought. If she hadn’t been so determined to bring him down, Angel would still be safely locked away. She wouldn’t have had to take a swan dive off the fourth-story roof of the healing cent
er onto a cement walkway.
But Rachel wasn’t a woman who spent much time considering her own shortcomings, her own guilt. She was too caught up in blaming others. Which was just fine by him—it only made her more vulnerable. And in the end, her guilt would overtake her, destroying her.
But not before he had her.
“Of course,” he murmured. “Why don’t you escort Rachel to my rooms while I take care of this? She wanted some moments of peace and quiet.”
He could see that she wanted to protest, but Bobby Ray had already put a courteous hand under her elbow and was leading her away. Luke watched them go with a faint note of foreboding. Alfred made sure that Bobby Ray was drugged into docility, and he believed firmly in Luke’s divinity. There was no way he could prove a danger to anyone in the compound, even if he wanted to. Rachel was entirely safe with him.
Nevertheless, Luke decided that Angel didn’t need much more than a cursory service, committing her crushed body to the sun-baked earth of Santa Dolores. Our Lady of Sorrows.
Suddenly she could breathe again. Rachel glanced at the young man who led her down the corridor, doubtful, but he seemed the soul of sweetness. He was probably the youngest person she’d seen there, maybe in his late teens. Another lost innocent led astray by the master con man, she thought grimly, shaking off the oppressive feeling he always left her with.
She felt mauled, and yet he hadn’t touched her. Her entire body felt bruised, sensitized, aching, as if he’d put his hands on her.
But he hadn’t touched her. And he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t dare.
“Where did Luke go?” she asked the boy. On closer inspection he wasn’t that much younger than she was—maybe in his early twenties, but there was something curiously unformed, childish about him. With his angelic face and tousled shock of dark hair he seemed like an overgrown Tom Sawyer, all ingenuous charm and awkwardness.
“To bury Angel,” he replied in his sweet, quiet voice.