“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. At all.” I took a deep breath. “And I think that’s what frightens me. The fact that you should scare me, but you don’t.”
He crossed the room to me and pulled me to my feet. “No.” He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You should never be frightened of me. I would never hurt you.”
I looked into his blue eyes. He was so close.
I put my hands on his chest, running my fingers over the swell of his pecks. He was so solid. So firm. Being this close to him, I felt lit up like a fuse.
He put his arms around me. He engulfed me.
I kissed him.
His gloved hands roamed over my back, guiding me closer, pressing me into him.
Oh. That was nice. That was so nice. For a minute, it was all I could think about.
But then the wheels in my brain began to turn. Vigil was right, wasn’t he? If I got Barclay arrested, he’d be back on the street in months. He was too rich. He had too many connections. The entire system of Aurora was infected with the money from organized crime.
I massaged Vigil’s tongue with my own, bliss shooting through me. And I thought that maybe it would be okay if I didn’t break the Barclay story.
Maybe.
I pushed him away. “One condition.”
He looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ll agree not to reveal anything about Barclay. To interview you instead as a consolation prize. But on one condition.”
“What?”
“As long as no other girls die. The minute that they do, the deal’s off.”
He nodded slowly. “All right. That’s fair.”
“Good,” I said. I traced the places on his chest where his muscles were knit together. His costume was so tight that I could see every plane and valley.
He closed his eyes, drawing in a long, slow breath.
His reaction made something inside me tighten pleasantly.
His hands moved on my body. The halter top I was wearing left so much of my skin bare, and his gloved fingers dragged themselves over my shoulder blades, down my back, and over my waist.
“Why?” I whispered. “Why are you touching me?” I knew why I wanted him. He was walking, talking sex. Just being near him made me feel bothered. He was a mysterious man in a mask who’d saved me more than once.
“Do you want me to stop?” His mouth was on my neck again.
I moaned. “No. But I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either,” he murmured into my skin. “Something about you…”
His lips found mine again.
I surrendered myself to him, kissing with abandon.
* * *
The police were in my apartment when I got home.
“You didn’t check in with me,” said Airenne. “And it’s after two.”
I’d been with Vigil for a long time, it was true. I had to conduct an interview, because Henry wanted another story. And for some reason, the he and I had found it difficult to concentrate on the questions. We’d done a lot of kissing.
A lot of really intense kissing.
I stood in the doorway to my apartment, staring at the police officers, wondering how I looked. The makeup I’d put on earlier than night was probably smeared all over my face. My clothes were a little wrinkled. And I had bandages on my bare midriff from where The Phantom had cut me. What must they be thinking?
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”
“You scared me to death,” said Airenne.
“Where were you, ma’am?” said one of the police officers.
“Working on a story,” I said. “I’m an intern for The Sun-Times.”
“Oh, that’s why I recognized the name,” said the other officer, a woman. “Cecily Kane. You wrote the story about Vigil.”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Were you out looking for him tonight?” asked the female police officer.
“I found him,” I said. “Well, he found me.”
She grinned at me and nudged her partner. “You hear that? She was with Vigil. You believe that?”
He gave her a sour look. “He said the police were all corrupt. I don’t like him.”
“Well, he wasn’t wrong,” said the female. “You and me are a few of the only straight shooters out there. Anybody who’s trying to clean things up, well, I figure he’s on our side.”
The male officer pursed his lips, but didn’t say anything.
“You keep it up, honey,” said the female. “And you tell Vigil that we’re grateful. Can you do that?”
“I can,” I said.
* * *
I’d created a Vigil that didn’t exist. The news stories I wrote were about a man committed to justice, who was only motivated by a desire to set things right. The real man was complicated and secretive. He wasn’t doing what he was doing out of any sense of justice. He was only obsessed with and drawn to The Phantom, his distorted mirror image.
Perhaps I wasn’t being quite fair to him. He did have some sense of justice. After all, he was protecting women from getting killed. So he didn’t take any joy in death.
Unlike The Phantom, who mutilated and killed for fun.
Vigil was better than The Phantom.
But they were the same in ways that disturbed and frightened me.
And what disturbed me even worse was my own inexplicable attraction to this dark, complicated man. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t know why he wore a mask. I didn’t know why he felt connected to The Phantom.
I should know things like that about a man I’d been kissing.
But I didn’t.
Truth be told, the mystery of him was part of the appeal. That and the fact that my interaction with him was a secret. He wasn’t like my last boyfriend, Scott, with whom I’d had a very public relationship. We’d met at a campus football game. I’d somehow gotten roped into covering it for the school paper. He was there because he actually liked football. He’d asked me on a date during half time, in front of a crowd of people.
At the time, I’d found him and his exhibitionist tendencies charming.
For months, I’d let Scott parade me around campus. We’d gone to parties. Gone to games. Gone to events.
But after a while, I began to realize that Scott didn’t feel alive unless people were looking at him. He was a theater major, and he always seemed to be acting. I couldn’t tell who he really was.
At first, that didn’t bother me. I didn’t particularly want to open myself up to anyone. My past was complicated.
Maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe the truth was that my past was simple.
But its simplicity was ugly and a little bit tragic. And that wasn’t the way I wanted anyone to see me. So I was glad enough that Scott and I weren’t going to be a couple who shared everything. I was happy enough to have something superficial.
For a while, anyway.
And then Scott got boring. And the parties got boring. And being in public got boring.
And I couldn’t talk to him about it after Darlene died. I just didn’t know how. So, I’d broken up with him, and he hadn’t even seemed that upset.
The sad thing was that Scott had been my boyfriend the longest out of all of my boyfriends.
Not that Vigil was my boyfriend. I knew better than to assume that. He was definitely not boyfriend material, no matter how smoking hot his body was or how much his kisses made me tingle.
He was something else entirely. A shadow man. His potency was dangerous. I needed to be careful, or I was going to get in over my head.
Because I didn’t know anything about Vigil, I started to look up stuff about Hayden Barclay. The Phantom. Vigil said he was connected to him. Besides me, The Phantom seemed to be the only person Vigil was connected to.
I’d turned in my latest story on Vigil before lunch, so I figured that I’d have the afternoon to research The Phantom unless Lauren found some other story for me to work on. I settle
d down at an empty computer in the office and fired up the internet.
I typed Hayden Barclay’s name into a search engine and began to scroll through the results.
I clicked on a news article about Barclay being admitted to Chilton Center and began to read.
The article didn’t give me much information. It didn’t know why Barclay had been locked up. It only said that it had been done at the request of his father, Frank Barclay. It said that Hayden was scheduled to be committed for a stay of six months.
Well, it was obvious that Barclay’s issues had something to do with hurting women. The police had already put together a profile on him from the murders he’d committed. He was a sexual sadist. He both hated and worshiped women. He kept their legs as trophies, probably because he thought of those objects as beautiful. But he killed them because he despised them.
Did he hate women because they had rejected him?
That seemed unlikely. After all, he was the rich heir to a crime family. He could buy women if he needed to. And he didn’t need to. I’d witnessed firsthand the way women threw themselves at him.
Darlene had thrown herself at him.
“Ms. Kane?”
I jumped. I was startled to hear anyone speak.
Henry was standing over me.
“Sir,” I said, getting up from my computer.
“You have a minute?” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
He pulled a chair over from another desk. I realized that he had a piece of paper in his hands, and on further inspection, I realized that it was the story about Vigil I’d turned in before lunch. How had Henry gotten it already? I’d turned it in to Lauren.
We both sat down.
He spread the story out in front of me. It was covered in red ink. “This is good.”
It was good? It looked like he’d stabbed it until it bled. “Thank you?”
“You’ve got talent, girlie,” he said. “You’re aggressive. You’re sharp. And you can write okay. I’m impressed.”
I could only write okay, huh? I decided it probably wasn’t the best time to point out that the word “okay” was not a proper modifier for the word “write.” After all, maybe that was high praise coming from Henry.
“I just made a few adjustments here,” he said. “You fix this up, print out another copy, and bring it up to me in a half hour.”
A half hour? But the story was covered in corrections.
He patted me on the back and got up out of the chair. “Got it?”
“Um, yes, sir.”
He started to move away, but then he stopped and looked back at me. “You think this guy’s for real?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“Reason I ask is I can’t get a feel of what you think of him from these stories. They’re serviceable. They give the facts. They tell us what Vigil said. What he did. But they don’t tell me the truth about Vigil. Is he a crazy man in a costume? Or is he a genuine hero?”
I bit my lip. “Well, with respect, sir, I don’t think it’s a reporter’s place to insert her own opinions into a story. She should be objective. She should leave the speculation to the reader.”
Henry snorted. “Readers aren’t smart enough to speculate, Ms. Kane. You want them to think, you got to lead them by the hand.”
I shook my head. “No, I disagree.”
He raised his eyebrows.
I felt my face grow hot. “With respect, of course.”
His face splintered into a grin. “Well, I respect that you’re thinking for yourself, Ms. Kane.” He folded his arms over his chest. “But if we keep running stories about Vigil, personal stories in which he speaks directly to the reader, then we’re going to need an angle. And you better figure out what that is.”
As he walked away, I realized that I’d already created an angle. Without meaning to, I had. Because I was hiding things, keeping things back, I’d already turned Vigil into a genuine hero.
So much for a lack of bias on my part.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t sure that my angle was the truth. I wasn’t sure if Vigil wasn’t just a crazy man in a costume.
I sighed, turning back to the red-inked story. I needed to get to work on Henry’s corrections.
I spied Lauren hurrying over to me.
She sat down in the chair that Henry had just gotten out of. “Was Henry down here?”
“Um, yeah, just a minute ago.”
“Damn it, he got to your story before I did, didn’t he?” She snatched it up off the desk. “That bastard. He just cut me right out of it. He told you to bring the rewrites to directly to him, didn’t he?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Damn it.” She shook her head.
“I’m sorry.”
“That rat bastard,” she said.
“Um, Lauren?”
“What?”
“I kind of need those corrections. He wants me to have a new draft in a half hour.” I checked the clock. “Twenty-five minutes now.”
She thrust the piece of paper at me. “Damn it,” she said again.
* * *
I awoke to the scrape of my window opening and sat up straight in bed.
Vigil climbed inside with grace. He moved like a cat, all darkness and fluid motion.
My bed was directly under the window, meaning that he perched there, crouched at the foot of my bed, facing me.
I pulled the covers up to my chin. I was wearing what I usually wore to bed—a white t-shirt that I’d stolen from one of my high school boyfriends. It was big and stretched out and comfortable. I always slept in that t-shirt and only that t-shirt. I thought wearing underwear to bed was tantamount to torture. I hated the way the elastic dug into my skin.
Still, I might have to revisit my pajama choices if Vigil was going to make a habit of coming through my window in the middle of the night.
“About the knocking,” I said. “You could really try it.”
“This was easier,” he said, moving off the bed.
I would have gotten up too, but I was self-conscious about my lack of clothing. I stayed where I was. “Why are you here?”
“I saved another girl. I thought you might want to talk to me about it. You said the advantage that your newspaper has over the television networks is access to me. So, you want another story?”
“Oh,” I said. That was actually pretty decent of him. I was sure that Henry would be pleased if I showed up tomorrow with another exclusive on Vigil. Of course, it meant that I would probably have to stay up tonight and get a draft done after I interviewed him, but I could handle that. I pushed the covers aside, forgetting about my skimpy t-shirt. “Let me get my recorder.”
I got out of bed.
And then I remembered what I was wearing, because I watched his gaze travel over my body. His jaw tightened.
I grabbed the edge of my shirt and tugged it down further over my thighs. Damn it. My recorder was in my purse, which was hanging over the back of my desk chair. I picked up my purse and started to go through it.
His voice was deep and rumbling. “Are you wearing anything under that shirt?”
I turned to face him, clutching my purse against me like it would protect me. “I could put something else on. If you’d… turn around?”
He closed the distance between us in two steps. (My room wasn’t very big.) He took the purse away from me and set it down on my desk. He had to reach around me to do that. His body came sinfully close to mine, centimeters from touching me.
I licked my lips. “I need my, um, recorder.”
“Fuck your recorder,” he growled. “Do you ever wear actual clothes that cover any meaningful parts of your body?”
“What?” That wasn’t fair. I didn’t dress provocatively. Of course, the second time I’d seen Vigil, I’d only been wearing a kimono, and the third time I’d been wearing a halter top and tight jeans. “I didn’t know you were going to come through my window tonight, you know.”
He caught me around th
e waist, almost roughly.
The shirt rode up, dangerously so.
His lips found mine, and I melted into his arms. His body was hard against me, and I felt dizzy.
He ran his hand over my back, over my ass. His hand was hot through the thin cotton of the shirt.
I clutched him tighter, thrusting my tongue into his mouth.
He didn’t stop at the edge of my shirt. His hand kept going, exploring my bare thigh. He lifted it as his hand slid further toward my knee, bringing my leg up around his hip.
I gasped.
He pushed one of his legs between mine, and my naked sex brushed over the spandex of his costume.
I let out a strangled cry.
His lips pulled away from mine. “God damn it. What are you doing to me?”
“I…” My voice was a squeak. “You touched me first.”
He let go of me, moving to the other side of the room. Disappointment washed over me. I very much enjoyed being close.
My pulse was thrumming just under my skin. I felt lightheaded. I clutched the top of the chair to steady myself.
He was still staring at me, his gaze flitting from the top of my head to my bare feet and back up again.
I watched him too. He was lean and large, hulking and powerful, and the swell of each of his muscles glowed in the light coming in through my open window.
“Are you going to get your recorder or not?”
“Oh,” I said. Right. I turned around, bending over to look through my purse.
Too late, I realized that bending over exposed me.
I started to straighten, but he was already behind me.
He pressed against my ass, and his hands were inside my shirt, moving over my hips, my waist. “You can’t expect me to keep my hands off of you after you just did that. Not when you’re not wearing anything except this fucking shirt.”
My breath grew shallow at his touch. “I could put something else on,” I panted.
His hands moved higher, pushing the shirt up at the same time. He found my breasts and cupped them. “Is that what you want to do? You want to get dressed?”
I moaned, leaning back into his solidness. “I probably should, don’t you think?”
“No,” he groaned. One of his hands left my breast and slid down my body, nudging between my legs. “I don’t think you should do that at all.”
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