by Stella Noir
He huffs. “And go where?”
His question scares me. We look at each other like two trapped animals, the only difference being that he’s the stronger one. He’s in charge, and I know I won’t be able to get out of his reach if he doesn’t want me to.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Away from you.”
He shakes his head and gets up from the barstool.
“I’m afraid I can’t let that happen,” he says, standing tall next to me. His stature is intimidating to begin with, but under the current situation, it frightens me even more. “Not with everything you know.”
I hold my breath as I try to come up with a possible response to his intimidating behavior. But as soon as the thought of evading his grip and running towards the unlocked door even crosses my mind, he is on to me. My eyes scurry to the door behind him, but before I have a chance to act on my idea, he has me in a tight grip, wrapping his strong arms around me in a hug that could be seen as loving if it wasn’t for the possessive control he wields.
I flinch at his touch, instinctively struggling in his embrace, but he holds me in place as if he was calming me down from a nervous fit. I inhale his smell and am immediately reminded of my infatuation with him. His touch, his smell — it still soothes me, even now.
It doesn’t change the fact that he is a murderer. A fucked up man who thinks he has the power to decide who may live or die. I’ve always been opposed to the death penalty and I don’t believe normal citizens — or even victims — should take the law into their own hands.
Although, I know I couldn’t vouch for myself had Sonya’s murderer ever stood before me. Cutting that asshole’s throat would have been my pleasure.
“You said I was free to leave,” I say, my voice muffled by his shirt, pressed against his buff chest.
“You were,” he says. “But not anymore.”
I yelp in surprise when he lifts me up and carries me over to the sofa. Normally, I would wrap my legs around his waist and place my arms around his neck, falling victim to a wild kiss while he carries me to wherever he plans to fuck me. Today, he’s carrying me like a sack of rice. My arms and legs are dangling awkwardly and carrying me must be a lot harder for him than usual. But my weight is no match for his strength, and he carries me just as easily as always. I’m nothing more than a rag doll in his arms.
He puts me on the couch and sinks into the cushions next to me. I’m free of his grip, and for a moment, I even consider darting over to the door, but two things keep me from doing so. First, I know I wouldn’t make it. He would grab hold of me before I could even jump up from the couch. Second, I don’t want to. Being so close to him has cast a familiar spell over me. The spell that binds me to this man and his dark attraction. Whatever ferocious deeds he’s been involved in, I’m pretty sure that he’d never hurt me. On the contrary, in a way his savage story makes me feel safe with him.
He puts one arm around me and gently pulls me closer to him.
“Meadow,” he whispers. “Oh, Meadow. What am I supposed to do with you?”
His soft and mellow tone sends chills down my spine. This is the kind of moment when a killer would reach for the victim’s neck and break it with a quick twist, silencing the lamb before it can run off.
“Please,” I breathe. “Don’t hurt me.”
He chuckles. “Not too long ago, you were ready to jump to your death, and now you’re asking me not to hurt you?”
I sigh. “I didn’t ask you not to kill me.”
“Touché,” he says, placing a kiss on my cheek. “Either way, you don’t have to worry. I don’t want to hurt you. I want to keep you safe, and part of that is to keep you with me for now.”
“By locking me up?” I ask, casting him an angry glare.
The smile he throws at me has a condescending touch. I don’t like it at all.
“Yes, for now,” he says. “I can’t have you running around out there like this.”
“Do you trust me?” I ask, surprised at my bold question.
He freezes, and I see deep contemplation reflected in his eyes as he tries to think of how best to reply.
“No,” he says, his eyebrows furrowing. “How can you trust someone who stole from you? Someone who stole, stalked and lied.”
“I didn’t lie,” I correct him.
“You did steal my key and snoop around in things I told you to stay away from,” he insists. “So no, I don’t trust you.”
He pauses and clears his throat, indicating that what he’s going to say next does not come easy for him.
“I don’t trust you,” he repeats. “But I do care for you. I care about your pain, Meadow. I hate to see a beautiful girl like you so conflicted, so deeply hurt and destroyed that she thinks it’s best to end her life. And now, you got sucked into my world. I should have known that this would happen, but I didn’t want to face the possibility of you finding out this way.”
“You didn’t do a good job of hiding things…,” I remark.
He pinches me, causing me to yelp.
“I didn’t,” he admits. “I underestimated your curiosity.”
“Can you blame me?” I ask. “I’m locked up in here all day, every day. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do but to be subjected to my own thoughts and—”
“It was your choice,” he interrupts. “You chose to stay here. You’re the one who’s been hiding in here by choice.”
He has a point there. I still feel the urge to blame him. He cast a spell on me, he seduced me. He fucked me like no one ever has before and made me forget about my miserable life instead of facing it. It’s his fault that I’m in this position now, trapped and lost.
I wish I could actually believe all those things.
“Things will have to change, Meadow,” he says. “You knew you couldn’t stay here forever — and you only sped up the process with your prying.”
His words confuse me. What is he trying to say? Things will have to change, but he also refuses to let me go?
I look at him quizzically, too scared to ask him to explain what he’s trying to tell me. This sounds too much like a dark movie, where the next sentence could be, “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to kill you.”
But if he wanted to kill me, why hasn’t he done it already?
“Just tell me what’s going to happen,” I put forth. “Please.”
“I think the first thing that has to happen here is for us to be on the same level,” he says, smiling at me in that warm, yet confusing way. His rugged attractiveness never fails to bewitch me. I don’t think I would ever like to openly admit it, but the fact that his eyes have seen someone die at his own hands kind of adds an irrevocable appeal to him. To think what these hazel eyes must have seen…
“Same level?” I ask.
He nods. “Tell me. You owe me your story.”
I gulp and instinctively shake my head. “I can’t….”
“You’ll have to,” he insists. “You don’t want to deny me right now, trust me, Meadow.”
I sigh. “All right.”
It’s not the hidden threat in his voice that forces me to agree, but his somber eyes. He’s holding me in his arms, the killer who stopped me from doing the most drastic thing, the dark stranger who saved me and now controls my life. I may be at his mercy, but I’m also his to be taken care of. I believe him when he says that he cares for me.
“I’m gonna’ cry,” I warn him. “You’ll hate that.”
He shrugs and plants a kiss on my cheek. “I’ll deal with it.”
So, I tell him. I tell him almost everything. About my childhood, my parents, about their death and about Sonya, the greatest sister who ever lived. The girl, who at just eighteen years old, took it upon herself to raise her younger sister instead of going off to college. I tell him about her sacrifices, and about the ungrateful little brat she had to take care of. The tears start pouring down my cheeks as soon as I mention her name for the first time, and they don’t stop until I’m done telling my story.
“It was my idiotic way of thanking her,” I say. “A stupid party. I practically forced her to come with me, to get drunk, to be stupid. I thought she deserved it. Just one night of fun for the two of us before I left for college and she could finally get on with her own life instead of worrying about me.”
I choke, trying to fight back the violent waves of wails, but it’s impossible. Kade is holding me, quietly enduring my bawling without even knowing where I’m going with my story.
“What happened to Sonya?” he asks, suggesting that he does have an idea how this story will end.
I try to gather myself together, taking in a deep breath before I’m able to continue.
“She died that night,” I say. “We went to the party, she got drunk, very drunk, and so did I. I lost sight of her at some point, and by the time I finally noticed that she was gone, it was already too late.”
“Where did she go?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know exactly. No one knows. She must have left the party at some point, most likely by herself. I have no idea why she did that, but she was very intoxicated and not used to alcohol. Who knows what made her walk away like that. We searched for her, running up and down the street for hours before we could call the police. All of us were drunk, so no one could drive and search for her. We were just a bunch of drunk, stupid kids stumbling through the streets and a nearby forest like zombies.”
I pause, my body still shaking and trembling with pain, but the tears have stopped. I’m all cried out, but the pain is present as always. The memories are excruciatingly sorrowful. Despite my level of intoxication that night, I still remember it vividly. I can still feel the panic that overtook me as we were staggering through the dark forest in search of Sonya. She was found not too far away from the house and it’s not impossible that she was still very close when we were scouring the forest for her. The thought that I might have walked past her and her murderer still haunts me.
“They found her two days later,” I continue. “Raped and murdered, not far from the house.”
I can feel him tense up next to me. From what Kade has told me about his activities, I shouldn’t be surprised to see him react this way. His hate for the scums who cause this kind of suffering is apparent by his vigilante activities.
“Who?” he wants to know. “Did they ever catch the guy?”
I’m almost scared to tell him, with how angry he is already.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “They got nothing. The guy just vanished. We don’t even know if it was a spontaneous thing or if it had been planned out, if he stalked my sister or just happened to be around and see her drunkenly wandering down the street… we don’t know anything.”
Kade’s embrace tightens and he pulls me closer. “I’m sorry.”
He gently caresses my upper arm, while I feel another wave of tears running down my face. I’ve never talked about any of this with anyone. Everyone back home knew the story, so I never had to tell it, and I’ve been alone with all of this since I decided to shut myself off from everything. It’s such a relief to finally share this pain with someone who cares. I’m crying not only because of grief, but also because of the intense relief I’m feeling.
“After that, everything just fell to pieces,” I add. “I lost the most important person in my life, the only person I loved and who loved me back, and I blame myself for her death. I tried to keep going, I really did. I took care of her funeral and I went off to college, just like I know she would have wanted me to. But I failed her again. I couldn’t get myself to function. I flunked class after class, I lost my scholarship, I destroyed everything Sonya had worked so hard for. I failed her, Kade. I failed her on so many levels!”
I’m bawling into his hard, muscular chest, hanging on to him for dear life. Take it away. Take the pain away. The words are at the tip of my tongue, but I restrain myself from saying them out loud.
He’s furious. I can feel him boiling with rage, the same rage that he must feel when he is ready to kill. His muscular body is tense, ready and alert, but his touch on me is still gentle and loving.
“Where did all of this happen?” he wants to know.
I straighten up and look at him through blurry eyes, tilting my head quizzically.
“You said you were from Pennsylvania?” he asks. “Is that where all of this happened?”
I nod. “Yes. At home in Pittsburgh, Hill District.”
He nods, his face showing determination.
And I feel like I’ve just signed a death warrant.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Kade
I stay with her as long as she needs me. My twisted mind sends all the wrong signals to my body as I sit with her, feeling her soft body pressed against mine. She seeks my closeness the same way she always does when she’s in need of a mind-blowing fuck, and my cock reacts accordingly. I want to fuck her pain away, but I know I shouldn’t do it this time. This sick mind has to focus on something else for now.
My heart is on fire. Hearing Meadow’s story, seeing this beautiful girl cry for her sister — it was too much.
The motherfucker who did this to her must burn in hell.
Chances are, he already is.
As soon as she dozes off, exhausted from her physically draining bawling, I tuck her in with a blanket on the sofa and leave her. I get the key from the kitchen counter and enter my old bedroom. Whatever she touched in here, she was careful to leave everything as she found it. Smart girl. This was probably due to her uncertainty on how to deal with her findings. She could’ve kept everything to herself and just run off without me realizing what she knew about me. It wouldn’t have been easy, but I would’ve let her go if I had no reason to believe that she knew anything about me. I would have worried about her well-being, but not about her handing me over to the police.
I rummage through the notes about the last guy we offed. Joseph conducted most of the research because the guy had been on his radar for a while. He just fed the information to me and let me do most of the dirty work, the way it’s always been. Division of labor, it makes sense in business and in justice.
It’s just a suspicion, a crazy idea that came up when I remembered what Joseph said about this last guy being active out of state, as well. It can’t be true. It would be too much of a coincidence. But I need to make sure.
Besides, if Joseph knows about things happening in Pennsylvania, he might have heard about Sonya’s case, as well.
“I need to see you,” I type, hoping that Joseph is as glued to his phone as always. “Are you at the bar tonight?”
The response comes within a few minutes. “Get your ass over here.”
Joseph, pleasant as always.
***
“How pathetic am I,” he yells upon seeing me enter the bar. “Just sitting here at your beck and call because seeing you has become such a rarity!”
“Asshole,” I bark at him, nodding towards the bartender.
My drink appears almost immediately as I sit down next to my oldest friend.
“It’s fucking true, though,” he adds, not looking at me as he takes a sip of his Scotch. “So, what’s this about? You better not be telling me about wanting to quit and disappear again.”
“It’s about Pennsylvania,” I say, wasting no time beating around the bush.
“Pennsylvania?” Joseph repeats, furrowing his eyebrows. “You’ll have to be a bit more specific.”
&nb
sp; “You did the research on that last guy we offed,” I clarify. “And you mentioned something about him being responsible for some other shit out of state?”
Joseph shrugs. “Yeah, possibly. Most likely, actually.”
“How do you know that?” I want to know.
“Why are you asking?” he demands.
I roll my eyes. “Just tell me for now, I’ll explain later.”
Joseph sighs.
“Well, I’ve been observing that guy for a while,” he says. “He’s been convicted for rape once, like three years ago. Didn’t kill the girl back then and got let go thanks to good conduct. You know how it is.”
I nod. “Yeah. And?”
“Well, he couldn’t keep his filthy cock inside his pants for too long,” Joseph continues. “Found his first victim shortly after he was let go. He contacted one of our guys for cover-up, that’s how I knew.”
“That early?” I hiss. “How come nothing was done about him back then?”
“Calm your shit!” Joseph barks back at me. “Trust me, I acted as quickly as possible. But you know we have to be sure? I had to make sure we’re going after the right guy. I didn’t even find out about the Pennsylvania case until after we offed him.”
“How?” I ask. “How did you make that connection?”
“One of our guys pointed it out to me,” Joseph explains. “There was this blind spot a few months back. I was already watching the guy, but he just disappeared off the radar. He left town for a few weeks, but I had no idea where to. But one of our guys saw him over there, in Pittsburgh.”
My pulse freezes. Pittsburgh.
“Go on.”
“He was there for a while, got his fix at one of our dealers,” Joseph says. “It might just be a coincidence, but there was a case of another girl going missing at that same time, same city, same neighborhood. Same type of girl, same story. Same everything, you know?”
I nod. Sadly, I do know.
“Drunken college girl,” I say. “By herself, walking around at night, possibly on her way home from a party. Police never found the guy who did it.”