“Ready or not, here I come,” I whispered to myself then shoved the door open with the toe of my shoe.
Clothes were strewn across the polished timber floor and a brilliant blue rug. Jodie’s skirt and gray top were there, as well as other clothes I didn’t recognize. The door swung farther. This was a bedroom, a huge one, with another set of sofas and an open walk-in robe, and to the right…was revealed the bed. Rumpled sheets and more blues of quilt. A down-casting lamp stood beside the bed…and a woman’s foot poked out from under the sheets. Unmoving. Sleeping?
Dark dread trickled slow as death into my flesh, cooling my chest and pinning me with an ice-sharp ache, right in the very middle.
What had happened here?
I stepped in, breath caught up on some hard lump. My eyes seemed to snag and stop on each new detail as they came into sight. I was a robot with my gaze ratcheting along on cogwheel teeth. Jerk. A man’s body facing away from me. Naked. Jerk. His back. Jump again to see her head beyond his. They lay as if spooning. Her auburn hair trailed over the sheet that was pulled up to her cheek.
A memory triggered. Me and Jodie, in bed, cuddling. Her sensuous warmth against my skin. Her scent. Our murmured exchange of lovers’ pretty words and soft kisses. And, as always, my amazement that we suited each other so well, and that she loved me.
I could hear quiet wet breathing like someone sucking air in past phlegm.
My legs were distant from me and stiff as I approached the bed and looked down. My body wasn’t mine. I was ten thousand feet up, and the bed was down there, far, far away. This was not, could not, be real.
The man breathed stertorous and harsh, like a dinosaur inhaling swamp. He was making the sounds. She… I stretched out a hand to move aside some of her hair. The ice cold of her ear and her cheek froze me also. Slowly, I shifted the sheet downward. Loops of her hair clung to the sheet, uncurling. Then I saw her neck, her blue-white neck.
No. Fuck, no. A gasp tore like a red wound from my mouth, ripping a hole in my soul. “No.” Tremors took my arm until I had to draw it back before I knocked against the man.
I stared. He breathed through open mouth. She was cold and still. Her hands were tied up to the headboard. A ligature of rope was wrapped loosely about her neck.
I knew fifty ways to kill him but all I could think of was crushing his face into a red smear on the white sheet.
“Bastard,” I grated out, gripping a hunk of his hair in my hand. His eyes popped open. Mine fixed on his. I wasn’t missing a second of this. My other fist drew back to my ear—there all by itself, it seemed—ready to unleash hurt on him.
His pupils were huge and dilated. Drugs? On the bedside table lay a syringe with no needle, a small glass bottle, and a ripped-open packet.
“No,” he croaked, half-turning his head to look up at me. “Nooo.”
As I stared into his dark eyes, he coughed, his hands stirred feebly under the sheet, and vomit bubbled from his mouth, welling up like a disgusting fountain.
Logic arrived, late but welcome, and through the rage, I recognized how poorly he defended himself, how much danger he was in from inhaling his vomit. I moved my hand higher in his hair so the vomit wouldn’t spill on me.
“If you cough,” I told him calmly, as if this was merely some science experiment. “You might get some air. If not, well, I suppose you might drown in your own foul stench. I can’t think of a better way for you to die.” I narrowed my eyes, lowered my face a little, and I spoke through gritted teeth. “Die you evil fucking bastard. Choke on that shit.”
It took a few minutes…of watching him breathe in and out through the sludge in his mouth. Watching him die. Whatever he’d taken, whatever drug, it had slowed his reflexes and his brain and he’d lost all idea of self-preservation. As the last dribble of air sighed out and his body relaxed into death, I added a eulogy.
“I hope you knew what I did to you, you piece of filth. You killed Jodie.” I had to halt for a moment. I was so empty inside, so raw, like someone had scraped out my insides. My next words, I whispered hoarsely, “My beautiful, beautiful Jodie.”
Tears had blurred my vision by then, and the first of them spilled and ran down my face. But I wiped them away, sniffed them back, and made them stop. I had to take care of her now. I could grieve later. I wasn’t leaving her in this fucker’s embrace. I stepped carefully around the foot of the bed to her side, and bent to move the hair from her face.
“It’s not her,” someone said quietly, shakily.
The earth tilted. My heart lost a few beats forevermore. I turned, searching the room. “What?”
“It’s not Jodie.” Beyond the two red leather sofas, curled on the floor with handcuffs around her wrists and rope on her ankles, was a young woman, naked except for white underwear and bra, with her hair, black as oil, tumbling across her shoulders.
But…her words…
I swung my gaze back to the dead woman, reached, and brushed aside the hair over her face. “My God.” An unfamiliar face was beneath—her mouth open as if straining for air.
“It’s not—” she began again.
“Jodie,” I finished, slumping a little in shock. “Where is she then? Where is she! Is she alive?”
“Last I saw of her. Yes. She’s in the next bedroom down.”
As I tore out the door, I heard her cry, “Let me go. Please? He might wake up! Maybe he’s not dead!”
The next bedroom was dark. When I turned on the light, there she was on the floor, also naked and bound, at ankle and wrist, but looking back with big scared eyes that seemed riveted to me. A scarf was tied across her mouth. I did a quick scan as I strode forward. No one else was here.
I knelt and cupped her face and kissed her while saying softly, over and over, in deliberate reassurance, “It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.” Then I drew back and stared at her for a moment to fix in my mind it was really her, alive. My pulse was harder to convince and kept pounding away.
I applied myself to freeing her—undoing the scarf and the ropes. Some sort of stiff nylon rope. Maybe he used it for his yacht, the one he’d never see again. Whatever it was, it was stupid stuff and hard to unknot.
She sniffed and kissed my upper arm as I worked. Her words slurred. “I knew you’d come. Knew it, Klaus.” While I wrestled some more with the knots, she closed her eyes as if too tired to keep them open. Drugged?
“Of course I have. I’m yours forever, remember? Just like you’re mine.” The last loop came off her wrists.
Her eyes opened, blinking, clearing with each second, or so it seemed. “I do. I do remember.” There were tears in her words and that squeezed my chest, hard.
“Good. Don’t you ever forget. I had yours forever tattooed on my heart and it’s really bloody hard to get tattoos off of there.”
Her hands were cold and trembling. Mine were almost as bad, fucking shaking. Crapitty-crap. Now was not the time to lose it. I clamped down on my feelings and drew her hands to her front, kissed them once, and checked them for color and capillary refill.
With my arm over her back and my forehead snuggled against hers, I settled for merely holding her for a while. Just for a few minutes longer, I would be her cocoon, keeping away the outside world. In here, all was warm and safe. I breathed with her and stroked her and made myself calm down too. Nobody in the next room was going anywhere by themselves, or going to come to further harm. Unless…unless… All on its ownsome, my mind started sifting facts and going down pathways. I was in so much trouble. I veered away from that minefield. First, make sure we’re safe.
“Jodie, I need to know if there is anyone in the house apart from us and the guy in the bedroom and the two women? Are we in danger from anyone I don’t know about?”
Again, the tears made her words wobbly, but I was relieved at how clear her thinking seemed. “No. No one else.” She shook her head. “But I can’t remember exactly what happened to me. I can’t. Things are all confused.”
Shit. “You were drugg
ed? I’m just wanting to be sure we don’t have some guy apart from this Leon who might have done all this.”
“I…I don’t know. I think it was him. I guess. He seemed so confident and yet something was off about him.”
“Okay. Maybe I can ask…” The woman in the room next door. I knew what she was, what the police would call her—a witness to murder.
I’d made a big huge enormous life-changing mistake. No. Now wasn’t the time to wallow in that. I mentally took myself by the scruff, and shook myself. Being selfish here was not happening. I focused on Jodie.
“How are you feeling? I’m thinking you need a doctor. How groggy are you? Do you feel sick?” Had she been raped? I wasn’t asking that, not yet. That was a definite possibility, even if wondering about it made me feel like going back and killing the man again.
If she seemed to be getting sicker, I’d be phoning for an ambulance.
“My stomach feels funny. I thought I was going to vomit. But not now.” She shifted her legs up and closer to me, until her knees bumped my shoulder, then she felt my face with her fingers, patting me like she too couldn’t be sure this was real, I was real. “I just couldn’t get loose. And I can’t remember anything before I woke. Only coming here and drinking champagne. I don’t think I even finished one glass…” The hitch in her voice was followed by Jodie searching my face. “Klaus, what are you hiding?”
I watched those beautiful eyes take stock. How in hell she’d figured this out, I did not know. I should work on my poker face. Least I knew now she was thinking fine. I had to tell her.
“I killed the man, Jodie. The man on the bed with the woman who looks like you. Who I thought was you. There’s more, though.”
Tiny creases formed between her eyebrows, and I caressed the curves above each brow while I waited for her next words, her next question.
“You killed him…” Fear poured out with her next sluggish words. “What happened in there? It’s something terrible, isn’t it? That would be Melissa on the bed. What’s happened? You can tell me.” Her voice quavered.
If I said this the wrong way, would I lose her? I had only one excuse, and it was Jodie. I’d thought it was her corpse. What an ugly word corpse is. But death is damn ugly.
“The woman is dead. I killed him because he was lying beside her, and she has been strangled by a rope around her neck and her hands are tied. And I thought…he’d killed you.” I swallowed. I had to say this. “I thought it was you he’d killed, so when he started to vomit, I held him so he’d breathe it in. I let him die. I made him die.” The rest. Say it all. “And I’m not sorry.”
“Ohmigod.”
I sighed. “The other thing is there’s another woman in there, handcuffed still, but okay, and she saw what I did. I didn’t see her until after.” When her expression didn’t alter, I figured I needed to spell out what that meant. “She is a witness to me killing this man.”
“Oh, Klaus. Oh god. I don’t know what to say. I shouldn’t have come here.” She began to rock, shaking her head against the rug, over and over, as if by denying it she could change what had happened. Her face went a smudged red and white. “It’s my fault. Now you’ll go to jail and it’s my fault. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.” She made a strangled squeak. “I’m sorry.”
“What! The hell it is. It’s not your fault.” I wiped away the tears leaking from her eyes, thinking as fast as I could under the circumstances. “They can’t tell that I did this. People do that all the time when drugged, and he was drugged. Maybe she’ll stay quiet if I ask her to?”
“I don’t want to lose you! I should have said no to coming. I should have known.” She wrapped her hand around my finger that had been stroking her forehead and sobbed, her shoulders trembling.
Was it the aftereffects of whatever she’d taken? This was irrational. “Of course it’s not your fault. Shh. Shh. Let me think this through.”
For once though, I was having trouble getting it all lined up in my head. I’d murdered someone. Bad man or not, it was what I’d done.
And I’d been seen doing it. That was, for me, the worst of it. For a man who always liked the moral high ground, I had awful shaky foundations.
I leaned my head in my palm, with Jodie still clutching the other hand. I had to do right for her as much as me. I had no right to drag her into something illegal, to make her a victim again.
I didn’t want to go to prison. The police would see it the wrong way. I’d killed a man just because I wanted to. Not in self-defense. We didn’t even have the death penalty, legally, for any crime here, so this would never be excused. Not completely. I needed to find out more facts though. If it meant only probation or a year in jail, could I do that?
Maybe.
I shut my eyes. The prospect of being labeled a criminal horrified me. I’d been through this moral bigheadedness question already when I discovered the extremeness of my cravings for sadistic activities. If not for Jodie—her compassion, her understanding, and her sheer stubbornness—I might have been forever angry and grieving at what I saw as my depraved self.
What if I had to go to jail? Could I stand having my name dragged through mud?
I didn’t want to. It was not something I even felt I deserved. The man was an evil bastard, as far as I could tell. I wanted to stay free and I didn’t want to be seen as a murderer. Enough. I’d chase this tail some more later.
“Okay. Here is what I want to do. You need to say if it doesn’t sit well with your conscience. Because…” I stared directly into Jodie’s eyes. “Because I don’t intend to be tried for this, if I can avoid it. But I am not going to make you my accomplice. There’s only one way to wriggle out of this that I can see, and that’s to convince that woman in there not to say what happened.”
A quiet pause, then she nodded. We were so close I caught her scent and felt the warm movement of air as she spoke. “Yes. I agree.”
“Good.” Maybe this was the right time to ask the next question. “Jodie,” I said softly, “Do you know if you were raped?”
Her lips compressed and she looked toward her toes for a few seconds. This must be a hard thing to contemplate but we needed to know. “I…no, Klaus, I can’t be sure. It doesn’t feel like it. You know. I don’t feel sore or, or messy, or anything. But…” She pulled a face, as if disgusted, then shrugged.
Maybe a doctor was the only way to find out? “Okay. Try not to worry about it. We’ll find out. Okay? We will figure this out.”
Pensively, she nodded. “‘Kay.”
Even though we’d both like an answer straight away, I couldn’t see a way to be sure.
“I need you to do what I say, for the time being. It will make things simpler. But answer me this—the other woman in there, do you think she will she do this? Lie and deny seeing what I did?”
“Stephanie?” Jodie thought awhile, with her bottom lip between her teeth. Her little headshake might have been a no or an I don’t know.
Gently, I held her face in my palm. “You don’t know, do you?”
“No, Sir, I don’t.”
“Then let’s go find out.”
Later, I could try to find a way to research the law on this. Maybe, if it seemed the best course of action, I could simply front up and confess. Maybe that would be best for Jodie and me…
If only that didn’t seem like ripping off pieces of who I was and feeding them to a passing dog. If only, every time I considered confessing, I didn’t want to scream, this is not fair.
All of this mess was because I thought he’d killed her. My vengeance had seemed so right.
Chapter 3
Stephanie
My wrists were aching, so were the muscles in my arms. I tried to shift my numb shoulder into a better spot on the rug on the floor between the sofas. Even with the rug over it, lying on the timber for this long was painful. This has not been a good party.
That stupid thought had been alternating with terror ever since the big guy had entered the room and let Leon die
. Clearly Leon had fucked up in a big way, but he didn’t deserve to die, did he?
Not…I shuddered, remembering the awful gurgling, the smell of vomit…no, not like that. That had been awful, terrifying, a whole lot of bad adjectives. I wasn’t close to either of them, though I knew Melissa more than I knew Leon, but still. I never wanted to see someone die again.
Especially not me.
The trembling took me again. The handcuffs clinked.
What if this stranger found out everything? I wasn’t squeaky clean here. A little chemical something to liven up a get together was fine in my books, but this had gone too far…way far out into outer space, like, it was as far as bad outcomes could possibly go. The Star Trek of bad outcomes. And yet, not being able to predict something…did that mean I wasn’t to blame?
No. I let out the breath I’d been holding and decided again, no.
I’m not a coward. I’ll take the heat on this, except not to this man who kills people that make him angry. No fucking way.
“It was Leon, mostly,” I whispered to myself as footstep sounds tapped back down the hallway. Leon was mostly to blame. Those were too many sounds to be just him. Had to be Jodie as well. Who was he? Jodie’s boyfriend? Oh god. That would be it. If he found out what I’d done to her. Shit, shit, shit. He’d just killed a man in front of me.
Then he came back in. Jodie followed him then she stopped dead, stiffening at the sight of the bodies on the bed.
“Klaus…oh damn, damn, you were telling the truth.”
“Yes. I’m so sorry, Jodie. There’s nothing you can do for her. Take your time, sweetheart. Don’t look…if you can do that?”
“I’ll try.” She sent him a wobbly smile. “It’s hard not to throw up.”
He took her shoulders and hugged her to his chest while rubbing her back. His chin rested near her ear and he whispered something.
Bind and Keep Me, Book 2 Page 2