Never Better: A Dark Obsession Novel

by Charlotte Stein

  She didn’t know. She’d never been around guns.

  She wasn’t even sure why she was around them now, until he put a hand up. Just one hand, palm out. No words, no look in her direction, nothing—though she understood clearly enough anyway. He was telling her to stay where she was.

  Then a second later he gave another signal.

  He touched his finger to his lips.

  But she still didn’t truly believe anything was wrong, until he abruptly stood straight and started talking too fast. And even then, it was hard to take it in.

  “Okay, here’s what going to happen. You’re gonna go in your room, and pack a bag quickly. A change of clothes, a change of shoes, essentials. Nothing bulky or heavy, nothing that isn’t practical. Got it?”

  “I want to have it, but I think most of my brain just shut down.”

  “And I wish I could help you restart it, I really do. But we have to go.”

  “Could you at least tell me why? Because you know it could be that you’re panicking about nothing. Maybe you’re just having a lot of feelings—I mean it was barely an hour ago that you were asking me to ride you so you could permit yourself some pleasure.”

  “Totally true. Completely possible that I’m working through my issues. In fact, let’s just go with that. Let’s say I’m out of my mind with guilt over past actions and feeling unworthy of your affection and have therefore invented a hostile in your hallway. Are you really going to refuse to go with me as I descend into some terrible downward spiral?”

  Her mind immediately jumped to a million terrible scenarios.

  Him hurling himself off a bridge. Or in a hospital, fighting orderlies.

  And as soon as she pictured them, she knew he had a point.

  “I’m going with you no matter what. You know I’m going to go with you no matter what. But at least let me tell you about other possibilities, first.”

  “You have twenty seconds to tell me about other possibilities.”

  “Okay, okay. So, there’s the guy in the apartment down the hall.”

  “What about the guy in the apartment down the hall?”

  “He sometimes goes to the wrong door. He wanders here and then he just wanders back. Don’t you think that’s what you might have heard?”

  It sounded plausible, when she was saying it.

  But his answering expression immediately made it less so.

  And so did his eerily deadpan tone. “You have a guy in your building who wanders to your door even though your apartment is the one at the end of the hallway.”

  “Yeah. But...it’s not that weird.”

  “What does this guy look like?”

  “Like a normal guy. Like a college kid.”

  “Truly like a college kid? Or like someone who wants you to think he is?”

  “I don’t know what the diff—” she started to say.

  Then had to cut herself off. Of course, she did.

  Her mind was currently blowing.

  Suddenly, she could see almost everything about the guy, from the letterman jacket that was just a little too on the nose, to the almost too perfect buzzcut use above his ears. He even walked in that loping way some of the guys on campus did—as if he desperately wanted to get every little detail right.

  And then there was the way she felt when she caught him looking.

  Like he can see all my secrets, she thought, and suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  But that was fine. Isaac was right there, just waiting to get her going again.

  “There it is,” he said. “Now, go pack a bag.”

  * * *

  Half of her expected someone to kill them the second they stepped out of her apartment door. But the other half was still trying to rationalize and explain away. Several times, she almost asked him who he thought the letterman guy really was—and that urge intensified once they were out in the hallway.

  It was completely empty. No one was waiting for them.

  She couldn’t even smell the lingering scent of Axe body spray that the guy liked to lather himself in. There was nothing. And there continued to be nothing all the way up to and into the elevator. In fact, once they were safe inside, she almost laughed.

  See, there’s nothing to worry about, she went to say.

  Then the elevator started to go up instead of down, and that rational half of her started to slip. Of course, it did. He cursed the second they started moving. He spat the word fuck as if them going to floor twenty was the worst fucking thing in the world, and then he did something even worse.

  He hit the emergency stop.

  Or at least, he tried to.

  But the problem was—nothing happened when he did it. The elevator just kept going and going, and she could almost feel the tension in him rising, and then, oh god, then, he spoke into the near vibrating air of the tiny little cube they were trapped in. No looking at her, no warm gaze full of reassurance.

  Just this:

  “No matter what happens now, know that I love you. I’ve always loved you, from the moment I first saw you. And I will carry on loving you, until the day I die.”

  She didn’t even get chance to respond. The doors pinged open a second after he spoke, and after that silence seemed best. Though really, she had no idea why. It wasn’t even the guy from twenty-seven. It was the dude who lived in the apartment above hers—the one with the patchy moustache.

  I bet he’s really he’s really into reviewing things online, Letty had once said.

  And it was true. Somehow, he had that look about him.

  He definitely did not look like the type of guy to pull a gun and fire it at her.

  But that was what he did. Casually, as if he was waving down a cab. Just his right hand into his jacket and then out, in one quick, vague wave. Followed by a bang, so loud it actually seemed to briefly crush her against the wall.

  Or was that the impact?

  It had to be the impact. There was no way he could have missed in such close quarters. He was barely a foot from her, and there was absolutely nothing between them. She must have been hit, yet somehow, she felt no pain. There was no sense of spreading warmth. And when she looked down, she didn’t see any blood.

  She saw a hole in the elevator floor, innocent as a cigarette burn.

  And a familiar hand, still forcing the guy’s gun hand down.

  Though, she could tell it was getting difficult to hold him. The guy was fighting it. He was straining to aim the gun back at her, and when he failed, he fired it again. Another thunderclap filled the tiny space, even louder than the first. She actually felt her ear pop, hard enough that she wondered if she’d just gone deaf.

  But then Isaac spoke, and she knew she hadn’t.

  She could hear what he was saying, as clearly as she’d ever heard anything. Clearer, in fact. His words were as big and bright as a neon sign, surrounded by a shower of sparks. They lit everything up, in a way she could hardly process. They were the thing that stopped her breathing. They were the thing that made her heart try to burst right out of her chest.

  Though on paper they didn’t seem like much.

  He just said, don’t make me do this in front of her.

  That was all, that was it, and yet, it had so much impact.

  And as she watched them struggle, it slowly dawned on her why.

  It was because they weren’t struggling at all. This wasn’t a precarious situation, for Isaac. He had the gunman. He had him so completely that the gun, the size of the guy, the small space was all of no concern to him at all. The only thing that mattered was this: she would see him do something brutal. She would see him be the man he had once been, in other countries where being free meant fighting men like him.

  Though honestly, she had no idea what that meant until the guy tried to fire again.

  He made a face like whatever man, as if he didn’t believe what Isaac was saying at all. Then he tried to turn. He tried to get out of the hand on his wrist, in a way that clearly said the hand was nothing. Bu
t, oh man, was he ever wrong about that. The moment he moved, she heard her snap, and just like that, the gun was on the floor. No scuffle, no fight to get the upper hand, no nothing.

  She didn’t even know what Isaac had done.

  The guy didn’t know what Isaac had done.

  It took him a full ten seconds to really react to whatever it was—a fact made all the more remarkable when she saw it for herself.

  He’d snapped the guy’s arm. Though really, snapped didn’t begin to cover it. His elbow was now on backwards. Bone was clearly pressing against the material of his crappy jacket, and she could see a stain starting to spread there. Blood, her mind informed her, and her mind was right. He’d slammed his other hand so hard into the guy’s arm, he’d shattered bone through skin.

  And he didn’t stop there. He didn’t wait for the guy to start screaming or fighting back or going for the gun again. He just took hold of the guy, in a way that almost looked friendly. Like someone greeting a friend from behind, with a pat on the shoulder. Hey Jim how you been? her mind suggested, but her mind did not sound calm about it. It sounded hysterical. It sounded like it was screaming.

  Then came the snap, and suddenly her thoughts were quiet again.

  Everything was quiet, after that. The guy slumped to the floor with the minimum of fuss—as if he’d just spontaneously fallen asleep or fainted in the middle of whatever this was. And though part of her felt she should be making noise, right around now, no noise came. She didn’t panic, or cry, or protest. In fact, she didn’t do any of the hysterical things she’d thought she would, if something like that happened again.

  No, no, no. It was Isaac who did the hysterical things.

  It was Isaac who lost it, as if somehow all of his calm had been sucked right out of him and shoved into her. She wasn’t the one suddenly shaking. He was. She didn’t fist her hands in her hair. He did. And it was him who broke the silence in the elevator—first with a thumped fist against the doors, and then with something worse.

  He made sound. A rough, agonized sound, of the kind she could tell he’d tried to hold in. She could tell he was gritting his teeth against it, but it did him no good. If anything, it only made his pain seem more despairing, more full of frustration.

  Like a man caught in a trap, she thought, who had only dreamt he was free.

  Now the bars were clear to him again, and god, he couldn’t seem to take it.

  For far too long a moment, he couldn’t seem to take anything.

  In fact, by the time he finally spoke, she was so afraid she’d lost him forever that she couldn’t quite take in the words. He had to ask them again with twice the urgency and ten times the panic—though, it wasn’t the tone that really got through to her. It was him finally looking at her, as he spoke. It was seeing the concern in his dark gaze and that thread of hope that she was still with him.

  “Lydia, please tell me that you’re okay,” he said.

  And she answered for him. To reassure him.

  To let him know that things were okay.

  “Never better,” she said, but here was the thing:

  As soon as she had she knew.

  They weren’t only the kindest words.

  They were also undisputedly true.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He wouldn’t explain anything to her, on the drive to his place. Though, she didn’t think it was about keeping it to himself. He was just on such high alert that nothing else appeared to get through. All that mattered was getting her safely into the car and then safely to his apartment and then safely inside.

  And even then, he didn’t pause to talk. He made her wait at his Fort Knox door while he seemed to frisk the place. She watched him glide between tidy little rooms filled with surprisingly plush looking furniture, opening and closing things as if he was expecting armed assailants to be hiding in every cupboard.

  Though she could hardly fault him for it.

  If elevators had gun happy psychos in them, why not all everyday things? They’d stepped out of the normal and into whatever dangerous world he’d once inhabited, and that meant heightened care at all times. It meant making sure they were safe even after it became absolutely clear that they were.

  And it also meant blood.

  “Oh my god, you’re bleeding. Isaac. Isaac, just stop for a second. You’re bleeding. You’re bleeding through your jeans, Isaac. Can you hear me?” she asked.

  But he just waved her off.

  “It barely grazed me, honey. It’s fine.”

  “Yeah, but the it in question is a goddamn bullet.”

  “A goddamn bullet that almost completely missed me.”

  “Again, I think you’re missing the most important word in your own sentence. Almost means that it did not miss you. Almost means that you’re gushing blood.”

  “I’d hardly call this gushing. At best, it’s a light trickle.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t think you’re the best judge of that.”

  “Why would I not be the best judge of something on my own body?”

  “Because now you’re making a mess of the floor.”

  She pointed, and this time he seemed to register what she was saying. At the very least, he looked down, at the trail of red he was leaving in his wake. And he reacted to it, too. He told her to go run some hot water in his bathroom and get the medicine kit from the drawer under the sink—both of which sounded like good ideas.

  But as soon as she started in the direction he indicated, she knew something about his words had not been quite right. His voice had seemed too flat. His gaze had almost looked right through her, to something else beyond. Like he was already thinking of some next move he needed to make, her mind suggested.

  And she knew it was right.

  She knew it so hard that she stopped what she was doing. She had to, because now all she could think about was what that next move might be. Her head was suddenly full of all kinds of conspiracies and shady dealings, and every one of them ended with him going down in a hail of gunfire.

  And they began with him leaving, right now.

  God, what if he was leaving right now?

  She had to go check. She had to see.

  But she didn’t find what she was expecting to. He was just talking on the phone. Just the phone, she told herself. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Though once she got a little closer, she was forced to reassess.

  He was using a voice she’d never heard before—one that had no tone to it, no feeling in it, none of that light breeze she’d learnt to associate with him. It was calm that voice, but it was somehow also brutal at the same time.

  Like the way he’d snapped that guy’s neck, she thought.

  And the words he was saying only backed that up.

  “Listen to me, friend,” he said, as if the person on the other end had tried to argue. And as soon as he did, that person seemed to listen. There was a heavy silence, a waiting kind of silence, and then Isaac said:

  “I gave you a chance. I told you to leave her alone. I told you what would happen if you kept tabs on her, but clearly, you did not listen. Clearly, you let that paranoia creep up on you. What happened? Did your stooge see me with her and report back? Yeah, that was it, wasn’t it. Then, instead of taking a rational course of action, you decided to try murdering her in front of me. Honestly, what did you think would be the outcome of that? Did you really think he would bury me, too? You know exactly what I’m capable of. You hired me because I was capable of it.”

  He laughed, then, in a way that should have disturbed her.

  But it didn’t. Truthfully, she barely even registered it.

  She couldn’t register it. Her mind was too busy circling a dozen things that he’d just said, over and over, until she wondered if this was what going insane felt like. Keeping tabs, she thought, hired, she thought, I told you, she thought.

  And there was more. There was more.

  “Perhaps then, you think most of it was just exaggeration. Well, let me
disavow you of that notion. Every word about me is absolutely true. Every skill you’ve heard I have, I have it and more. Every ability you prized, is mine to use as I see fit. And now, I see fit to use it against you. I am coming for you, Smith. And not just you—I am coming for every part of your disgusting little empire. Nothing will hide you from me; there is no action you can take to prevent your own downfall. You fell the second you casually decided that her silence wasn’t enough, and now you’re just waiting for the ground.”

  He didn’t turn, the second he hung up.

  But that was probably a good thing. It gave all the pieces in her head a chance to slide into place. It let her go over every word he’d ever said to her and everything he’d ever done, so that when he finally did turn, she was sure. In truth, she didn’t even know how she hadn’t been sure before. The whole thing was so obvious, she wanted to laugh.

  Yet somehow, when she spoke, it sounded like she was crying instead.

  “It was you, wasn’t it? All along it was you,” she said.

  Then waited for him to deny it. He had to deny it.

  And when he didn’t the whole world flipped upside down.

  “I wish I could say no. God, I wish it.”

  “But you can’t, because it’s true.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “You were the one.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “You shot the guy who attacked me, you did that.”

  “Of course I did. Of course, my love.”

  “And all this time, you kept quiet. You didn’t say a word.”

  “I was afraid, I was afraid it would ruin you. And then god forgive me, I was afraid it would ruin me, too. So tell me, tell me, what else could I do?” he asked. And he sounded so broken, it was all she could do not go to him. She had to restrain herself from doing it; she had to glue her feet to the floor. But she was glad that she managed. It made so much easier to be angry instead of a sobbing wreck, as she burst out with her last words.