Stepping carefully into the humid hallway, her beautiful eyes searching for the husband she should have been able to trust. She walks down to the end of the first floor, clearly searching for an unlocked storage unit, but when she doesn’t find one, she returns, approaching the staircase to try the next floor.
Her lilac scent hits me on her way up the stairs and I breathe it in hungrily from the shadows, before emerging and coming up behind her quickly.
I clap a hand over her mouth to cut off her scream.
“Hi honey.” I kiss her neck. “If you’re looking for my unit, it’s on the second floor.”
She starts to shake and I don’t blame her.
I’m a monster, after all.
One she’s unknowingly been feeding with her body, her love, her trust.
I walk her up the stairs and guide her into my unit, pressing the code on the wall, a mechanical whir filling the air as the metal door peels open and reveals what must look like her worst nightmare. My theory is confirmed when she makes a sound inside my cupped palm and starts to struggle. “Jolie, please.” Her fear of me makes my chest feels like it’s caving in. “I’m not kidnapping you. You have nothing to be scared of from me. I would fucking die before hurting you. If nothing else, you have to believe that, okay? Please.”
I try to see the room from Jolie’s eyes. The pictures of her taped to the wall, shots of her leaving the supermarket. Hundreds of photos of her sleeping, showering, exercising. There are news clippings regarding her kidnapping. Some pieces of her clothing, including panties that I’ve stolen so I could touch them unseen. Hold them to my face. Use them on my cock.
And then there’s the guns.
A wall of them, neatly lined in racks. Ammunition, silencers, ski masks.
She’s gone eerily still and that scares me more than anything.
Explain. You have to try and make her understand.
“I saw you on the news. I saw you, so brave and beautiful, and I had to get closer. Had to make contact. Know everything. Protect you. And then…we met and I was right. This fire, this love between us is real. You feel it too. I never expected it to move so fast. I thought we would date and I would make myself change. That maybe I could learn to feel for you the normal way men feel about women, but every second…” I exhale roughly against her temple, draw her back more securely to my chest. “Every time you breathe, I grow a little more obsessed. It’s something I can’t stop.”
Jolie whimpers. Which tells me nothing. Nothing.
“Can I take my hand off your mouth?”
She nods.
With a deep breath, I drop my hand away.
My wife turns and punches me in the face. Hard.
Her knee jerks up and comes within an inch of my groin, before I block it.
Even with my head buzzing with pain, I’m so proud of her. One self-defense class and she’s already confident enough to fight back when she feels threatened. If I was some average joe on the street, she might have succeeded, too, but I’m a hit man with ten years’ worth of military training.
There’s a thin length of rope within reaching distance and I use it to bind her wrists, throwing the end over one of the ceiling rafters, triple knotting the bindings and leaving Jolie’s hands tied in the air above her head, captured.
“I don’t want to do this,” I say through my teeth. “I just need you to listen.”
“I’ve heard enough.” Her eyes are bright with unshed tears. “You are no better than Joseph Hynes.”
My head jerks back like I’ve been slapped. She’s right. Of course she’s right.
This was my greatest fear all along. Being the thing that scares her the most.
“I love you. All I can say is that’s real. It’s the realest thing I’ve ever felt.”
“Well I don’t love you,” she chokes out. “I don’t even know who you are.”
My heart lurches, sinks, sinks all the way down. “Don’t say that. Yes, you do. Every moment was genuine, I was just holding back the full extent of what you do to me.” I step closer to Jolie, breathing into the crook of her neck, cradling her hips in my hands. “But when I’m inside you, when we’re close to finishing and I’m going for broke, that’s me. You’ve met me, felt me and you’ve loved it.”
“No,” she whispers, but I catch her hesitation. “No, you played me. Made me feel safe—”
“You were always safe,” I growl.
She ignores me. “Why do you have so many guns?”
“Work.”
Stark horror dances into her expression. “Oh God. What do you do?”
I swallow my trepidation. There’s nowhere to hide anymore. “I’m a hit man.”
Surprisingly, her features don’t register shock, but there is so much happening behind her eyes and goddammit, I would give anything to crawl inside and read her thoughts. “The other night…you weren’t coming back from the kitchen, were you?”
I shake my head slowly.
Her head tips back on a watery sniff. “You kill people for a living, you’ve tied me up in a storage unit full of pictures of me—my god, you’ve been stalking me—and you expect me to believe I’m safe right now?”
“Yes.”
She pulls on her restraint, slumping when it holds fast. “You’re a psychopath.”
The accusation hits me like a spray of bullets. I’ve always thought this was the case, but a psychopath doesn’t love like this. Doesn’t have regrets or guilt or attacks of conscience. But if I tell her any of that, there is no way in hell she’ll believe me. This storage unit has damned me. My lies have fucked me over. I do not have a chance with this woman any longer.
I’m a criminal to her.
A stalker.
A crazy person.
If I really love her, I have to put my money where my mouth is.
I…I have to release her.
If for no other reason than she’ll know my feelings are real. Because I don’t think I can go on living if she believes the last perfect, beautiful month of our lives was some sick, perverted fantasy I played out at her expense. That would haunt me forever. If I choose to go on living without her. The jury is out on that one.
I bring our foreheads together. “I’m going to let you go. I’ll untie you, let you out of this room and disappear. You’ll never have to see me again.” Her breath hitches, her eyes searching mine. I watch them closely, so closely, as I drag my fingertips up the inside of her thigh, pressing them to the silk material of her panties and massaging gently right over the top of her clit. “Please, just let me come inside you one last time.”
“No,” she breathes, shaking her head, yanking on the rope that secures her to the rafter.
It kills me, but I start to remove my touch…until she makes a breathy sound of protest, reluctant lust wafting into the gold of her eyes. Her thighs cinch around my hand before I can fully take it away, and hope lights up my entire system. Our uneven exhales mingle in the darkness. I should let her go now. I shouldn’t fuck her. Because I can see she’s confused by the fact that her body still craves mine, even though she surely hates me.
But I can’t. I can’t walk away when I have the chance to be joined with Jolie.