He lifts his face, showing me his eyes as they reflect the light from the window. "You must know their version of everything."
"No." The words are a lie, but I want nothing like I do our peace and to return to our life.
He stands, making every hair on my body stand on edge, and crosses the floor slowly. His steps are soft and deliberate. When he reaches me I swear I see him hesitate. "Do you know my name?"
My stomach sinks as I nod, feeling a single tear slip down my cheek. There is a terrible feeling inside me that facing him is like facing a wild animal.
"Say it."
Glancing up into his beautiful face I say the name I want to say. "Dr. Derek Russo."
A smile crosses his lips, but it's not the one I love. It's bitter and filled with what I fear is the end of us. "Say it." He doesn't specify. He doesn't have to.
I swallow hard, letting the words fall out of my lips. "Benjamin Dash."
"And who are you?"
A sound leaves my lips. It's defeat in its simplest form. "Jane Spears."
"Liar." He lifts his hand, running it through my hair and then cupping my cheek. He leans forward, I assume to kiss me, but he whispers in my ear instead: "Who are we?"
I shake my head. "I don't know." My response is a whisper to match his.
"We are the hunter and the prey." He kisses my cheek softly. "Which one are you, Samantha Barnes?"
I close my eyes, no longer fearing him, regardless of the fact I am certain he is every bit the man Rory said he was. "My name is Jane."
"What are you doing here? Why didn't you leave?"
"I told you earlier, I love you. I have always loved you. I don't want us to be this way. I don't believe you are anything but my sweet Derek." I know it's wrong, but I don't care that he's an assassin. He might have killed a man tonight-he's all but admitting to it all, and I don't care.
His lips find mine in the dark. There is something desperate in the kiss. There is no control and no method to his madness; it is just pure and crazed.
His fingers tear at my clothes, where his lips press to heal the reddened flesh. He kisses away every bit of roughness but never softens in his touch. My clothes are ripped away completely as my lips are kissed as though they may never be again. I don't move with him but allow myself to be ravaged. I am unsure of his mood or movements. Everything is foreign and frightening in a sensual way.
He lifts me into the air, lowering me onto his erection. His jeans rub the bottoms of my legs as he enters me roughly. His hands lift me by the hips and ass, working me on his cock but at the same time moving with abandon on the reins normally holding him back. Warm grunts fill my ears as my head and back drag up and down the door. His fingers bite into my flesh, holding me too tightly and treating me too roughly. But I love every second of the assault.
Our lips crash as our faces melt into one another. My tongue slips into his mouth, only to be met with caresses and soft sucks, contradicting the thrusting and slamming of my body.
My naked breasts squish into his shirt in rhythm to the jerking of our bodies as my climax starts to build. I grip him, clutching and clawing as his cock brings me to a blissful release. He cries out, groaning into my hair as my orgasm milks his cock until he too releases inside me. Our movements slow but the disparity of it all doesn't.
He doesn't hesitate. He moves our still-trembling bodies, carrying me to the shower. He strips off his clothes, pulling me into the shower. He turns it on, as always, protecting me from the cold water.
He cups my face as if it were the most delicate thing in the world. His eyes are almost completely gray, no green at all, but his smile is the one I love the most. "I don't want to lose you."
I nod. "Can we just be who we are, right now? These people in this shower?"
His eyes glisten, and I know it's not the shower. "I don't know." He kisses me softly, just lightly feathering his lips against mine. "I have never been more scared in all my life than I was today."
I nod again. "Me too."
He wraps around me, holding me tightly to his chest.
When we go to bed there are a thousand questions roaming my head, but choosing which one to start with feels impossible. Each one leads down a path I'm not certain I want to detour down. Not when he's here and he's mine.
I hate myself in some ways. I hate that I needed to know. I hate that I followed the bread crumbs to Samantha Barnes and the bullshit that was her life. I wish I'd left it alone. I wish for so many other options instead of the one that led me to the moment I am in. It is too filled with regret, so filled that I'm certain if I break the top off this can of worms I will drown in the sea of things I could have lived without knowing.
"Do you want me to sedate you?" His question is so random I don't answer at first. I lie perfectly still, perplexed as to why he would ask it.
"No." I almost answer as if I'm asking a question.
He turns, facing me. I can hardly make out his face in the dark. "You might sleepwalk."
"I thought you made that up."
He shakes his head, rustling it against the pillow. "No. You really killed a cat in front of me. You really sleepwalk. You really wake covered in blood-not often, but you do."
"You didn't do that to me?"
It's his turn to sit in silent contemplation. I regret asking it, even more so when he answers.
"I have done everything I can to make you safe. I have told you a thousand times that I love you. You have always been my priority, even when you didn't know me. The first chance you are given something that could make you doubt me, and you believe that, over the years of love and sacrifice? How did it take such a small thing to make you doubt me when it was so hard to make you love me?"
My insides clench. "I don't know what to believe. I don't know what to think about the sleepwalking. I don't think I did it when I was a kid."
He gets up abruptly, bringing instant panic out in me. He walks from the room, flooding the hallway with light and heavy footsteps. He bangs and clangs and rifles through things downstairs in the concrete basement.
It's then that I realize how little I know about him, and it makes me trust him even less, if at all. I have a fear that he's downstairs making something that will be my demise.
A realization hits me like a shovel to the face: Our love will never work. He will always be a suspect in my brain that is naturally on the side of the law, even though I never knew it was. I am naturally skeptical, even if I am lost in the mud and fog in my head. I wish I could take it all back. I wish for a second I could just be the girl with no memories again.
His heavy footsteps leave the basement as he rushes back into the room. He looks me over, giving me the strangest face. I can hardly make it out with the light of the hallway behind him. He starts to speak softy, but I'm lost in the look on his face. I think it's defeat, but I can't be certain.
I don't hear what he's saying, not completely. I just watch him, hating how beaten and rough he looks. It's more than tired and stressed. It's loss in its simplest form. He is losing me and I am losing him, and we both know it.
I fear it puts me in a sticky situation, though, what with him being the serial killer and me being the ex-agent of sorts. I don't think either of those roles defines us, but our love doesn't either. Not anymore.
My doubt in him is a betrayal of the worst kind. It matches his lies, even here in the dark where we can't see everything and we say nothing that will patch these injuries.
He drops to his knees, and I realize he's holding a box. He's telling me things I don't listen to. The box has become my focus. Its contents drive my curiosity.
He struggles with words for a moment, taking a deep breath. "Your name is Samantha Barnes. You were an agent assigned to bring me in." I watch him slip away, fading as a person and becoming a shell, a husk. He is empty when he says his next words. "I was also an agent, assigned to something different. Killing people is an art, one only a certain type of person can stomach." He blinks and breathes and looks pained in some way, but he is a robot. I see that now. "I was a doctor in the military-easiest way to become one without paying for it. I didn't have money growing up." There is something else to his story of growing up that I can see is there in his hollow eyes. There is pain there that he has buried with the deaths of others.
My skin shivers. How is all this possible?
I pull back from him, distancing myself from his words as he continues to speak softly, as if the quiet of his voice will mask the horror of his words. "The CIA recruited me when I was twenty-five. I became a cleaner." He lifts his face, smiling blankly. "I loved my job." He winces. "Until I was assigned a girl, a woman named Samantha Barnes. I came to your town, watched you and researched you. I met your father and your aunt. I met every person I could find who knew you, but every piece of the puzzle and every step of the way made me feel something I didn't understand. I found myself watching you for hours. Simple things like sleeping and eating and even bathing. I became obsessed with every aspect of who you were. I realized then I was in love with you. I couldn't kill you any more than I could kill myself." His words and unsteady grip on the box fill me with fear. A new type of fear, one I have never felt.