He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead, he let me go and I slumped to the ground on the dirty blanket. I drew the blanket around my shoulders and cried, not caring how many tears I wasted. I cried in self-pity. I cried for myself, for my mother who I had tried to forget and for all of the time I had wasted out in the world.
And I cried, too, because I wanted him and did not want to want him. The memory of his kiss played again and again in my mind and made me ache so badly. So badly that I touched myself and orgasmed immediately, coming hard against my hand in the dark dirty room. Stifling my moan against the blanket, I tried desperately to forget him, forget his touch, forget how much I had wanted him.
Who was worse? Was it him, the monster, the killer, the freak? Or me, who could not help but desire him despite all his darkness?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Gav
It started out as manipulation, kissing her. But her moan made something inside me shiver. It scared me, as much as anything could scare me. That she could have seen what she had seen... and still desire me.
It was the reaction I’d wanted, so why was I so disturbed by it?
Trying to get out of my own head, I went to the library to look up news about my kitten, to see how much information about her disappearance was floating around out in the world.
No, not her library, I wasn’t that stupid. A local branch, far away from the university.
Despite my otherwise opulent house, I kept all kinds of technology far away from me. No television. No computer, save for the security system. No phone. It made things simple. It kept me safe from being tracked in any way. And it made it easy for me to leave my victims in the house without worrying about them finding a way to contact anyone outside.
Now, I searched for my kitten’s real name and came up with a slew of news stories. To my surprise, only some of them were from the past week. I scanned the most recent ones and made sure that the police hadn’t gotten any new information from that friend of hers. Even as I went through the motions, a bubble of curiosity was floating up inside of my brain.
Nothing. There was nothing incriminating me. Nothing even to indicate that the police investigation was treating the case as an abduction. Missing girl. No further information. I licked my lips. The fear was already seeping out of my muscles.
Perfect. No push for a large investigation. I’d thought that a missing girl would be a thousand times more interesting than the missing businessmen and lawyers I normally killed. I suppose that my kitten was just lucky.
Or maybe there was more to it than that.
I went back to the older entries. The first headline sent an almost erotic thrill down my body:
Missing Teenage Girl Found
A local teenage girl thought to have been kidnapped was discovered last week…
No wonder no one actually cared.
She’d run away at fifteen years old, it seemed. I scanned through the rest of the article. No mention of her suicide attempt. Maybe it had been later, or maybe they’d managed to keep it out of the paper.
The other articles gave up some small pieces of information. Her parents’ names, their hometown. So much for her refusing to give me that information.
My kitten had managed to keep her parents from finding her for over three weeks. She’d apparently filed to claim independence from her parents once she’d been caught.
“Kitten,” I murmured as I paged through the text, “why did you run away from home?”
Another question to find the answer to. But at least I knew that I was safe, and with this information, I was even safer. The pieces clicked together in my mind like a puzzle of armor keeping me safe.
She’d run away once... she could have run away again.
Kat
He left me alone again, and I slept, goosebumps chilling me as I clutched the blanket over my shoulders. I didn’t know how long had passed, but when I awoke my bladder was full to bursting and I was hungry again and thirsty, though not as thirsty as before. I sat up in the darkness. He’d come for me before when I screamed. Maybe it would work again.
“Gav? Hello?”
A pause. No sound from above.
“GAV!” I yelled louder.
The light came on outside the door and I heard his footsteps on the stairs. Suddenly I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to come down. The last time he’d come to help me, he’d wanted a trade. I hated asking for more - I was scared of what he would demand in return.
The door opened, and I steeled myself. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his chest was broad, blocking out the light.
“Yes, kitten?”
“I need to use the bathroom,” I said. “And I… I need some clothes. Please. It’s cold down here.”
“You need a lot of things,” he said. He came closer, and I shivered. Because of the cold, or because of him? I couldn’t tell.