Читать книгу Red Blooded Murder - Laura Caldwell, Leslie S. Klinger - Страница 7

The hands that grabbed her were greedy. They shoved her, pushed her, not caring when she cried out. And although she wanted more—more now, more later—she felt the need, even in this faraway moment, to say the truth. “We shouldn’t be doing this again. At least I shouldn’t. This is the last time, just so you know.”

“Shut up,” came the reply.

“I’m not kidding. I want you to know that this is it. It’s over after today.”

“Shut up.”

Those hands moved lower, clawing and probing as though they’d been waiting for this, lying in wait until she was vulnerable, when they could strip her bare and plunge her into oblivion.

She threw her head back and clutched at the bed sheets, holding herself down until the moment when she would step into the void that she so craved.

A breeze trickled in the window, enticing after the biting winds that had battered Chicago for months. Yet nothing could touch the heat that boiled inside, carried her in small but growing crests, reaching her in places she always forgot until moments like this.

The hands stopped suddenly, startling her.

“Why?” she said, desperate.

A mouth crushed against hers, bit her. “I said shut up.” And she did.

Later, when she was alone, she slipped into her clothes for the evening—white, ironically. Tonight, she would smile, and she would be engaging. After all these years, she knew how to do that—how to shine her eyes at someone, how to direct her energy so they felt seen and heard and touched. No one at this event would know what she’d just done. She would carry the last two hours in her head, like little packages whose pretty wrappings hid the shame and the pleasure. Those thoughts would please her when she mentally unwrapped them; they would send pangs of delight throughout her body. But they would remove her from everyone, too. Secrets were always like that. They put a film between you and the rest of the world, so that you could see everyone else, but no one could see the whole of you.

Searching for her bag, she walked through her place and found it by the door. She remembered now that she’d dropped it there in the heat of that first moment, when she had let herself be devoured by her wants.

She sighed and picked up the bag. She took it into her bedroom, where she transferred a few essential items into a smaller bag more appropriate for the evening. She brushed her hair.

For a second, she studied herself in the mirror. She didn’t look any different than she had that afternoon. There wasn’t a blush to her cheeks or a shine to her eyes. She’d gotten so good at hiding the evidence.

Her gaze dropped. It was hard to look at herself these days. She walked to the front door, trying to clear her mind of the last few hours, of everything.

She stretched out her arm for the doorknob, but suddenly it turned on its own, surprising her, making her gasp.

The door opened.

“You scared the hell out of me,” she said, when she saw who was there.

She stopped short, looking into those eyes—eyes that saw her, knew what she was really like. She opened her mouth to say something sexy, but when she looked again, she saw those eyes shift into an expression of cold anger. She turned away for a moment while she collected words in her head and shaped them so that they would be earnest, pacifying.

But before she could form the sentences, she felt something strike her on the back of the head. She heard herself cry out—a cry so different from those she’d made earlier, a cry of shock and of pain. Instinctively, she began to raise her hands to her head, but then she felt another blow. Her mind splintered into shards of light, the pain searing into pink streaks. She felt her knees buckle, her body hit the floor.

Something tightened around her neck, squeezing her larynx with more and more force, stealing the breath from her. The light in her brain exploded then, filling it with tiny spots. Strangely, it seemed as if each of those spots encased the different moments of her life. She could see all of them at once, feel all of them. It was a beautiful trick of the mind, a state of enlightenment the likes of which she hadn’t known possible. She felt more alive than she ever had before.