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Surely one of the women would’ve raised the alarm within a few minutes of me not coming back.
I’d heard the CliffsNotes version of each of their stories and had I not met them all and trusted them, I would’ve said they were full of shit. It didn’t sound real. The kidnappings, the bombings, the drive-by shootings.
But it was.
They wore the scars in their eyes.
I fucking hated that these women who smiled easily and laughed even easier had that. But the second a cloth settled over my mouth and I was roughly yanked back into a stranger’s body, I was hopeful that their past might help me ensure I had a future.
A door opened and closed, and I stiffened.
I didn’t crane my head to see who it was, though everything inside me ached to do that. Maybe I wouldn’t see them at all. Maybe I’d feel cold steel at the back of my head and then I’d feel nothing else.
But I couldn’t change that by looking death in the face, and it felt oddly weak to try to crane around to see whoever had entered the room. If they wanted to make eye contact with me, they were doing all the work.
I saw his shoes first. Gucci. Snakeskin. The tacky style that rich guys thought made them look rich but just made them even slimier than they were.
The suit was slightly better. Charcoal. Custom. Tailored to perfection, crisp shirt underneath, no collar. Neck was smooth, tanned, attractive. Then there was the face. What I’d been avoiding. I was trying to prolong this, my survival.
His eyes were cold, familiar, full of interest, the same interest a spider might have over a fly caught in its web.
“Ms. Edwards. You’ve proven yourself difficult to locate,” Kitsch said. His voice was pleasant, the same as it had been that night at the charity function. There was a calmness to him that scared the shit out of me.
He was a psychopath. It shouldn’t be surprising, really, with all that data saying that a good percentage of successful men were psychopaths.
Most of them weren’t driven to murder. They just ruined people’s lives without thought of what might happen beyond them adding to a fortune.
“Well, you’ve got me now, haven’t you?” I replied, forcing myself to stay calm. “I will say, you’re meant to be smart but kidnapping one of the world’s most famous actresses right before she’s going to testify against you isn’t really going to clear your name.”
He smiled, moving over to a bar cart tucked in the corner of the room. He leisurely grabbed two glasses and poured from a whisky decanter.
“I’ll apologize for not giving you use of your hands,” he said, glancing up to someone behind me.
A large figure moved to grab the glass from Kitsch and move in front of me.
The man was well over six feet tall, all muscle, close cropped hair, no neck, and wearing all black.
Private security was being paid far too much to feel anything about the fact he was attempting to feed whisky to a woman chained to a chair.
As much as the hot burn of whisky would be welcome right now, I wouldn’t let some goon fucking feed it to me. I wouldn’t let the last thing to pass my lips be something forced on me.
The cold glass stayed pressed against my lips until Kitsch made some kind of signal. Goon stepped back to put the whisky on the coffee table. But he stayed right in front of me.
“I wish you’d accept my hospitality,” Kitsch said, nodding to the glass. “It’s a great bottle, very rare. Makes everything that much…softer.” He sipped from his own tumbler.
I wasn’t about to play along with this. He probably had a vision in his mind of how this would go. He was going to get to play the gentlemanly villain who shows his victim hospitality before he kills her. At best. I didn’t miss the way his eyes lingered on my thighs, with my skirt riding up almost to my waist.
“He here to do your dirty work?” I asked, nodding to the goon, trying to banish thoughts of getting raped before he murdered me. “You want to kill me. Need to kill me if you want your freedom. But you also want to make whatever fucking speech you’ve built up in your mind because the only way a woman would really listen to you is if you kidnapped her and tied her to a chair?” I snapped.
Something moved in Kitsch’s eyes, he clenched his hands around the tumbler. I’d got to him. Men who thought they were smart, powerful were usually the easiest to unravel.
“Mommy didn’t love you, huh?” I continued. “So you decide that you’ll hate women for the rest of your life, punish them when you can? Newsflash, buddy. In my eyes, you’re always gonna be the pathetic, scared little boy who only wants his mother to love him.”
