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I narrowed my eyes at him.
“So….?”
“So I knew you could handle this, Nyx. There was never a doubt in my mind about that.”
“Oh.” That was all I could think of to say. I felt oddly pleased with his logic, but also somewhat bothered by it, which irritated me.
He irritated me.
My mood constantly ricocheted anytime Maliki was near. From chaotic, to happy, to sullen, to angry—I loathed it.
And I didn’t understand it.
I wasn’t some purified virgin, obviously. So why did he make me feel like this? Butcher most definitely hadn’t.
Ugh. I really needed to stop comparing the two of them, but there weren’t any other relationships to go off. When Maliki was near I was like, well, this. When he was away, I remained firmly in my sea of chaos and cloaked in melancholy.
That was enough of a struggle for me already without adding all of the emotions that came with being a twenty-one year old girl.
I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew I wanted him when I shouldn’t. I had no idea who I was meant to be, but I knew my feet fit perfectly in my father’s footsteps.
I didn’t know much else beyond the fact that my baby brother was still missing, and a certain redhead had a soul that was mine for the taking.
A feather light touch on the side of my face had my lids fluttering and reality replacing my cogitations. “What are you doing?”
“Bringing you back to me.” He dropped his hand and recreated the distance between us before I had a chance to process that he’d been in front of me. “Do you know that when you do that, you zone out completely? It’s almost like you’re comatose, but sometimes you mumble to yourself.”
“No, I don’t,” I refuted, though I very well could have. I certainly fucking hoped not.
He turned around with such a darkly mischievous smile on his face that apprehension didn’t delay in making an arrival.
“You do. You’ve said many things I’m not a fan of. And others that let me know you’ve got a filthy fucking mind.”
This was a trap. One that would make me share what he claimed to already know. I wasn’t falling for it. I was weird, yes, perhaps what some would even call strange, but not to that extent.
I looked down at the last man my blade had been acquainted with and studied the slit in his throat so I wouldn’t have to stare at Maliki any longer than necessary. “I think you and I have had too much alone time.”
“I think the exact opposite.”
My gaze flew to his, diverted, and then found its way back. “Did something happen? You’re acting different. If there’s an issue, just tell me what it is.”
He did that thing again, the one where he perused my body from head to toe so thoroughly I had to refrain from shielding myself and, whatever he was thinking afterward, he kept to himself.
“We gotta go.” He turned and walked out of the garage without a backward glance.
“What about these guys?” I questioned, following after him.
He waited until I was outside and then reached up, grabbing hold of the metal shudder door. “They’re dead. Let em rot.”
That was my original plan, so it worked for me. I stood back and watched him close the garage, shutting the three corpses inside.
The temperature in the Badlands was hot enough that you could sometimes cook on the asphalt, so it wouldn’t be long until the bodies began to swell and leak.
Maliki stepped back and gestured to the hideous brown van that lacked windows. “I got our guy hogtied in the back.”
“You did all that within a few minutes?”
“You sound surprised,” he replied, rounding around to the driver’s side of the prehistoric vehicle.
