I brushed my thumb along the bare skin of her collarbone, back and forth, back and forth. Goosebumps broke out along her skin and I smiled. “Today.”
I caught the skepticism in her eyes. “Don’t try that charm on me,” she warned.
“Are you saying you’re immune to my charm?” I lifted a single brow.
“Oh yes,” she said, her lips curving secretly. “It’s your other, shall I say, gifts that I’m partial too.” As she spoke her finger trailed across my chest and down my stomach.
I laughed. But then I sobered up. I wanted her to know this stuff. “For several months now I’ve been feeling restless. I always completed the jobs I was assigned, but sometimes things fell through the cracks.”
“Money, you mean,” she replied.
“Mostly,” I rasped and rubbed a hand over my face. “It gets old… working for a man who can be as ruthless and cunning as he wants. He can play with your life, make threats, and withhold things that are rightfully yours.” I paused and glanced at her. She nodded and so I went on. “And then Dex came along… He figured out a way to get around G.R.’s game. I did nothing to stop him.”
“YouhelpedDex?” she said, her eyes going wide and her shoulders straightening.
“I didn’t save your friend.” I could see in her eyes that she was trying to make me into the hero. I wasn’t a hero. I never would be. I was the bad guy. The killer. “All I did was look the other way and maybe keep G.R. busy while Dex did his thing.”
She shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“A little.”
“Come on,” I said, starting to rise, but she made a sound deep in her throat.
“In a minute.” She pushed me back down and pressed herself closer against me. “There’s something else I want to know.”
“Hmmm?” I asked, paying more attention to the way her body felt against mine than what she was saying.
“Did you take the job because you were angry you died?”
“You ask the hard questions,” I murmured.
“Because those are the ones that tell me the most.”
“Does it really matter?” I asked then. “The reason I became what I am? The reason I became a killer? Because it won’t change the fact that I’ve killed over and over again for over ninety years.”
“It matters to me.”
I hesitated again. Was I really ready after all these years to tell my story to someone?
“Olly,” she whispered.
I wasn’t sure that I would ever get used to hearing her call me that. It brought a rush of emotion every single time she said it. “My sister used to call me that.”
“Tell me about her.”
I nodded. “Her name was Sarah.” It was another name, another emotion… another blast from the past.
And then it was like I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The words, the past came tumbling out of me.
“I died in nineteen twenty. The world was different back then. It wasn’t as free—as liberal as it is now. Women’s rights were on their way, but even still, women weren’t regarded the way they are now. They still needed the protection of a man, the income of a man. They were vulnerable, easily exploited and taken advantage of.”
I was aware of Frankie’s fingers moving lightly over my chest, giving me courage to talk.
“My father wasn’t much of a man. He left us when I was ten years old. Sarah was only five. A baby. My mother did what she could for us. She worked herself until she had circles beneath her eyes and holes in the bottom of her shoes. Still, she always smiled at us, always told us how much we meant to her. It would have been easy, I think, to blame us, to be angry and make us the target for that anger. But she never once let us see her cry. I heard her sometimes, at night, when I was supposed to be in bed.”
Instead of saying she was sorry for what obviously had been something hard, she still said nothing. Instead, she kissed me just beneath my jaw and then pressed her face in the crook of my neck.
