Page 3 of Dangerous Games

This is how I die.

For not minding my own fucking business.

“Did you track me down to bring me that slice of pizza?” I try to joke, but my smile comes out half-assed and forced, and well, his face hasn’t moved from the scowl.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

I look between him and my front door, wondering if I could make a break for it before he had time to make it to me. He’s not extremely tall, but the wide, muscular shoulders fill him out. I think I could beat him to the door; however, I think he could easily break the door down, so really I’m at a loss here.

“Going home.” I point toward my door.

The man’s mouth parts slightly before he runs his hand over the top of his head. “Oh fuck. Matteo is going to kill me.”

Uh oh.

If Matteo is going to kill him, that means he’s definitely going to kill me.

I take another step, wanting nothing more than to get away from this man and get on my way to pretending tonight never happened. Living in denial is the key to happiness, at least in my world.

The man looks up as I dart up the stairs with my heart pounding in my ears. It’s the same feeling you would get when you were a kid when you shut the lights off downstairs and have to sprint up the stairs in the dark to your room because you think someone is randomly going to appear out of the woodwork and drag you back to their lair, except this time there’s actually someone there.

My shaky hands fumble my keys as I’m trying to place the key into the hole. On the third try, I’m shaking so bad they slip through my fingers. I watch in horror as they fall through the crack in the metal-grated step and land on the pavement.

Fuck.

My.

Life.

The weight on my chest feels like it’s squeezing the life out of me as I watch the man slowly move over to the keys and bend down and pick them up. My breath catches in my throat, waiting to see what happens next because there’s nowhere else for me to go. If I make a run for it back down the stairs, he’ll just meet me at the bottom. And the door to my apartment is locked, so I’m stuck.

I watch frozen in place as the man tosses my keys up in the air, almost as if he’s testing the weight of them.

Oh my god.

What if he cuts my hand off slowly with my keys? Is that possible?

He studies them, turning them around as he flips through the keys on my keychain. There isn’t much, just two keys, one being to the apartment and one to the store, and a trinity knot keychain I refuse to take off. His thumb slowly strokes the knot, making sure to touch each tip. He abruptly tilts his head up, his hard gaze aimed right at me, making me jump. He lifts his arm and draws it back. I flinch as he throws my keys toward me. On reflex, my hand darts out and snatches them. The metal that is usually cool is warm from his touch, but it sends a chill down my spine all the same.

He gives me one last look before he prowls back inside with the bucket he came out to get, leaving me alone in the dimly lit alley. I let out a deep breath, finally feeling like I can breathe for the first time since I walked into the pizzeria. I find my apartment key and this time stick it in the lock on the first try. Once inside, I slam the door shut, flip all three locks and slump against the back until my ass hits the floor. My head falls between my knees as I try to process what the hell just happened. Whatever it was, I don’t have a good feeling about it.

“Ugh,” I groan as I slowly lift my head back up, resting it against the door. It’s almost painful because it feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.

I look around my apartment, questioning if I need to move in the middle of the night so he doesn’t come back later when he realizes he should have killed off the witness.

But where would I go?

I highly doubt I’d find another place in my price range. It was hard enough to find this. I love my job, but working at a gaming store doesn’t exactly have me rolling in the big bucks.

I let out an exhausted sigh. I was really loving this place too.

It’s just me. I didn’t need much space, and it’s close to work. The landlord doesn’t bother me, and I don’t bother him. It’s a perfect setup. Yeah, it’s only a studio, but sometimes the smallest places are the coziest. And surprisingly, despite it being above a restaurant, I don’t hear anything that happens below.

I don’t have much furniture-wise, just a queen-sized bed shoved up against a wall in the far corner to give me more room. I have two floor-to-ceiling windows that face the alley, a small window in my bathroom that faces the street, and one above the kitchen sink. A cheap sofa I found on the sidewalk ready to be taken to the dump the next day on my way home is in the middle of the room, facing the two windows, which have a small TV stand and a small TV on it in between. I don’t have a dining room table because, well, there isn’t room for one, and it’s just me, so what’s the point?

Picking myself off the floor, I strip out of my clothes and hop in the shower to wash away my shitty day. I swear it’s always on the days when you wake up and think, “This is going to be my day” that are the absolute shittiest. The water is scalding hot; the steam swirling throughout the bathroom proves that, but I don’t feel a thing as the water pelts my skin. My mind is on what the man is doing downstairs. And I can’t help but think that whatever it is, no matter how bad or how angry he was, he looked fucking hot doing it. A guy in a suit has never been my type. And it’s not the fact that I don’t find them attractive, because I do, obviously. It’s just that whenever I’m around a man like that, I feel completely out of my league.

I turn the water off, feeling no less relaxed, but I also can’t afford to spend the night under it and rack up my water bill. I’m always sticker-shocked every month that bill comes.