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Feeling older than her twenty-four years, tired to the bone of simply breathing, she kept her face steady, breaking their gazes and looking into the water.
“Eyes.”
The slow, deliberate command of a word speared through her body. She clenched her jaw, not understanding what he was doing here, and why he was speaking to her when he had never said what she wanted to hear.
“I won’t ask again.”
Something in the tone of his voice, like an underside of a blade, cut through her confusion, making the small part inside her that knew he was dangerous instinctively react. It reminded her of the handler she’d had when she’d been fourteen, training her in the art of obedience for the right man. She had learned, not through obedience but through fear.
She turned her neck to look at him again, her gaze locking with his devilish mismatched eyes, waiting, a sliver of fear in her body lingering after the memory of her adolescent training.
He tilted his head to the side. “Afraid of me, flamma?”
The knuckles on her hands turned white with her grip. No, she wasn’t afraid of him. Or maybe she was. He elicited vastly different responses in her.
“Won’t you give me your voice? Even if I give you your answer?”
The question was soft, but effective enough to make her heart begin to thud. Would he answer her? Or was he toying with her? From the look on his face, she couldn’t tell.
“Will you?” she finally gave in, speaking to him for the first time in months, swallowing as the man with her answers stood still against the wall.
“One day.”
Bitter disappointment crashed into her, followed on its heels by rage, her words falling from her lips in a barrage she had been keeping in for so long. “You’re worse than these monsters. You dangle hope and take it away every single time.” She turned her face, her lips quivering, hating the ease at which she cried, the ease with which she felt. “Stay away from me. I want nothing to do with you.”
He stayed still beside the sink, leaning against the wall, casual but alert, his devilish gaze steady on her as she resumed her silence.
“They will be here in a few minutes,” he told her, shifting topics at her continued, deliberate silence.
She already knew that. That wasn’t news.
“I want you to tell them what happened.” He straightened from the wall he’d been leaning against as he spoke. “Tell them the Shadow Man was here.”
Why?
She almost asked but bit her tongue, her gaze wary as she looked at the man almost the entire underworld was terrified of, and for good reason. His entire expression stayed neutral the way it mostly did, but his eyes gleamed. He didn’t answer her silent question, refusing to acknowledge it just like she refused to voice it.
She watched as his hand went to his inner jacket pocket, bringing out a black eternal rose, putting it on the counter beside the sink. “If I stay away from you, you’ll miss me, flamma.”
Fuck him.
She wanted to ask him why he left those for her, why that specific rose, why specifically after a kill. She had fifteen of them now, an entire bouquet worth that she kept hidden in a box lest someone steal it. As twisted as it was, they were the only gift she had ever received, and she was possessive of them, along with the clothes he brought her every time.
She looked around to see where the bag of clothes was, her search coming up empty. Nothing. There wasn’t a bag.
Her eyes went up to him, fire flooding her veins. He was playing with her again. Why? What satisfaction did he get from inciting her reactions, toying with her emotions?
One corner of his mouth slashed up in a half-smirk. He knew she had come to rely on him bringing her clothes, clothes she wore back to the complex, clothes she washed and kept safe because they were the nicest she owned that were only hers. She didn’t know if she was just easy to read and no one had tried it before, or if it was his special skill at deciphering her, but he knew her thought patterns and she absolutely hated that.
Without another word, he left the bathroom, closing the door behind himself, and Lyla got up, wrapping a towel around her body. She was mad at him, mad at herself, mad at the world. And she knew she only had five more minutes to be mad before she had to be docile again, before she would give up on her anger, and that just made her angrier.
Marching out of the bathroom, she came to a sudden stop at seeing a plain paper bag on the bed. Ignoring the corpse on the side of the room, she rushed to the bag and saw a pair of black jeans, a white sleeveless top, a pair of nude cotton bra and panties that looked comfortable. Taking the tags off, she quickly donned the pieces, yet again questioning how he knew her exact sizes for everything. It was a perfect fit. And he had been testing her to see her reaction.
Hair still wet from the bath, she towel dried it as something on the table beside the bed caught her eye.
A phone.
She stared at it for a long minute, a gaping hole in her chest. Someone else could have stolen it and asked for help. She couldn’t. She didn’t have anyone she could call. And calling the police was out of the question. With the kind of people she knew were involved in these operations, she would either end up dead by an organizational assassination or dead by a police encounter. There was nowhere for her to go, not until she got what she needed from the one man who refused to give her answers.
