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Not even close.
And that realization, although I’ve been contemplating it all this time, snaps my spine into a painful line.
“Are you going to hurt me?” My voice is small, divulging my erratic heartbeat.
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On your ability to follow orders.”
“W-what orders?”
“Have dinner with me, Lia.”
“What?” I mean to snap, but it comes out as a bewildered murmur. Did this killer/stranger/the one who threatened and continues to threaten my life just asked me to have dinner with him?
His face remains the same, caught in that eternal calm that only monks should be allowed to have. “Dinner, something where people eat and talk.”
“I know what dinner is. I just…I just don’t know why the hell you’re asking that of me.”
“I already answered that question. To talk.”
“About what?”
“You’ll know once we have dinner.”
“Can’t we talk here?”
“No.”
It’s a single word, but it’s so closed off that I know he’s done entertaining my questions.
Still, I have to ask this, “What if I don’t want to?”
“As I said, your safety depends on your ability to follow orders, Lia.”
I swallow at the subtle threat in his tone. His message is clear. If I don’t have dinner with him, he’ll act on that threat. Worse, he might even finish what he started a week ago.
“It would’ve been easier to take you to an unfinished construction site or ambush you in your apartment building, but I’m offering you dinner in a restaurant with people around. You’re smart enough to realize the difference, aren’t you?”
The difference between getting hurt and not. My ability to stay alive and the complete opposite.
While everything in me revolts against the idea of going anywhere with him, my survival instinct rushes forward.
Dinner is definitely much better than being killed in a parking garage and having all traces gone in the morning.
Besides, he awakened something inside me earlier by merely sitting in the audience. I chalked it up to coincidence, but now that he’s standing in front of me, my legs tingle with the need to move, to do something, anything.
If I have to do this, I might as well find out why someone like him, a dangerous criminal, was able to draw that reaction out of me.
“I need to change,” I say, tactfully avoiding his gaze, not only because of its intensity, but also because he seems to peer into me whenever we make eye contact.
“Then change.”
“You need to leave for me to do that.”
“And allow you to call for help or escape? I don’t think so.”
