AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m trying to do this the nice way, Heidi,” he said, pausing halfway through his plate.
“You killed a man. Then you drugged me and kidnapped me. This is your idea of nice?”
He nodded slowly, eyes meeting mine intently. “Thisisthe nice way,” he said, sending a cold shiver down my spine.
The food I’d eaten sat like a heavy lump in the pit of my stomach. But food equaled strength. It equaled the energy I’d need to survive whatever happened between now and the moment I dragged a knife straight through his jugular. So, I forced down bite after bite until my plate was clean.
“That was surprisingly good,” he said, the moment I set down my fork. “Grazie, Heidi.”
“Don’t thank me. I would have doused your food with poison if I’d had any handy.”
He laughed, full and hearty, making those tiny lines crease at the corners of his eyes. “I don’t doubt it,” he said, shaking his head. But he sobered quickly and met my eyes once again.
“The police are a problem,” he said, “but not an insurmountable one. You’re here because what I need from you more than your silence, is information.”
Information? I had plenty of that. “The human heart pumps an average of sixty-seven million gallons of blood in a lifetime,” I said.
His brow furrowed in perplexity.
“You wanted information, right? Now you have some.”
He barked a laugh, shaking his head slowly. “You really are something. You don’t scare easily, do you?”
No, I didn’t scare easily. So, it spoke volumes that I was terrified to the bone right now. But fear gave the wielder power, and I wasn’t about to hand that over to him.
“I need to know about Bianchi,” he said.
“Elio?”
As I spoke the name aloud, a ghost of what I’d felt when I saw him tied and bleeding in his apartment shivered through me. Except, it hadn’t been Elio.
But did my captor know that? Did he believe he’d killed the CEO of Bianchi Industries? If he did, then I couldn’t let on otherwise.
“What is it you want to know?”
“What are you to Bianchi?”
The question brought me up short. I hadn’t been expecting it, nor did I have a word to explain it; we’d never put a word to it. Lover? That sounded too intimate. Boyfriend? Too immature, plus it implied a sort of liking that I just didn’t have.
My captor’s chest deflated. He had a name—he’d said it—but I hadn’t been able to fully make it out.
He reached into his trousers’ pocket and pulled out a phone. He pressed a few buttons, then held it out to me, screen up.
There was a picture on the screen. A picture of Elio with a blonde woman on his arm.
He swiped the screen and another appeared, this one of Elio and the blonde at a restaurant.
“…is his girlfriend,” I caught the last few words of what he was saying. “So, what areyou?”
I looked back at the screen, waiting to feel… what? Rejection? The sting of betrayal?
I felt neither, no more than the emotion that came from losing a decent vibrator.
“I’m a convenience to him,” I said simply.And he to me.
“And yet you had a key to his apartment?” he asked as his gaze turned increasingly suspicious.
If this man had been hoping I had the codes to Elio’s bank account or the keys to his safe deposit box, then he was sorely mistaken.
