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I start preparing everything I’ll need and a few minutes later, I have my gun in hand. My gaze shifts to his face, holding back a grin as I find him white as a ghost, and without hesitation, I grab his hand and place it on my thigh, just as I’d done the first time. “How can a man who spends his days fantasizing about ending someone’s life be so terrified of needles? I mean, fuck. You cut yourself with a blade like you were chopping up a roast chicken, and you had no issue jamming a syringe into the side of my neck, but this has you breaking out in a sweat. It makes no sense.”
“Fucking tell me about it,” he grits through a clenched jaw, his gaze locked on the ceiling, refusing to watch what I’m doing.
I laugh to myself, pressing the gun against his skin and watching how he flinches away from it. My terrifying serial killer stalker boyfriend is scared of needles. Wait. Is he my boyfriend?
“What?” Alex questions, his gaze coming to mine.
“Huh?”
“You made a face,” he comments, blowing his cheeks out as he clearly tries to use whatever this is as a distraction. “Something’s on your mind.”
“Oh, I umm . . . it’s nothing, really,” I tell him, my gaze shifting back to his broad chest. “I was just laughing to myself about my serial killer boyfriend being a little scaredy-cat, but then it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know if you were my boyfriend. I mean, is that . . . is that what you want, or is that not how things work in the serial killer world? This whole screwing your stalker thing is new to me, so I don’t really know how it works.”
Alex grins, his eyes softening, and for just a moment, he doesn’t look as though he’s about to throw up. “You wanna be my girlfriend, Mace?”
“I mean, it sounds so trivial when you say it like that.”
“How else am I supposed to say it?”
I let out a frustrated groan, rolling my eyes as I try to focus on what I’m doing. “You’re impossible, you know that, right?” I tell him, before gently biting down on my lower lip, feeling shy all of a sudden. “But for what it’s worth. Yes. I’d like it very much if, from this point on, you referred to me as your girlfriend. Or your highness. Either works.”
Alex winks, and every part of me swoons. “I think I’ll stick with Mace.”
A stupid grin settles across my face. “I think I can deal with that.”
His hand on my thigh squeezes. “Alright, let’s stop dancing around,” he tells me. “I know you have questions, and it’s been killing you not to ask for the past few days.”
Rolling my tongue over my lips, nerves begin pulsing through my body, and as I meet his eyes again, I let out a shaky breath. “Your mom?” I ask him. “I was curious about you, and the other night when I was at Nat’s place, I found an article that suggested you killed your mom and were discharged from the Marines with a warrant out for your arrest.”
His face scrunches, and he sucks in a breath, probably trying to buy himself some time to work out how he’s going to explain this. “Starting with the hard stuff, huh?”
“Sorry,” I murmur just as my phone blasts through the silence, cutting me off. I glance over to the screen, getting ready to silence it when I find a FaceTime call from Nat. “Shit,” I say, picking it up and showing him the screen. “If I don’t answer, she’s going to get worried.”
Alex nods, and I place the tattoo gun down and quickly accept the call before it rings out. Nat’s face instantly appears on my screen, a glass of wine in her hand. “Girl, where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry,” I say with a cringe. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Scare me? Ky, you fucking terrified me. I went to sleep with you right beside me, and when I woke up, you were gone. Likefall off the face of the earthkind of gone.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” I say again. “I was feeling kinda off, and with everything going on, I guess I just misread all the signs. And then after you fell asleep, it just kinda hit me, and I didn’t want to get you sick too, so I went home.”
“Just like that?” she questions. “Just packed your bags in the middle of the night and took off without even a goodbye, right after you told me that your hot-as-fuck neighbor was your stalker.”
“I mean, I tried to say goodbye, but you were sleeping like the living dead,” I tell her, immediately feeling like shit about the lie while also trying to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to explain the whole Alex thing when he’s sitting right across from me. “As for the stalker, it turns out it was all a bit of a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?” she grunts, not believing me for even a second.
I spare a glance at Alex, noting how he watches me, wondering how I’m going to play this, and honestly, I don’t even know at this point. If I confirm all of my suspicions with her and tell her that everything we talked about at her apartment is true, she’ll think I’m insane. But I don’t like the idea of lying to my best friend, especially over something so huge. “Okay, so . . . maybe not so much of a misunderstanding,” I say, my brain scrambling for something to say. “I can’t really say much, but just trust that I’m okay. I’m safe and I’m happy.”
Nat stares at me through the phone, the silence dragging on a moment too long. “You weren’t sick, were you?”
I scrunch my face, hating how easily she can read me. “Umm . . . no.”
“So where the hell have you been?” she demands. “Did that guy do something to you?”
“No,” I tell her. “He did nothing that I didn’t ask for.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
