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My head spins as I climb into the car next to him. It’s similar to the one I was in last week. Spacious, with soft leather seats and a partition.
Only this time he sits in the back with me. He immediately pulls out his phone. It’s so disconcertingly normal, my mouth goes dry.
What I should be doing is jumping out of this mobile prison at the next light. Manhattan traffic moves slow on Friday nights. Outside is a sea of lights and noise, the city alive and pulsating.
But the inside of this car projects an oasis of surface calm, the noise outside blocked out. Beneath that calm is a buzz that scrapes over my skin. It simultaneously makes me want to scream and do dirty, naughty things just to please him.
It’s not like I want to please him in life, but on some sexual level I can’t even begin to understand.
His veiled threat about my sister blends in with the hopeand the strange sense of relief that she’s in the place where I’ve been hopelessly working toward getting her. But it makes so much more bubble to the surface—a complicated mess of old feelings and resentment for Mercer, the guilt over my brother and sister, and the overwhelming desire to stop a monster who hurts girls like Ruby.
Mercer said she died a long time ago. My mind trips back to the last time I think I saw her, but it’s lost in the explosion and fall out from me turning Mercer in to the police.
I had to do it. Elise was young, and when I think about her holding the drugs she found, the ones that looked just like candy…
Shit. It twists my stomach, still to this day.
I’ll never forget the sheer heat of my dad’s anger, directed at me and Jaxson.
Or Jaxson’s white-hot fury and his flipping Dad’s choice of military school or prison on its head by enlisting and disappearing from our lives the next day.
Or the look of disappointment I got from Mom.
Because good girls and good wives found ways to do things that didn’t cause fall out.
But the one thing I’ve hidden deepest, the one thing I really don’t know what to do with and never have, is the confrontation before Mercer’s arrest.
Me and Mercer.
He…
I swallow hard.
Even now I can’t unpack the look on his face.
I slide my eyes over to him and I know that even as he types a message on his phone, trying to look unaware of my presence, he’s very tuned into me.
And he’s a vicious beast.
Outside the cloak of a fine suit, the animalisticvibration of him threatens to overtake and overwhelm. The line between civility and carnage is invisible.
He looks like what he is.
Dangerous.
And…I want him.
The “want” is on a deep, raw, savage level. It’s got nothing to do with emotion. Nothing to do with anything apart from instinctive functions. Desire hooked into the thalamus. Nothing emotional about it.
“Save that look, Pollyanna, unless you want to get fucked here and now.”
I suck in a breath and twist my fingers together. “You’re exactly how evil?”
“Not as much as the man we’re taking down but more than you’ve ever had to deal with.”
My fingers twist some more. “Well, I think you’re the Devil.”
“You don’t believe that crap, Pollyanna.”
