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“Who are you? What the hell did you think you were doing?” I hissed as I smacked him against the wall again for emphasis.
He flapped his mouth silently. Impatient, I looked around for security cameras and then drew my gun and stuck it in his face. He whimpered, cringing away from it. This was no hitman.
“Well?” I demanded.
“My girlfriend lives there. She blocked me and won’t talk to me, and she wouldn’t say why so I—”
I stared at him.Are you fucking kidding me?“So you thought you would break into her home.”
I looked him up and down. That raincoat was too heavy for the weather. With an annoyed snarl I shoved my forearm into his throat, partially blocking his airway as I pinned him down. Then with my other hand I waved my gun in his face. “If you so much as twitch, I’ll shoot you in whatever body part this is nearest.” Then I checked under his raincoat and yanked out a long, cheap catalog knife, pulling hard enough that its faux leather sheath dropped to the ground in two pieces.
“You thought you’d chop her up. With this.”
He didn’t seem to know where to direct his terrified look now—at my eyes, at the gun, or at the knife. “I…she was…I just wanted to make her come back…”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have scared her off in the first place.” I wanted to kill him for his audacity, for his bloody plans, and for fucking inconveniencing me like this when I could have been watching over Olivia. “You can’t make a woman come back to you once you damage her love for you enough, you damned fool.” I forced him to look at me, letting back on the partial pressure I had on his throat so that I could switch the knife to my free hand and tuck it under his weak chin to keep his head up. “You would have murdered her as soon as you realized that.”
Tears brimmed over in his tiny shit-colored eyes. “I…I…all I did was choke her once!”
He let out a tiny squeak of fear as he saw my expression.
“I should kill you here and now, before you hurt any more defenseless girls,” I growled. “Your kind never gets taken to task for your actions. You just pity yourselves and pull the same shit over and over.” I moved a step closer. At this angle I could have severed his jugular with one stroke, even with this cheap-ass knife. “It’s time you learned about consequences.”
He started to hyperventilate. His breath was foul. That only pissed me off more.
“If you ever go near her, this building, or this neighborhood again, or speak of this to anyone, I will know. I will find you. And I willgeldyou with your own knife!”
He was nodding gingerly, too aware of the knife under his neck. His eyes rolled like a frightened horse’s. When I pulled the knife away, he ran for it, stumbling out of the yard as fast as he could.
I stood there in the shadows, catching my breath. The lights around us had gone back out. But I suddenly became aware that someone was watching me.
I looked over and saw a furry head peering at me over the fence. The dog was absolutely gigantic, a brown and black Ovcharka that probably outweighed me. He’d gone silent and just watched, as if knowing I had his intruder in hand.
“Good dog,” I told him. He tilted his head slightly, then dropped back down. It was unusual to see a Caucasian shepherd dog being used as a guard dog here, maybe I’d have to get someone to check on the owner.Or maybe, I just needed to stop being so paranoid about what kind of people were getting close to my woman and child.
I slipped out of the yard, tucking my pistol away and hiding the knife up one sleeve. The thing felt like it had been hammered out of a car bumper. What was with stalkers and outsized, cheap cutlery?
I went back to my car without slipping through the alleyway, though I did turn back once I was on that street to see what the metal thing he had dropped was. My eyes widened—it was a pistol. I had scared that wet-behind-the-ears little maniac so badly that he’d dropped it instead of firing it.
His girl dumped him, and his response was to break into her apartment with a knife and a gun. I should have cut his throat. Hopefully, I had put enough fear into him that he would think twice about indulging any more of his ‘romantic’ fantasies.
I sat in my car watching a while longer. Eventually, a slim young woman in pajamas wandered out yawning to see what the fuss had been about. She looked in the alley, saw the gun, and turned around quickly, looking around before rushing inside.
I sighed. She hadn’t seen me, but she was doubtless about to call the police. And that marked the end of my vigil.
Sleep well, Olivia, I thought, hoping she would only learn about the strange events at her apartment building in the morning.You and my son too.
Chapter 14
Olivia
Ichecked my makeup in one of the decorative mirrors hanging by my desk for the dozenth time that hour. Then the clock on my computer for the tenth. Viktor was coming in to discuss the estate sale, which was opening this weekend.
It was the first time that my coworkers would see us together. The first time that anyone who had met Michael would get a good look at Viktor. Those distinctive eyes of his that he’d passed down to his son, they couldn’t possibly be missed.
There would be questions. If not today, then soon. At this point, it was unavoidable. My fault for bringing Michael to work. But what the hell was I going to say to everyone?
Guess I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it. I fussed with my hair, the items on my desk, even my computer desktop. My hands wouldn’t stop moving, so I forced them into my lap and folded them.
