Page 4 of Killer Bones

As in, aren’t you dead? Laughable.

In the weeks afterward, the incident vanished from the news as if it had never happened. No one was jailed, charged, or sent to prison.

“I can tell you remember me. What a good girl.” He bites my shoulder. Fuck.

I sag into the wall. I suck back a groan. I asked a question, and he bites me?

Fuck, I don’t recall that guy being this sexy. I’m melting inside while I’m being assaulted in the middle of the street with bystanders…okay they’ve gone, but I let them leave and said nothing.

“In here.” He lets me up and hustles me, pushing, urging me into the nearest alleyway. A dark freaking alley, and I let him.

When I pause a few yards in, he grabs me again, shoves me into this new wall. Hard brick presses the side of my face, my lips, my nose, as he rummages among my clothes, pushes aside the coat. He pulls and lifts cloth until my ass is bare to the night air and to his gaze.

I hear him inhale. “Nice.” Only nice? I’m insulted. “This ass is going to take my cock, but first, you are going to beg me for it.”

If this isn’t that dude from way back…

I don’t remember his name. Am I sure this is him? Even if it is him, who comes back from the dead after five years and jumps into OTT sex? Psychos, that’s who.

Jumps in, grabs me as if this is five years ago.

Don’t panic. Breathe. Yes, I am still breathing, and that’s a plus. The not panicking is a whole other thing. I’ve always thought I was smart but maybe I’m the dumbest bitch ever. I’m turned on and stupid.

“I don’t remember”—I take a rasping breath—“who you are. I mean your name?”

“My name doesn’t matter.” Then he lets me turn, and I see his face for the first time, tonight.

Dark hair, cropped short. Scars writhe and spill over two thirds of his face. Distorted skin skews one eyebrow aloft, makes his mouth pucker on the left. His cheeks are battlefields, his nose is unaffected, and his eyes are perfectly normal. They’re a fathomless black, but normal otherwise.

“The fire did this. Maybe this is from your fire. Maybe your friends brought this on me? Maybe I should blame you?”

I’m shaking my head, wondering why he’s saying this. It’s not true. “No. No.”

“But what if it is. Have I come to seek revenge? You wanted terrible things done to you, that night. Bad things. You wanted me to hurt you. Well then, this is why.”

I frown. He’s making up something, a story, I guess. A way to scare me. I see that now. He has to be even crazier than I am.

He puts his hands to the wall to either side of my head, leans in. He kisses my forehead, my jawbone, the side of my mouth, casually, then raises himself and shows me my pocketknife. It’s been opened.

My knife at eye level revolves in the dull light, the blade gleaming, slick and sharp.

“Not that sort of hurt.” I gulp. How did I manage to get myself here. I retrace my actions and come up bare. Yet…there is a thrill coursing through me, an awakening I’ve never felt before. I’m in an alley being talked to like he’s going to slice me open.

I’m sick. This story of his is his entry into my private dreams.

I lick my tongue across the seam of my mouth, stalling, searching for sanity. “I never said a knife. I never said do it to me after five fucking years pass, and I did not make the fire happen. My friends died too.” One did, to be exact. Not Dead Guy, never a friend. He was an arrangement, nothing more. Until now.

Tears threaten, lipping the edge of my eyelids. Grief sometimes hits me like this.

As if I said nothing, he continues in a monotone. “I might nail you to the wall with this through your pretty hands and fuck you while you squeal.”

Inexorably and in spite of my struggles, he brings my hands to the wall above my head, locking them there beneath his hand, in a chilling echo of his story.

I gape, shocked. “No. Don’t?—”

He kisses me, fully, on my open mouth. Then he uses the knife tip to mess with me, cutting threads on the dress, drawing the edge over my breast—light enough to not pierce, firm enough that I felt it run across my nipple. He halts it there, pushes, circles, toys with that precious part of me.

I hiss in alarm, wide-eyed. “You…you can’t.”