Bait: A dark erotic thriller (Hunter & Prey Book 2) (31 page)

He barked a harsh laugh at my defiance.

“Oh, it will, because you won’t be alive to testify. There was a struggle. I surprised you, just as you wielded the killing stroke. I had to defend myself when you attacked me.” He made a face. “It was such a good plan. Of course you had to foil it. Fucking cunt. I knew I should have installed a jammer first to make sure that she couldn’t dial you on the phone. So sloppy. See what you’re doing to me? You are driving me fucking insane!”

His words should probably have made me more afraid, but they didn’t. If not for that fucking gun pointed straight at me, I would have rushed him that very second, trying to go for the knife.
 

“You’re a fucking amateur. You’ll never get away with this,” I taunted. Maybe if I just got him mad enough that he slipped up—

My plan seemed to be working immediately, because the way he stared at me, so full of contempt and derision, didn’t make him look very much in control anymore.

“Shut the fuck up!” he shouted. “I have lost so much, just because of you! You don’t even know it. Because you don’t give a shit about anyone or anything except yourself. And him, of course. He’s your world, isn’t it? He can lock you up and rape you, he can mutilate you, and still you’re all but falling over yourself to spread your legs for him. Me, you ignore. You fucking whore.”

His words made me want to scream, but I realized that if I wanted to get the better of him, I’d have to keep my calm. I could do this, I knew that. I’d gotten out of that basement. This was a piece of cake compared to that.

“I’m weak,” I replied, trying to aim for sympathy now. He’d always been so sympathetic. Maybe that was the way to get through to him. “I hate myself for it, but that’s my worst flaw. I’m weak. And yes, I’m a whore. And not just because I’ve sold my body for years. You know me better than anyone else. I’m sorry, Adam. I’m so, so sorry.”

The words burned like acid on my tongue, but it wasn’t by far the worst lie I’d told in my life.

He cocked his head to the side, studying me, and for a second hope flared up inside of me. Then he spat, hitting me on the right cheek, just below my eye.

“You think you can talk yourself out of this? You passed up that chance. That’s why I wanted to meet with you yesterday. To give you a chance to prove to me that I was wrong. That you weren’t a lost cause, but just misled. That I didn’t give up everything for you, only to have you trample all over my hopes and dreams!”

There was so much about him that I didn’t know, that was glaringly obvious.

“What did you give up for me, Adam? Please, tell me. Maybe we can find a way to restore—“

“Shut your fucking whore trap!” he yelled, the gun wavering so heavily that I was afraid he’d shoot me by accident. “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“Then tell me!” I pleaded. “If nothing else, tell me so you’ve made me understand before you kill me.”

The gun jerked again at “kill,” but somehow my plea calmed him.

“You really want to know? You never did.”

“That’s because I didn’t know who you were, not really,” I said, trying to lull him into further complacency. Was the line to the emergency call operator still live? Maybe, maybe not, but as long as there was a chance, I had to take it. Did she listen in on all of this? At the very least they’d have the recording for evidence. If I could stall him long enough, they’d sent a SWAT team to take him out. Maybe.

Maybe was a hell of a lot better than no hope at all.

Adam considered, making me afraid that my thinking about the phone had somehow given something away, but finally, he indulged me.

“I had a family, you know? A wife, and a daughter. I had a career. Not what I’d dreamed of, but it was a good job. Paid well. Low risk, because I did all of it from the security of a locked room. At the end of the day, I would go home, hug my wife, kiss my girl goodnight—the perfect dream.” He paused there, swallowing heavily, and for a second only I was afraid that the next thing he’d tell me was that, somehow, Darren had gotten to them and killed them. I almost sighed in relief when Adam went on without mentioning him.

“They approached me about this case that they were building. Very important, high profile. They needed an expert, on site. Someone who could both sift through endless amounts of data and get through high-class security systems. The paycheck was enough to cover the mortgage for the house and then some. But it was the challenge, really, that convinced me.” He swallowed, the barrel of the gun sinking just a little lower as he had to relax, the tension in his arm becoming too much. “Cindy wasn’t happy about the time I’d spend away from them, but it was planned as a three-month operation. The groundwork was all laid out. I thought, maybe I could even do it in two. Sounded easy enough.” Another pause, this one ending with a laugh. “I was so fucking stupid. So naive.”

That, I had come to realize, we had in common.

“What happened?” I asked when he didn’t go on.

His eyes hardened, boring into mine. “Your fucking monster happened! Three girls were already dead, and it was my job to keep him from coming after the forth. But I failed. Not my fault. We had a mole on the team. He knew exactly what to look out for. We blew our timeframe, because with no body, we couldn’t even call it a loss. There was talk of an extension. The team leader was asked to go, so Eva stepped in. She had this great idea of how our chances would be so much better with superior data. I’d need to work undercover for that, embedded in the system. We thought out my disguise. Only took two weeks to establish it, and the first whores came knocking, asking me to do the very thing I was already here to do—keep tabs on their clients. Do background checks. Nail down that fucker who decimated their rows, one little disillusioned prostitute at a time. And that’s how I met you. And you, Penelope. You ruined me.”

So much for hoping that there was something to this that I could use against him.

“What did I do?” I asked. I didn't have to feign cluelessness; that was all real.

He laughed, shaking his head. “Of course you don’t get it. You were there. You were available. And you made it so fucking easy to fall for you.”

Ah.

“You had a wife. A child,” I pointed out.

That was a mistake. The gun barrel snapped up again, Adam’s eyes narrowing with anger.

“Yes. Had. She divorced me. Got full custody, because legally, I didn’t exist anymore. The deep cover, you understand? I didn’t even get a chance to talk to her. I had to use my own resources to track her, and that almost got me thrown in jail. See, if you stalk your ex-wife, it’s a crime. If you stalk hundreds of whores, it’s your civic duty.”

I could understand his anger—but not how all that was my fault.

“Why did you never tell me anything about that?” I asked. He frowned, and I quickly backtracked. “I get it, you couldn’t blow your cover. But you could have hinted at something. Or you could have told me that you felt like I was more than just a friend to you. I didn’t know, Adam. I really didn’t know.”

Another lie, and one I’d told him before. I had known—I just hadn’t wanted to deal with the obvious complications. And complicated it would have gotten, because he’d never been anything but my neighbor, friend, and occasional fuckbuddy.

“How could you not know?” he accused. “It was your fucking job to know! Isn’t that what you always were so fucking proud of? That you instinctively knew what your clients wanted? To turn yourself into the perfect woman for them? Why were you never my perfect woman?”

Toward the end, his voice grew louder and harder, making me swallow with a new kind of fear whispering through my mind. Shit. This was not just him projecting his frustration on me. This went much deeper. And, stupid as I’d been, I’d told him way too much about how things between Darren and me had been—and how that had come to a temporary stop.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, but I wasn’t even sure that he heard me.
 

“You should be,” he ground out. “You ruined everything. My life. My job. And now I have to watch and stand by while you two slink off into the sunset? This is too much. If I can’t catch you red-handed, I figured I’d have to help a little. And whether you wanted to or not, you picked out my perfect target.”

I so wanted to look over to where Brigitte’s body lay, but forced myself to keep my attention on Adam.

“How did I do that?”

“I followed you,” he said. “And I listened to you tell her everything. Sure, she thinks she keeps her apartment free of bugs, but she forgot the old-fashioned way. There’s a fire escape right outside that window over there. Doesn’t even require skill to access it, and anyone can press their ear against the glass. And, as usual, you never even realized that I was there.”

He gestured toward the floor-to-ceiling window front over at the other side of the room, behind his back—and when I looked over, it was just in time to see a flicker of movement out there. Of course it could have been a figment of my imagination—and wishful thinking was entirely in the realm of possibility right now—but I was sure that I had seen someone.

Probably for the first time in my entire life, I was glad that Darren was enough of a control freak to keep tracking me, even when he said that he wasn’t. Resolving that issue was something that could easily be done in the future—when I had made it out of here, alive.

“I’m so sick and tired of this shit,” Adam grumbled, making me look back to him. “Not even when it’s just the two of us, I’m invisible to you. What does it take for you to see me? Do I have to keep you tied up in a basement, too? Because, trust me, that can be arranged. Everything that fucking monster did to you I can easily do to you as well.”

It took him saying that for me to understand that, even after so much time together, he’d never bothered to really understand me—a mutual oversight, it seemed. Sure, being forced to smash my own hand had been hell—but it had been the psychological horror that I’d lived through that had broken me, not the physical abuse. In the end, Darren had done nothing more than restrain me and refrain from feeding me. Yes, the tattoo counted, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t even the sight of the dolls, or knowing that I was next in line to join them. It was the knowledge that, knowing all that, feeling it and having it stare me in the face, I still loved him. That I just couldn’t make myself stop needing him. Wanting him.
 

That was one thing that no one else could do to me.

I chose to hold my tongue, because if I’d said something, it would likely have led to him shooting me right in the face. Instead I continued to look at him, waiting for him to either do something or continue his tirade.

Or, lacking that, for the elevator to give a loud “ding” that made us both jump, followed by the incredibly welcome sight of Agent Smith stepping out of it, her gun already drawn—pointed at Adam. Gosh, but it would have been just my luck if she’d been in on it, too.

“Drop the weapons, Adam,” she said, her voice deceptively calm.
 

Adam gave her a sidelong glance, but the gun didn’t waver, and neither did the knife. That he hadn’t just shot me in surprise was sheer luck, I figured—and likely something she could have lived with easily. Fucking agents.

“Eva. Always the diligent goodie-two-shoes,” he snarled.

“That’s my job,” she replied, her tone even. “As it’s yours. Don’t throw away your career for that tramp. Drop your weapons, and we can have this resolved within the hour. Trust me, Adam. I’m on your side.”

She was lying, of course. I could easily tell that. So could Adam, it seemed, because the next moment he was moving, stepping closer and partly around me so that I became his meat shield. I really wasn’t comfortable with that, because I didn’t trust her not to shoot right through me.

“Get up,” Adam barked, now pressing the gun against my temple. “Get the fuck up!”

The next moment, a dark blur slammed into him from the side—that side where he’d made himself vulnerable by changing position. A kick landed in my ribs, sending me sprawling on the floor, but I was already pushing myself away. Turning, I watched as Darren was grappling with Adam for the gun. Agent Smith shouted something, but no one was listening to her. For a second, it looked as if Darren would manage to wrest the gun out of his opponent’s grasp, but Adam stabbed him with the knife two times, making Darren’s struggle falter as he grunted in pain. Adam finally managed to pull the gun arm free, then tried to backhand Darren with it, but missed. Darren used that momentum against him and went for the knife—

A shot rang out, deafeningly loud. Darren jerked, blood dripping from his mouth as he coughed. I screamed, panic gripping me hard. A triumphant smile spread on Adam’s face as he sneered. But then his eyes went wide and strength seemed to leave his body. He staggered, only Darren’s grip on him keeping him upright. At that slight turn, I could see why—Darren had managed to obtain control of the knife, and had rammed it into Adam’s stomach. In true Darren fashion, that wasn’t enough for him, though, and he wrenched it upward until it got stuck somewhere along Adam’s rips. He snarled into the other man’s face while doing so, bloody spittle spraying everywhere.

“See? You’re even too incompetent to kill me.”

He shoved Adam away from him, watching as the body landed a few feet away from Brigitte’s. Taking a staggering step, he turned toward me, a beginning smile on his face—but then his strength left him and he sagged down, making me scramble toward him as soon as my muscles would move. He was wearing a dark sweater so I couldn’t see the blood from the knife and gun shot wounds in his lower abdomen, but as soon as I touched him, I realized that the material was already soaked through.
 

“Darren? Darren, look at me! You have to keep looking at me,” I shouted, half-pulling him into my lap. He tried to protest, but his hand was way to easily batted away. “Just hold still. Help’s on the way.” That wasn’t even a lie, I realized, as only just now my brain was making sense of the wailing sirens I could hear in the street below.

Agent Smith knelt down on his other side, trying to push me away. I resisted, but she ignored me, using her folded jacket to press it over the wound. “Here, help me. Hold that,” she barked at me, the sharp yet authoritative tone making me follow along before I had even time to think whether I wanted to or not. “Keep the wound as compressed as possible,” she went on. “The EMTs will be up in a minute.” She paused as she met my gaze, the look on her features utterly unreadable. “It’s only one shot, and the stab wounds can’t have gone deep. He has a good chance that he’ll make it.” That clearly was better news to me than her, but right now was not the time to dwell on it.