Page 41 of Killer Kiss

“I said, what are you doing in my house, Ophelia?”

I was breathing too fast. My tits rose and fell while I sucked in breaths, trying to get enough oxygen, which felt impossible when I could feel every inch of his body tight on mine.

And I meant every inch.

Every sizable inch, pressed in places that were suddenly very interested in him.

Jesus Christ. I needed to make something up. Some plausible excuse as to why I was here, but my brain was barely functioning amongst the hazy swirl of lust it was floating in. “I came to look for Fawn.”

Augie recoiled, like I was a snake who’d just bitten him. “What the fuck? You came looking for her? Like I might be the sick fuck who’s had her tied up in his basement all this time?”

I went to shake my head. It hadn’t been what I meant. I’d meant to say I’d come looking for information on Fawn, but my damn hormones had my coherent thoughts held hostage, and it obviously hadn’t come out that way.

But now that he’d mentioned it, I probably should be thinking of him as a suspect. All I had was his and Eve’s word that Eddie was the one who’d taken Fawn. Yet nobody else I’d talked to had seen Eddie in months, if not years. He’d dropped off the face of the earth according to people he and Fawn had once hung out with.

Maybe Eddie was just a convenient excuse to cover up whatever Augie had done to her.

“Maybe I do,” I said slowly. “You were one of the last people seen with her.”

He released my wrist and took a sharp step back, any hint of emotion evaporating from his eyes and leaving only the bitter nothingness I’d come to expect from him.

Some deeply buried part of me was painfully disappointed to watch him shut down again.

“Get out.”

He wasn’t even going to argue with me.

I didn’t move. “She’s my sister—” I tried to explain.

“Get. The fuck. Out.”

The frost rolling off him was so thick I could practically taste it. I didn’t know how quickly someone could change. My body was still warm from where his had surrounded me.

And yet he was ice-cold.

With the tiniest of movements, I attached the bug to the side of Augie’s dresser and then walked out.

I was halfway down the street before I could breathe again.

12

AUGIE

Iwas still seething when I got to the club, Ophelia’s accusations ringing in my ears. I grunted a hello at Terry, who was probably used to my bad moods by this point and didn’t seem too bothered by my sharp tone.

Lyric and Eve were sitting on the edge of the stage, their feet swinging, the two of them about as depressed as if they’d just been the ones accused of kidnapping and abusing Fawn.

I stopped short and stared at them. “Who pissed in your porridge?”

Lyric, in typical Lyric fashion, stuck her middle finger up at me. I flipped her one right back, because that was how she and I rolled.

Eve actually answered me though. “No one showed up for our dance class.”

I winced at that. She and Lyric had spent days choreographing a new routine to teach during their first class. “Seriously? Not one person?”

“Not unless you count Terry.”

I grimaced at the idea of Terry trying to swing his thick, unfit, middle-aged, too-many-donuts type of body around a stripper pole. It wasn’t pretty.

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