Page 62 of Killer Kiss

“I’ll be finishing my job bag this week, Ophelia. Maybe even tonight. I expect yours to be done in the same time frame. Next week, we start our lives together. I don’t need a marriage certificate to own you. I already fucking do.”

He paused in the doorway to turn around and glare at me. “And so help me fucking God, if I hear again that you’re slutting around with another man, I’ll kill both of you.”

I jumped when the door slammed behind him.

Seconds later, tremors racked my body, sending a chill through my limbs that I couldn’t shake.

Sweat broke out across my skin, and a whimper escaped my lips. I pushed to my feet and ran to the door leading out onto a tiny balcony, but no amount of sucking in deep, cold breaths of night air could calm the terror inside me.

I couldn’t go inside. The walls felt like they were closing in, the air too thick and sticky. It just reminded me of his weight on top of me, pinning me in place, refusing to let me move.

I hated to be stuck in small spaces.

It reminded me too much of being put in a cupboard as a child when I’d cried because I didn’t want to help my mother clean up after one of her kills. Or the trunk she’d shoved me into once when I’d been so paralyzed with fear over a man’s screams as she’d tortured him. Vincent had been in there with me, the two of us clutching at each other in the darkness while my mother shouted obscenities about how useless we were if we couldn’t even clean up a job site for her.

I stared down at the road beneath my apartment, trying to calculate the distance and how badly I’d break my legs if I jumped.

The pain seemed preferable to spending the rest of the night in that apartment now that Riddick had been in there.

I forced myself inside long enough only to grab my purse and my keys. The front door closed behind me with a thud that sent a fresh wave of panic through my system, and I took the stairs two at a time in an effort to get away.

Riddick had brought a darkness to my door that crept down the stairs after me, chasing me out into the night. I paused at my car but then turned away, picking up pace until I was running into the night.

He would have bugged my car. Put a tracker on it somewhere. I was sure of it.

I ran and ran, until my lungs heaved, but that was still preferable to suffocating beneath Riddick’s weight. I ran until the houses around me became smaller and unkept, and eventually, I realized exactly where I was running to.

Or maybe it wasn’t a where, but a who.

Augie’s street was quiet apart from the group of people outside his neighbor’s house, a bright-red Jeep in the driveway. An older woman, three men in their twenties, and a woman with a little girl on her hip watched me run past.

It was only when I was banging on Augie’s door hysterically that I realized they were Augie’s brother and his family.

All of them staring at me like I was some sort of freak show.

Which I was. Barefoot. Running through Saint View in the middle of the night. Eyes probably possum-sized with panic.

I banged on his door again to avoid their stares.

They probably thought I was some sort of junkie, off her ass on a heroin bender. I bit down hard on my lip as Augie opened the door.

He stared at me. “Ophelia? What on earth?”

I didn’t mean for it to happen, and I knew that in the morning I’d be mortified, but a sob burst out my throat.

In an instant, Augie’s arms came around me, holding me tight to guide me into the house. There were murmurs from his family across the other side of the broken chain-link fence, but he cradled my head, protecting me from their stares and whispers.

“I’m sorry,” I babbled while he closed the door behind us. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know where else to go.”

He guided me to the couch, but I couldn’t let him go. I clutched his soft gray T-shirt, burying my face in the fabric and inhaling the scent of him. He smelled like warmth and safety and just everything good.

He stopped trying to get me to sit down and just held me instead, his palm running up and down my back slowly and calmly, while he pressed his lips to my hair and murmured comforting words in a deep, gentle tone I’d never heard him use.

“Stop saying you’re sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

But I did. I was sorry for Fawn. That she’d been taken by a man just like the one I’d run from. I was sorry for Vincent and Scythe because I hadn’t been here to protect them when they’d needed me.

And I was sorry I’d brought all of this to Augie’s doorstep.

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