Page 5 of Broken Hearts

3

Celeste

Now that it was over,I was cold again. I shivered, goosebumps cropping up all over my skin. Alex took off his shirt and put it on me.

“Time for you to get out of here,” he said softly.

I quickly realized what he meant. I’d earned my ticket out of this underground shelter. Gained his trust. As much as I’d come to miss the familiarity of the cell when I wasn’t in it, my mind adjusted almost immediately, making me crave the outside world again.

Alex carried me out of the shelter and into the house before leading me to my room—the big, comfortable space he’d created just for me. I knew I’d made the right choice now. He wasn’t going to kill me. This room, this house, this life… it wasn’t a lie. Alex was keeping me alive, and as long as I helped him and followed the rules, I could have anything I wanted.

Except my freedom.

I shoved that thought aside, not wanting to think too deeply about that. Not in this moment. Eventually, I knew I would, but for now, I just wanted to enjoy some creature comforts and forget the world for a while. After sleeping in a dirty gray underground cell every night, I figured I deserved just a few selfish, spoiled moments to myself. At the very least, I deserved a hot shower. I was still speckled in Dan’s blood. It had dried on parts of my skin in encrusted little droplets, and I wanted to scrub myself till my skin was raw.

Alex seemed to read my mind. He led me right into the opulent bathroom and nodded at the shower. “Take a shower, then get dressed. We still have a lot to talk about.”

I bowed my head. “Yes, sir. We do.”

“I just have to dispose of Mr. Vallone’s body.” He frowned. “It’s a shame he felt the need to threaten you like that. If he kept his mouth shut, I could’ve kept him for longer.”

I shook my head. “No, sir, it would be pointless. He was loyal to the Circle. He told me he would never tell you anything.”

“They all say that at first. Until they don’t,” he said crisply. I suddenly pictured him violently torturing and ripping his previous victims apart, piece by little piece. The image was stark in my mind, but it was still so hard to reconcile it with the man standing before me. The man who said all he wanted was to protect me. “But, no matter,” he went on. “We’ll find out more without him, won’t we?”

With that, he curtly nodded and stepped out of the room. I followed his orders (and my own needs) and stepped into the shower, turning the water onto full blast.

As the hot water streamed over me, dirt and blood and cum dripped down my legs, swirling together in a macabre pattern on the light marble-tiled shower floor before slipping down the drain. I shuddered, tearing my eyes away from the sight.

The shame was inching back in now, making my skin crawl. I’d just been fucked by a confirmed killer, a man who cut another’s throat right in front of me with zero remorse. I had that man’s seed dripping out of me right now. And I fucking loved it.

What the hell did that say about me?

When I was scrubbed raw, I turned the shower off, dried myself, and headed into the enormous walk-in closet. After choosing a black and white lace bra and panty set, a mocha-colored cable knit sweater, and black jeans, I dressed and stepped deeper into the closet, checking out the mirrored white vanity which sat at the end. The drawers were filled with makeup, perfume, nail varnish and all sorts of moisturizing creams and potions.

Robotically, I sat and began to play around with the makeup, dusting brown eyeshadow onto my eyelids and experimenting with a shimmery highlighter that made my dull skin glow with a golden hue. It felt so silly, so self-centered, to be applying cosmetics while a serial killer cleaned up the mess of a bloody corpse only yards away on the property, but I needed this right now. I needed something from the outside world to make me feel like a real person, anything, and this makeup session was doing the trick.

I almost felt like I was back in the real world for a moment, just a spoiled little girl playing with her expensive, pretty toys. But then I remembered that in the actual real world, I was a poor struggling college student who could never afford any of this stuff. The Chanel foundation alone probably cost a week’s worth of my rent, and the little bottles of Le Labo perfume were likely worth two or three times that.

So this place was still an escape from reality. Funny in a twisted way, because I’d spent so long trying to get away from here only to decide it was an escape in itself.

Alex finally returned to my room three hours later. By then, I was curled up on the bed reading one of the many books that lined the shelves in this enormous place. When he opened the door and stepped in, it occurred to me that I hadn’t even checked to see if I was locked in this room while he was out. I’d just stayed in here and accepted it.

“You have questions for me,” Alex said. It wasn’t a question in itself. It was a statement.

I nodded and closed my book. “Yes, sir.”

“I’ll answer what I can for now, and you have permission to speak freely. But I do have to go out soon, so we don’t have very long.”

“Where are you going?”

“Work. I have a private consult in the city.”

“Oh.” It was strange to imagine Alex heading off to work like any other regular person, helping out his fellow human beings at the hospital, while in his downtime he was off maiming and murdering the scum of society. “What exactly do you do?”

“I originally specialized in general surgery, then later specialized in neurosurgery and pain medicine. So I do consults at the hospital and occasionally some other clinics, and the occasional surgery as well. But seeing as it’s mostly consults, I actually have a decent amount of spare time now.”

“So it’s not like Grey’s Anatomy where you’re running around a hospital eighty hours a week.”

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