Page 17 of Bird on a Blade

I look up at him through the tangled net of my hair.

He stares down at me, his eyes dark and hungry. But also… faintly astonished, like he finds this whole scenario as unbelievable as I do.

“Now what?” The question comes out barely a whisper. If he really is Sawyer Caldwell, I have to remind myself, it’s very possible that I’m going to die.

But he doesn’t attack me. He doesn’t move for a knife.

Instead, he tugs on my jeans, pulling them down to my thighs.

“Get these things off,” he says. “I’ve been waiting fifteen years for a taste of your cunt.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

SAWYER

I’ve always liked making women come. It’s the next best thing to killing them, really, the way their breath gets fast and shuddery and their bodies go limp and they just lose sight of everything. Except you get to do it over and over again to the same woman.

When I was younger, Mama decided it was time for me to learn Hunter ways. She figured I’d want to kill the way she does, which is to stalk a man and cut his throat while they’re in bed together. So she brought me some girls to practice on. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill them. They didn’t do nothing to me but make me feel good, showing me all the fun you can have with a living human body. I wanted to kill people who deserved it.

So Mama stopped bringing me girls, but I sought them out myself. That was how I learned about making them come. A couple of them taught me everything I needed to know, and I got addicted to it, feeling their pussy muscles clenching around my cock, their clits throbbing against my tongue.

That’s what’s happening now. My perfect prey is coming for me, grinding her pussy up against my face, and it’s exactly like I imagined all those times when I was in the dirt.

When I brought her the head, that little token of my affection, I never thought it would actually lead to this. Ihopedit would. But hope usually doesn’t mean much.

Usually.

“Oh my god,” she pants, the syllables matching the movement of her thrusts. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

I keep licking her until she stills, her thick gorgeous thighs trembling on either side of my head. Only then do I let myself look up at her. I replace my mouth with my fingers, keeping my touch gentle.

“I’m done,” she gasps, hands flailing. She’s sprawled back on the couch, her shirt hiked up to just beneath her tits. “You can stop.”

“No,” I say, dotting some kisses against the dark thatch of her pubic hair, breathing in the scent of her arousal. A little musky, a little sweet. Reminds me of the woods around the camp. I didn’t think this would really happen, but now that I’m here, I’m not letting go.

“No?” It comes out a squeak, and she picks up her head to gape at me. “You can’t—It’s too much?—”

“No,” I say again, and then I move up over her stomach, nuzzling her soft flesh. I keep one hand on her pussy, stroking it softly. I expect her to fight back, the way she did when I dragged her into the cabin, but she doesn’t, just sputters out questions at me.

“Why?” she says. I like how she’s still trying to catch her breath. “Why are you… doing this?”

I stop my trail of kisses just beneath her shirt hem and look up at her. She looks a bit like how she did the night I killed her tormentors—eyes wide, hair a mess, cheeks flushed pink. All that’s missing is blood splattered across her full chest, a thought that makes my cock throb.

“I told you.” I push up her shirt until I spot her bra. To my delight, it’s lacy and transparent and I can see the dark moons ofher areolas through the fabric. “I’ve been waiting fifteen years for it.”

I pull away from her pussy so I can pull her up to sitting and reach around to get rid of this bra. She moves with me, loose and pliable, even though she keeps arguing.

“I still don’t understand how it’s you.” Her eyes glimmer. “Or why me. Why you didn’t—” She swallows and I know she was going to say,kill me. I’m glad she doesn’t ask so I don’t have to try and explain. Mostly because I don’t know how to put it into words. I just want to focus on her right now.

I snap the hooks of her bra and throw it away. Her tits are fucking gorgeous. Big and soft and trembling, and I think about the first time I saw her. She was running, jogging down one of the narrow trails in the woods. One of the pieces of shit I killed two months later had been yelling at her to go faster, but I managed to tune him out by focusing on the way her tits bounced inside her shirt. It wasn’t the only thing that drew me to her, but goddamn it if it wasn’t one of them.

“Are you really Sawyer Caldwell?” she asks for what feels like the hundredth time.

I look up at her. She gazes back at me, eyes big and searching, like she still doesn’t believe it. In a way, it’s fair; I had my mask on that night. She never saw my face. And there aren’t any pictures of me to be printed in the newspapers and the like—Mama insisted.

I stroke her cheek with the back of my hand. She jolts a little, like a frightened rabbit, but doesn’t pull away. “There were only two of us in that dining hall,” I tell her. “I told you what I remembered. What happened between us.”

She’s shaking, and I know she knows it’s me, deep down. We shared something that night, and I knew about it. A good girl like her, someone who’s not a killer, she wouldn’t have told anyone. Can’t argue with any of it.

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