Page 24 of Captive Souls

Although I was tempted. Sleep seemed like an impossible bodily function for him. Sleep left you too vulnerable.

There was nothing vulnerable about this man. Nothing soft, human. Nothing to cut into.

Not that I would. I’d eyed the unused steak knife he’d put in front of me at the table for about 2.5 seconds. Stabbing someone with a steak knife would do little. Unless by miracle you hit an artery or were willing to continuously stab. And that’s on someone who wasn’t fighting back.

Knox wouldn’t need to fight back. He was watching me so carefully, I’d have the knife out of my hand before it was even halfway through the air.

And even if by some miracle I did kill or incapacitate him… Then what? There was nowhere to run to.

I doubted that Knox did anything without a lot of thought. The meat. The sharp axe. All of it was a taunt. That he could give me a weapon on a silver platter, yet I was unable to use it. Even if I had the stomach for it, I couldn’t fight him, kill him.

On that thought, I shoved on my running shoes—purposely not looking in the direction of the sofa in case he was awake and watching me—then crept out the door.

I couldn’t kill him.

But I could run.

I felt him in the woods around me before I saw him. A slash of black against the crisp-green foliage and trees. A yawning black hole of death amidst the glorious life of the mountains.

He wasn’t wearing a suit. He’d abandoned that like a snake shedding its skin.

But he was still clad in black. A form-fitting sweatshirt, even though the morning was unseasonably warm. I’d shed my layers immediately, the long-sleeved tee I’d donned tied in a tight knot around my waist leaving me in only a sports bra.

His long pants were expensive, practical and spotless. Same with the black boots. He wore them well, even if I had the inkling this was the first time he’d worn gear like it.

The inky curtain of his hair was messier today, as if he’d been running his hands through it, falling across his face and highlighting his flawless, ivory skin. His eyes were dark and predatory as I came to a stop, raking over every inch of me.

I’d previously been sweating, flushed from the exertion of running on uneven terrain without the appropriate amount of fuel in my body.

My throat closed up with his attention on my bare skin. A flashback to when we first met. Was it really only yesterday when I’d been running through Central Park?

Like I had then, I resisted the urge to cover myself up, to protect my exposed skin from his gaze.

I didn’t know how he got there, how he tracked me, in the woods, at least a mile from the cabin. Not the city boy that he was. Maybe he was supernatural. Maybe he tracked me by scent. Smelling my blood. My fear.

I believed in all of that. In things that couldn’t be explained by science. I believed intuition was a form of divination, that souls called to one another, that auras communicated the true nature of people.

Knox was challenging those beliefs. His aura was dark, thorny, dangerous. Yet his soul called to mine in a way I couldn’t explain.

He wasn’t leaning anywhere, just standing in the middle of what couldn’t really be called a trail, more like a break in the woods.

I’d followed my instincts through the woods, running where the ground was most forgiving, lapsing into memories of my childhood, tearing through the trees and over ground carpeted with pine needles like the ones outside my grandmother’s house. Though her old property had been sold, abandoned, hundreds of miles away, I yearned for it. To be running back to a cozy house with freshly-made biscuits cooling on the counter, scrambled eggs from the chickens she kept. Thick cuts of juicy bacon from her neighbor who kept pigs. That’s what turned me into a vegetarian. I’d petted those pigs, named them.

My grandmother, an Appalachian woman through and through, was soft in many ways but hard when it came to life and death and sustenance. She cared for animals, loved her cat Frank and her hound Lewis, but she’d never hesitated to kill when she needed to.

My grandmother didn’t agree or understand my vegetarianism but had accepted it. Just as she had accepted everything from those she loved. Even when accepting that my mother loved my father and would be leaving the mountains for the city lost her her daughter.

“What are you doing?”

Knox’s flat voice jerked me out of my stupor. I was standing in the middle of the woods, half-dressed, panting and sweaty, staring at a killer.

“Running.” My voice was a little breathless but not weak. Weakness had no place in these woods, in front of this man.

Knox didn’t respond, he just stared.

“Not running fromyou,” I stipulated, unable to weather the stare. “I’m running. Like I do every day. I was planning on coming back.”

Again, Knox didn’t speak as the woods gently hummed between us.

---