Page 9 of Twisted

She pulled into the garage, shutting the door as her wide blue eyes watched it descend. No flash of red and blue. No unmarked van across the street watching her every action, ensuring she wasn’t exhibiting any odd behavior just weeks after her beloved husband’s murder. As soon as the door hit the concrete and the wheels quit creaking, she slumped back with a sigh of relief.

Inside she went, through the dark hall and kitchen and up the wooden steps to her room. Peeling her boots off, she tossed them aside and fell back on her bed with another huff, hands clasped over her stomach. She stared at the dark ceiling, imagining shapes and patterns in the swirling paint above her. A lone window allowed some scant, pale moonlight, but she made no move to turn on her lamp or even any lights. She wanted to feel nothing, see nothing; if she could continue on being numb, she could make it, could shove aside the brutality she had found herself shockingly capable of.

Even if he had deserved it, nothing would have prepared her for the horrors ofafterthe gunshot. At the moment, she’d been so filled with rage and power that she’d reveled in his death, had smiled at his corpse. But now that her psyche had had time to settle, the reality of it all crumbled around her. She was still sweet at her core—good hearted and pure and with love she so badly wanted to be able to give. But she would never allow herself to become ensnared again by the snakes that were men and the women who had just as equally forked tongues.

She dozed, legs dangling over the edge of her bed, eyes slipping closed in peace and contentment despite the trauma playing over and over in her mind and in her heart. She could push it away if she tried hard enough, could bury it deep, deep down as she had with all the other abuse flung at her.

The hardest part, though, was wondering what she had ever done to deserve being treated this way by those who claimed to love her, to be her friend. She knew there was nothing; she’d never even raised her voice at her husband, had always been meek and submissive despite the fire in her belly. She’d always been a good friend, going out of her way to ensure everyone else was taken care of before her. She’d never even so much as stolen a stick of gum at a gas station. She was good and innocent through and through. Everything that had been done to her hadn’t been warranted, had come in the form of pure evil.

The air in her room changed; the shift was almost unnoticeable to her tired, slack body as it wavered between sleep and wakefulness. It turned cool, a slight draft, and then a heaviness charged through with hot currents of vibrant electricity settled in, sending her hairs standing straight, her primal instincts kicking awake.

Her heart skidded to a stop, her fingers flexed and tensed. Her father’s revolver was in his office. If there was a threat, she needed to get there, get to it. She knew—as any true southern girl knew—how to use a gun with ease and proficiency. Even if no one was there, it would calm her to feel that kiss of cool metal in her trembling hands. She could take a life if it threatened hers. She was resolved, now, to stand up for herself first and worry about the effects later.

But when her eyes flicked open to her room that hadn’t been changed since she was a teen, her blood altogether congealed in her veins, solidifying into ice and freezing her in place on her bed. She was sprawled before the dark, hooded figure in her doorway, a tantalizing piece of bait. Had Carter’s henchmen figured out it was her?She’d been so fucking careful!She swallowed a thick wad of sticky saliva, about to sit up when his rough, southern voice growled to her, kickstarting her heart and pushing that stuck blood through her body as though a dam had broken.

“Been a while, my Maisie girl. But a promise is a promise.”

Slow, controlled, she sat up, eyes swishing around her room for anything to use as a weapon, his odd words meaningless, other than the fact that he somehow knew her and had made some unknown promise to her. He took one step closer, the air electrifying even more as his footstep ate up some of the distance between them. His heavy boot fell to the wood floor with a gentle thud, her breath leaving her lungs in a terrifiedwhooshas her fingers curled into her bedding, holding tight to it as though it would conceal her and protect her from the monsters as it had as a girl. Only now, the monsters in her life were real—flesh and blood and clearly wanting her dead.

The man continued forward, prowling like an ancient beast. Rough, tattooed hands settled hot as flames over her knobby knees, prying them apart. She blinked, tears gathering, her body frozen. Frozen the same way it had frozen whenhehad done this to her—Randy. She screamed to her limbs to move, to flex, to push and pull like she knew they could, but nothing happened.

He stepped into the space between her thighs and leaned forward. That simple motion made something snap within her, a rubber band breaking, and she reeled back at the same time a scream built in her throat.Not again, not again, never again,she chanted in her mind.

She released her scream, right into his shadowed face, and kicked and thrashed and twisted, trying in vain to get to her purse, to find the pocket knife buried in the depths of the mess of receipts and pens and mints. She somehow managed to roll onto her stomach and kick away, but he threw his body over hers, pinning her down with his muscled torso, his hand flicking out to knot into her hair and yank her back. She screamed again as he flipped her over, her fingers just clutching the strap of her purse, sending it flying across the room with the scattering and rolling of miscellaneous items, dashing her limited hopes.

They scrambled for control, but with his steel strength and unrelenting power, he pinned her to the bed with his hips to hers and a hand at her throat, squeezing just hard enough to cut her air supply in half and send her brain into a fuzzy frenzy. He growled, annoyed, angry, but she didn’t care as she clawed at his wrist and twisted, kicking as hard as she could. He clamped his thighs closed, stilling her crazy legs as best he seemed able.

Still unable to see even the cut of his jaw, Maisie felt her vision pulsing as she sucked in air through what felt like tiny straws, her chest heaving. In all her panic, his words hadn’t registered until now. A promise is a promise. He knew her? How? Who was he? And what unknown promise was he here to keep?

A shiver ran through her as she fought, more fruitlessly now that she was pinned so tightly to her old mattress. She heard it, then; the click of a knife being flipped open, the kiss of cold steel to her throat, just grazing her precious arteries. She stilled out of instinct, but her feeble hands held their grip to the wrist pinning her throat to the bed, her nails dug in with stubborn abandon.

She felt it, too; the hot flash and rigid length of him through his jeans grinding against her sex. A whimper echoed in her otherwise still and quiet room, his breathing ragged from the scuffle, hers wheezing through a clamped throat. She knew his intentions for her were ill, but the most confounding part was who; who had sent him? And what would she have to endure before he killed her, giving those bastards a justice they didn’t deserve? It had to be that, right? He knew she’d killed her husband and his business partner, even with how careful she’d been.

But he didn’t move. He didn’t speak. She lay there, sprawled before him with no chance of escape and frustrated tears slipping out of the depths of her ocean eyes.

After a short span of eternity, the room seemed to chill. She stared into his hood, depthless, black as night and about as void. But she felt it, the fury pulsating hot blooded through his own veins, felt the angry hammering of his heart. In a quick movement, he removed the knife, flicking it closed and stowing it in his front jean’s pocket. She silently thanked the universe for that small kindness; ever since her run-in with the jagged edge of a beer bottle, anything sharp made her queasy.

Her wide, wild eyes jumped down as he let up his hold on her throat the smallest bit, as he simultaneously reached up with the rough pad of his thumb and stroked the scar that ran from cheek to upper lip. It had been gruesome, seeing her skin split in such a jagged way, marring the one thing she could always count on; her beauty. She’d held the edges of skin together as hot, salty tears seared into her already burning wound, as she’d screamed—as her husband had done nothing other than grunt in annoyance at how much he would have to spend to patch her up.

This man—this predator in her childhood home—his touch wasn’t cruel. It was alight with fire and rage so potent it made her flinch when his skin met the numb, puckered line she now wore as a proud victor, a woman warrior who had the strength to right the wrongs done upon her. She threw a vicious sneer at him, twisting her face away, confused at his soft display.

His gentleness gone, he pinched her cheeks between thumb and forefinger and forced her to face him. She glared, for as frightened as she was, she’d endured all there was in life to endure as a woman—and she’d done it alone, silently, wearing the pain like barbed wire around her heart, crying alone in the back of her closet in the middle of the night because weakness, in her world, was only allowed to seep forth in those haunting hours. She wondered if he glared back, if the eyes hidden in the mask of darkness were as cold and dead as that black void felt, or if those eyes were as fiery and devastating as his touch.

But then he spoke, the sound like a rumble of distant thunder across the Blue Ridge Mountains, his southern drawl deep and smooth, like the honey in her whiskey.

“We’re gonna play a game, Maisie girl,” he said. A tremor ripped up her spine, and she twisted, using all her pinned strength to move barely an inch beneath his sturdy, steely muscles. He turned his head in that momentary struggle, a moonbeam catching his high cheekbone in its pale light for a moment. Only a moment, but it was all Maisie needed; he had a thin, straight nose, upturned the slightest bit at the end, framed by the sharpest cheekbones she’d ever seen on a man. His brows were dark, his eyes deep set and still cast in some shadow, but his lashes fanned out like verdant ferns, so thick they seemed caught up in one another.

For a man committing whatever atrocious crime he was about to commit, he was sexy as sin, and that alone made her fear skyrocket.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” she gritted out. He was quick in his reprimand, ruthless in a way she’d somehow not yet experienced. He let up his hold, only to flip her onto her stomach as she writhed and kicked like an angry cat caught in a burlap sack. Once more pinned, her nose crushed into the familiar soft comforter, her struggles ceased. The tinkling of metallic graced her ears, the hiss of a belt slipping through loops kicking her fight or flight into overdrive. She pushed against the lumpy mattress, screamed, cried—gave it her all—but he still managed to catch her wrists and bind them together behind her back with his warm, worn belt.

She twisted her head to the side, another weak, frightened sob echoing in her room as he yanked her hips, slipping her down until she was curled around her bed, standing with her feet planted and her ass in the air. He fisted her tendrils of dark hair in one hand, and before she could conjure up more possibilities of what he’d do to her, a loud crack rang throughout the space, a biting sting following shortly after across her right butt cheek. She jolted forward with a sob, toes scrabbling against the grainy wood floors, but he kept her planted. Even through her jeans, his strength was clear and concise.

“My baby doll, you’ve got yourself in a real mess. Don’t make this harder.” His low voice warned, lips at her ear as he pasted his rigid cock between her cheeks. Her feet flailed against the ground again, her breath puffing out of ruddy cheeks, tears slipping from swollen eyes.

“Alls I need is one thing.”

The room seemed to chill even more. Her heart screeched to a halt.He knew. She didn’t know how he knew, but she felt it in her bones that he did. The hard drive. The last thing she needed to find and burn before she would be ultimately free.Who was this man?

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