Page 9 of Sexy Killer

Her red silk strands slip through my fingers easily as I tease and play with a lock of her hair. "You can't make me do anything I don't want to do, Chelsea. Just like I can't force you to do anything."

"You mean like being a firearms and safety instructor?"

A chuckle escapes my throat. "Can you think of a better way to hide what you actually do for a living?"

"Some safety instructor I turned out to be. I managed to get myself knocked out."

He chuckles. "That only happened because your father was unconscious. You still have sentimental ties to this place."

Chelsea hates it whenever I point out her flaws and her emotions. She expertly throws a leg over my lap and hoists herself up to straddle me. The faint scraping of a metal blade being taken out of its hiding place under the mattress brings a smile to my face as she holds one of her favorite knives to my throat.

"You just love rubbing that shit in, don't you? Every time I fucking see you, it's a pissing contest between who's the most distraught orphan. The girl with no mother and a father who can't stand her? Or the boy with no mother and a father who betrayed him?"

The sound of the man's name and the truth of his actions have always been hard for me to digest. "He helped us. We would have been buried in some prison hell hole after the number of people we killed."

"Help," she chortles and turns away from me. She pushes herself off me and off the bed to get dressed. "He made us choose between two impossible choices, both meant to keep us caged and docile. People like us shouldn't be shackled to anyone, anything, or any fucking entity. We didn't do everything that we did for the fuck of it. We weren't crazy or psychotic. Everyone played a part in destroying the world as we knew it, and everyone paid for their roles with their lives."

"And now?" I ask, tired and unwilling to fight because I know what's going to happen. I'm going to do what I've always donewhen it comes to Chelsea Emerson. My sweet and lethal Chelsea. I'll help her bury the bodies and keep local police off her back.

"We kill the asshole working with Kush and find out who pulled their fucking strings."

That gets a laugh out of me. "Don't you think we should do that the other way around?"

She smirks. "Asshole."

"You've only let me do that once and said never again."

"Fuck you," she says with a smile.

"Oh, don't make it easy for me, Chelsea."

She moves around back in front of me and grabs my crotch. "I always love making it hard."

My hand reaches around the back of her head, pulling her in for a passionate kiss. My tongue slides around her mouth before I yank her back.

My voice is low when I tell her, "You make everything in my life hard. The hardest is having to let you go every time you leave. Stay this time, Chelsea. Don't leave. Don't use some made-up bi-annual fucking tradition of having dinner with your father as a reason to come back to this shit town. Stay with me."

"I'll stay, Victor. Not with you, but for you, for us. You know what we have to do."

7

CHELSEA

Victor follows me outside into the early afternoon.

"You can't wear your badge while we do this," I tell him.

"Are you really about to tell me how to do what we do?" He tips his head to the side.

"I figured with all that fucking we did for you to remind me?—"

"No. I handcuffed you to the bed in the hospital as a reminder that I'm with you and like it when you stay in place. Everything we just did was a reminder to myself of why I put my job on the line whenever you come into town."

"Fuck your job. Let's go, Detective Bennett."

As soon as I turn to walk away, he grabs me by the arm and stops me in my tracks. The assertive tone he uses is a warning. "You leave that title with my badge. Where are we going first?"

"How's my father?"

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