Page 48 of Escape From Me

Would I stay? He told me I couldn’t leave, but in the end I don’t think that’s what he meant. He’d kill all the competition, which probably should have sounded horrible. Instead it sounded like the best confession of love of all time. I should have been scared. So why, in the end, was it that all I could see was a man that stuck around? He waited for me. He helped me move past my own demons in a really strange sort of therapeutic way.

I started a slow nod against that big hand that kept me front and center for him.

“Yeah. I guess I would. I would stay just to see my life with you. So I guess it doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t let me go. I wouldn’t run.” I paused and then a small spark in me, one that had only seemed to have found a life with this man, burned bright. “I wouldn’t run far anyway.”

I reached up a finger and booped the tip of his nose.

The whole room was quiet except for the sound of scratching. The smell of bleach burned my nose.

“Did she just boop his nose? Fuck, when was the last time he even let me shake his damn hand?” I wasn’t sure which ofhis brothers was whispering, but Zeid was right. You could hear everything down here.

“Shut the fuck up, X. I let you touch my shoulder plenty.” And then Zeid turned his attention back to me. “Did you really boop my nose?”

Maybe it was the high of the kill, the realization of just how crazy this all was, or, fucking hell, maybe I had just lost it, but I got the giggles until I didn’t.

His face got real close and I nearly went cross eyed.

“Yes, dove. That was a proposal. But, I don’t have a ring. Not yet.”

There was no air in this room.

The entire place was bright white and I swore it swayed.

“Breathe, little dove. Just breathe.”

His voice was my homing beacon. No panic seemed to want to linger around him. Quickly enough the world came back into focus and my lungs remembered how to breathe.

“Then I say yes. Yes, I’ll marry you, Zeiden. I don’t even know your last name.”

His hold on me relaxed.

“Rossa. It’s Zeiden Rossa, and you, my future Mrs. Rossa, need to get cleaned up.”

Cleaned up?

Mrs. Rossa.

Holy shit. But instead of making a lot of sense or freaking out. I did what any serial killer might do.

“So, on a scale of one to ten, future husband, how did I do with the judge?”

He growled and grabbed me up over his shoulder.

“I’ll meet you guys back at the house. You got this?”

The blood was rushing to my head and my heart pounded in a way that I couldn’t hear much. The slap to my ass made me squeal and not exactly all from surprise.

My body was already this man’s. My heart too. Why not just sign up for the rest of it? The rest of it sounded like a lot of revenge and sex.

TWENTY-ONE

zeiden

My small temporaryapartment wasn’t far up the stairwell. Marriage. I had just proposed to a woman that I’d only just met, and fuck, nothing had ever felt so right in my entire life.

The judge had been my own indulgence. I had wanted to kill him the second I saw him look at what was mine. There had been no reason to kill him. I hadn’t actually given a shit about information. I could already see the answers. The patterns and where it all led. But this had been personal and it had felt more important to let my dove have her own revenge. Hadn’t she needed it? She seemed to have needed it.

“Zeiden, you didn’t answer me. How did I do?”

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