Page 37 of Passion and Payback

“He was the one who tried to kill you?”

“Yeah. Funny, he was only an inch or so away from where he stabbed me the last time.”

I had seen the old scar when I’d been patching him up. Hunter had always stayed dressed after the attack, and there was no way in hell I was going to be insensitive enough to ask to see his wound. What struck me as odd about both wounds was that neither of them would have been enough to kill someone…at least not quickly. It only further cemented in my head that Hunter had been right. The man had been a sadist who got a kick out of knowing he’d left Hunter to die a slow, agonizing death as he bled out near his boyfriend.

Then again, that meant the other three had probably known. That wasn’t surprising. The three of them had taken turns raping Hunter while he had been helpless, knowing Lucas was either dying or dead, only feet away. That took a special kind of evil,and now I wondered if I should have been as blasé about how many more victims those men had.

“This doesn’t taste like anything,” he said, looking down into the bowl. “The most sugar-heavy thing I have in this apartment, and I might as well be eating cardboard sprinkled with dirt.”

“Pretty sure dirt has a taste,” I said, now seeing the toll the night had taken on him. The dark circles had grown even darker, and there was a haggardness about his face that hadn’t been there before. “Let’s get you to bed. I can clean up out here and let you rest.”

He opened his mouth in what I thought would be a protest, but he surprised me with, “Will you sleep with me tonight?”

“You want me to sleep with you?”

The first genuine smile curled at the corner of his lips. “Literally. Not…sexually.”

“I…yeah, I figured that. I’m just surprised,” I said, feeling my face warm at the implication that I thought he was asking to have sex with me.

He chuckled, giving a slight nod. “Then let’s go lay down and deal with all this crap in the morning, what do you say?”

“Sure,” I said, pulling the glove off the bandages and tossing it in the trash to follow him into the nearby bedroom. I’d seen his room when I first visited, but only a glance, and the one thing I’d focused on was the small gun safe under the bed.

He didn’t bother changing the lights as we walked into the dark room and led me to the bed. There were about five bodies already there, curled up in various positions. Though the floofy orange spot on the bed made him chuckle as he bent down to scratch gently at Clem’s cheeks.

“He never sleeps in here,” Hunter explained. “I guess he knew you’d end up in here with me.”

“Or you’re reading a little too much into the small brain of a cat,” I told him, even as I scooped Clem up to move him from the center of the bed.

“You’d be surprised what they can come up with when they finally manage to squeeze a few brain cells together,” he said with a chuckle as he wiggled his way under the comforter. The cats all began to move around him to make themselves comfortable again, and I knew if I wanted to get a spot, I would have to move quickly.

Thankfully, I managed to get under the comforter before the cats could settle in for the night again. They still shifted around us, but I was able to reach out and put an arm around Hunter. His eyes closed before he rolled over, putting his back to me and scooting backward.

“I didn’t think I’d be tired, but I’m exhausted,” he said in the middle of a heavy yawn.

“Then don’t fight it, just let it happen.”

“I don’t think I have much choice.”

“Good.”

He grew quiet, and I felt his breathing even out quickly. The day’s toll was being taken, dragging him down to sleep. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon as I ran the whole day through my head. It would hit him tomorrow, probably when he woke up or shortly after, and I needed to be prepared for that.

His voice rose from the darkness, thick and heavy but discernible. “This day fucking sucked, but I’m glad you kissed me. Be nice to…do it again.”

I waited in the darkness until he finally gave a soft snore. It seemed he wasn’t content to leave me with just the worries about what he’d done. He had to throw in that last comment for good measure for me to chew on.

What was I going to do with him?

HUNTER

It took me four days before the research began.

I knew Kai was keeping a close eye on me, but it wasn’t like he was hanging over my shoulder. I knew he was waiting to see how I would react to everything that had happened over the weekend. Maybe he was expecting me to have a psychotic episode or a mental breakdown as I realized I had taken a human life with a surprising amount of ease.

Which was weirdly fascinating. On one hand, the idea of killing someone was still abhorrent to me. The lack of remorse for what I’d done went against everything I’d been told about being a normal, good person. The only way to settle my worries had been to look at different people throughout the day. First, I’d tried Arwen and Rich, picturing taking a knife to them or, hell, just pushing them in front of the bus. And then I’d tried it with people I wasn’t close to, a random woman on the street, an old man who’d stopped on the sidewalk and almost made me fall.

Admittedly, the last one had been annoying as hell, but…no, the idea of insulting them made me recoil, let alone killing them. Yet the dealer, whose name I didn’t know and didn’t care to know, had died horribly by my hand, and I wasn’t tormented oreven slightly angsty over it. Sure, I could try to paint it as doing the world a favor, but after killing someone in a dark alley with their own knife, it was kind of hard to justify lying to myself. I had killed the man not just to save my life but because he was a foul creature who deserved every bit of terror and pain he suffered.

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