Page 38 of Promise of Destruction
She’s a full foot shorter than me; her head comes to my chest, and it would be so easy to scoop her up in one motion and throw her over my desk. I don’t even think she would fight me if I tried, considering the way she’s looking at me right now.
I recognize hunger better than most. I recognize need and desperation and pain.
I bow my head to her so that our lips almost touch. No matter how badly I want to taste them, I won’t let mine fall on hers. I also won’t deprive myself of her entirely, this woman I suddenly need more than air.
I press my fingers lightly against the back of her neck, no threat or ulterior motive in the touch. Her skin is soft under mine. For a moment I have to reconsider my rule against kissing her, because if her skin is this smooth, her lips will surely feel like heaven—particularly when they’re wrapped around my cock.
She draws in a sharp breath while she waits for whatever comes next. When I do nothing, she releases it without moving. Her eyes appraise me, wanting to know what I’m doing but too stubborn to demand an answer to the question she is also too stubborn to ask. Maybe she doesn’t want to ruin the moment.
I suck in the breath she exhales, and her eyes go wide. I feel her skin break out into goosebumps against my touch on her neck.
“Why do you think I found you?”
My question takes her off guard. “What?”
“You wrote the article about me, and I sought you out. Why do you think that is?”
“Because you’re crazy.” She says it simply, without the passion she used when she called me sick.
I shrug. “Maybe. But I came for you because I could feel it, even in your words. I could tell that you were just like me… sick and wrong. That first meeting in the bar confirmed as much. I mean,” I laugh and shake my head. “One look and I could see it written all over you. It’s in the air around you. It’s under your skin, changing everything about who you used to be, Soren Palmer.”
Her eyes narrow with her confusion. “What is?”
“You’re sick, too, baby. You want to watch the world burn, whether you’ll admit it or not.”
She opens her mouth to object, but I move my fingers to her lips, instantly quelling whatever she may have tried to claim.
“Shh,” I tell her, rubbing the pad of my thumb over her bottom one, relishing the sensation. It does feel like satin, soft andsmooth but warm. I bite back a groan. “Don’t fight it, Soren. You’re already dousing everything in gasoline. When you’re ready, I’ll give you a match.”
twenty-seven
Soren
Otherthanthefirsthour of work, where I signed the next year of my life away, my first day as editor-in-chief goes fairly smoothly. Declan called a staff meeting that was both briefer and less torturous than the previous day’s. He told everyone about his expectations and hopes for the future of the paper and asked where everyone was at with their current work, then directed them to send me their progress for review. We planned out a week’s worth of content, had a Zoom chat with the remote journalists (all of whom had been exempt from his purge), and navigated one another with a stilted sort of professionalism.
He still fucking calls me Miss Palmer at every turn, which results ineveryone elsecalling me Miss Palmer. I’m convinced it's because he knows I hate it, even though I picked it. Because now he knows that’s not my last name, because he knows that despite being widowed, I’m still a Mrs.
It shouldn’t bother me to the extent that it does—plenty of people are too ignorant to recognize the intricacies of people’s titles. But it’s not willful ignorance that I see every time he saysthe name I despise—the name I wish I’d never used to post that article.
Declan Evers still hasn’t told me what it is he wants from me, and at this point, I assume it’s just to put me in my place. I can’t try to find logic where there is none, and I don’t understand what this means for my life in the long run. Is he just taunting me because he can? Did he just set his sights on me because I reminded him that I exist, and I won’t be quiet about what he did… what he’s capable of.
The worst part of having him in my life is that we’re constantly dancing around the things that neither of us will say. I labeled him corrupt in the town newspaper, and he hasn’t denied it. He told me I was right about the cops being in his pocket, he’s confessed to stalking me, admitted that he watches me in the bathroom.
He’s crossed the line, he’s hinted at the things he could do to me, the things that hewantsto do to me. He’s taunted me and made a show of proving that I’m just a pawn on his chessboard, and yet he hasn’t come right out and said anything to me about what he did. I haven’t even heard Vin’s name on his lips, which, honestly, is a good thing. I’d probably want to rip his tongue out if I heard him speak the name of the man he stole from me.
And as much as he taunts me with his suggestions of sexual violence, he also does strange things… buying me a new phone, offering me benefits that I hadn’t negotiated into the contract. He ordered Chinese delivery for lunch and fixed me a plate when I refused to join the rest of the staff in the board room.
My brain is perfectly capable of refuting every incident of his unexpected generosity, of course.
I asked him if the phone was equipped with a tracker, to which he’d said he simply needed to have a direct line to his employees. The offer of benefits is probably standard, since he does want to keep up appearances. And the plate he fixed me that I didn’teven touch was probably poisoned. I’m not sure I’d put it past him yet to slip me tainted food just for the thrill of watching me writhe in agony. Or worse, drug me so that he can chain me up in his basement and put my head in his freezer.
The fact that my heart skips beats sometimes around him, obviously, is because he’s dangerous. His presence leaves me breathless because I have to agonize that each one I take could be my last. My stomach twists because he disgusts me. My mouth goes dry because he intimidates me.
Declan Evers is a monster, and I’ll never admit it to him, but within days of me calling him out for it, he has gained absolute control over me. It’s exactly what he wants.
And yet, the first week of work with him passes easily. He doesn’t even show up on the third day, and on the fourth he leaves the office early. Those nights, I don’t get any strange texts, don’t feel like someone is watching me. Those nights, I wonder if it was all in my head, if I dreamed the whole thing. How can he go from so relentless to so… distant? Is his desire to destroy me so easy to control that he can flip it on and off at will? Or did he simply have something better to attend to?
I know from my research of him that he’s not married, that he’s never even seemed to have a steady girlfriend. He’s an only child, and though he’s a bachelor, he doesn’t appear to spend his weekends out partying, so I doubt he spends his weeknights doing it either. Perhaps he was busy with another of his victims?
