Page 72 of My Kind of Monster

Chapter 20

SUKI

I sat on the barstool of the kitchen island as he cooked a delicious smelling pasta dish. One cannot help but marvel at the beautiful Viking behemoth moving effortlessly through his kitchen as he cooks potentially one of the best Arrabiata that has ever touched my tongue.

I chose not to dwell on that one simple word he spoke earlier.Me.I had more important things to think about now, and ignorance is bliss sometimes.

We ate as he summarized to me what he found out about Adrien. One of his more disturbing finds were the multiple conversations he had online with various women, I being one of them.

“Did you read any of it?” I ask the dreaded question.

His eyes lift to mine, but his head is still aimed at his plate.

“Yes.”

I take a deep breath and wonder why I even asked this question. I should have known he would read it… see my gullible stupidity plastered all over those words.

“I didn’t realize it was you until a couple of days into the conversation,” he pauses as he takes another bite, “and then I stopped… Miss Knoxx.”

Of course!I am definitely an idiot, he had no way of knowing that it was me, I wrote under my username. And he stopped… he stopped reading when he realized it was me. But he knows my full name now… I wonder what else he knows. I am certain now, certain that I am riding a damn rollercoaster through the rapids because the twists and turns he puts me through are making me dizzy and giving me whiplash.

He is a bad man with good intentions? Does that sound about right? No. What does then? Because I feel like he cannot make up his own damn mind. He wants to hurt me, he wants me to fear him, yet he protects me, defends me… and even shows me respect at times.

I know better than to let my guard down and accept it. He was, is, and will remain a means to an end and the end is my freedom. This is simply attraction, unbelievably electric, goddamn sizzling lust. That is it. Just lust.

I must not fall, not again, not after last time.

I must not fall.

I swallow and let out the breath I have been holding in.

“How many others?” I finally ask.

“Seventeen.”

My head whips up, shock clouds my eyes, yet he is looking at his plate, unfazed by this.

“Seventeen?! Including me?”

“Missing before you. He was constantly seeking for a new victim, even when he already had one, almost like they weren’t the right ones. Yet after he got you… the discussions were much more sparse… casual.”

My appetite is gone, but when I drop the fork on the plate I notice it is pretty much empty anyway. Damn, he makes tasty food. I lean back onto the barstool, running my hands through my long hair.

“How long has he been doing this?” I ask.

“About ten years, more or less. Not here, though. He disappeared from the radar and went off the grid about two years ago. I think he has been on my mountain for the last year. Yet, I don’t think he stayed here constantly. I think he’s been coming and going and most likely lives off the grid somewhere on one of these mountains.”

I watch him finish his food and gather the plates. I feel like I should be nice and clean them since he’s the one that cooked, but I cannot seem to focus.

“He had you the longest… the ones before you, the ones you saw…” I know he’s referring to the buried ones, “he had them between two weeks and two months. I think you were his favorite.”

I look into his eyes as he says that, and I do not miss the sparkle as he said that word. Am I his favorite too?

“What about the others, don’t they have families? Friends looking for them?” I urge myself not to dwell.

“No. He had a type—women with no connections, no families, reclusive, isolated, no social lives,” he says as he cleans up after us.

I feel his words like they are leaving my own mouth—they taste bitter. I am one of those sad women with no life. I guess it is practical… uncomplicated, as Niklas explained.

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