Page 55 of Vicious Hearts

“Don’t be such an asshole,” she scowls. “I mean after everythingyousaid last night. I got to thinking that maybe Grahamisbehind all this. It’s possible.”

“Don’t throw this,” I say, handing her a coffee cup. “I’ve now gone twelve hours without fucking myself up. If you scald me, I’ll be extremely pissed off.”

She sits down in the armchair and tries to shoot me an angry look, but she can’t help but smile.

“So I get to kill Graham Fisher?” I say. I put my cup on the table and rub my hands together. “Fucking great news.”

She shakes her head. “We’d have to be certain.”

I lean back and put my hands behind my head, stretching. “I hate his guts and feel like spilling them. You telling me there’s more to it?”

Roxy smiles. “If you murder someone and there’s no evidence other than a strong hunch, you’d go to jail,” she says, stopping to sip her coffee. “And I want you here withme.”

She’s right, of course. Fucking inconvenient, but that’s the problem with society’s iteration of justice. Too much paperwork and not enough bloodshed.

So, how to prove it?No, wait.That’s the wrong question. Evidenceleads, not follows. I hate Graham Fisher and would love for him to be The Dollmaker, but that doesn’t make it true.

“What do you think?” Roxy asks. “We could track down Graham’s ex-wife, ask her?”

I shake my head. “She’s got no incentive to talk to us even if wecouldfind her. She alibi’d her husband and would tell the same story again. She could be charged with perjury if she admitted she’d lied.”

“Hillard could talk to her. If we explain to him— ”

“No. We need to keep Hillard out of this. He’s being obstructive already, and nothing we say will likely change that. He pushed aside your concerns both before and after you were abducted. If it comes out that he presided over a miscarriage of justice of this magnitude, he’ll lose his job and be disgraced. If he catches on to what we’re doing, he’ll give us a problem.”

She grins at me. “When did you accept that The Dollmaker really is still out there?”

“When I was tripping balls on supposedly therapeutic medication.” I shrug. “Before that, it was all hearsay. Like you say, gotta be certain.”

The smile drops off Roxy’s face, and I realize I missed her point. She thoughtshe’dconvinced me.

“So right up to that point, you were humoring me? Screwing me and beating up my ex, and for what? Just to pass the time?”

She wouldn’t fucking say that if she had any idea what it took for me to open up to her last night.

A voice inside warns me to rein myself in. The urge to lash out at her is tremendous—I could push her away so hard that she would never want to be within a thousand miles of me ever again. It’d probably be better in the long run. She’ll start to see me in a different light when the new relationship energy wears off and she realizesthisis all she’s getting .

“Whatever you say,charodeyka,” I say. A condescending sneer curls my lip for a moment before I suppress it. “It’s not easy for me to accept that I was duped.Youcould have been mistaken.”

“You weren’t duped.” She stands up, padding toward the bathroom. “You were used, manipulated. Now you know how other people feel whenyoudo it tothem. Sucks, right?”

The bathroom door closes behind her.

Am I manipulating her?To an extent, yes.

I recognized the chinks in Roxy’s psychological armor as soon as I first started talking to her. She’s a girl who needs love and affection like most of us need oxygen. If I wastrulya monster, I wouldn’t have cared about the possibility of hurting her, and fucking her would have been almost too easy. She even came tomyfucking bed,and I resisted. Sort of.

Now that she’s mine, I’m leaning hard into her issues. Degradation, then praise. I know the intermittent reinforcement is messing with her head, and that’s addictive in itself, especially combined with a rough and dangerous sexual awakening.

I’m mixing all this shit up on purpose because it’s whatIlike, and I never considered whether it’s good forher.

Fuck it.She screams, she squirts, and she comes writhing on my cock. How much harm can I be doing?

And besides, I can’t give her up. My personality type is one of extremes, which is why I want her to be just as obsessed with me as I am with her. Justlovingher is what any gawky kid her age would do. She needs a grown-ass man to handle her. Her nasty little tricks in the car might have been just bravado, but I doubt it.

Shewantsto play. Who am I to deny her?

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