Hidden (To Love A Killer #1) (6 page)

              Suddenly, the sound of a key scraping into the lock stopped her dead in her tracks, and she stared wide-eyed at the front door until it thrust open and Ash stepped inside.

              He met her gaze, pausing only slightly to wrestle his keys out of the lock, then turned to shut the door.

              “You should sleep,” he said softly, his voice deep, commanding, yet gentle.

              “What took you so long?” She demanded.

              “You don’t want to know,” he said more casually than she would’ve liked, as he walked deeper into the apartment, bypassing her, until he reached his pack of cigarettes on the wooden table. “Want one?”

              He offered without handing her one. Rather he bit one out for himself and lit it. He wasn’t the biggest fan of how she was staring at him, almost appalled, as though he had done something wrong.

              “Are you going to explain to me what happened? Where you were?” She asked, holding her gaze on him, unwavering, yet scared.

              “No, I’m tired. I need a shower,” he said, pulling his tee up and over his head.

              He stood bare-chested at the other side of the room and tossed his tee absentmindedly onto the armchair.

              There was no denying his body was gorgeous. Tight muscles under smooth skin, the lines of his limbs smoldered, exuding a sort of easygoing sexiness that Hunter felt drawn to. He seemed to not even know the effect he was having on her. She found it impossible to keep her eyes on his face. Her gaze continually wandered down, lowering over his pecs, his chiseled abs, the apex of his jeans just under the belt.

              She sensed him staring back, and so she snapped her gaze back up to meet his. She felt her cheeks flush pink, embarrassed to have been caught checking him out. His blue eyes seemed to turn dark, brooding. He seemed to be looking at her with an edge of interest, and that’s when Hunter realized the magnitude of her attraction. She felt like she was falling into those dark and brooding eyes. She felt some kind of connection that couldn’t be explained. She felt unmistakably that he was here for her, had been here for her, had been put here for her. It was convoluted and hard to reconcile, but Hunter sensed that he was her protector and that he knew it. Yet she knew there was no way she could ever trust him.

              She realized how self-conscious she felt in his presence, as though her lips weren’t sitting on her face quite right. She sensed her hair was probably falling at ridiculous angles. She wondered if her skirt had ridden up too high. He needed to look away so she could recover from the intensity of their eye contact, but he didn’t. So Hunter looked down at Luthor who was lying, spread-eagle, on his back in front of her, blissfully unaware that murders and beatings had occurred all around him.

              Ash pulled hard on his cigarette, listening to the tobacco crackle as he inhaled deeply. He liked that Hunter was in his apartment. He liked the idea that she had washed herself in his shower. For a split second he let his mind wander towards images of her naked body, soapy, moving under the hot shower spray.

              Hunter’s hair was still wet. The humidity was causing it to curl slightly in long loose waves. She looked pale, ghostly, but it seemed to compliment her features. He could’ve stayed staring at her indefinitely. The way her breasts filled out her tee-shirt, causing the fabric around her chest to stretch taut, while directly below the tee hung loose, draping, sensual. She looked soft yet thin. He was already looking forward to the sleep he would make them both get. He wanted to be in bed next to her. He wanted to see how she might naturally respond to his hard body between the sheets.

              But first he needed a shower. 

              He crossed quickly towards the bathroom and once inside, turned the shower on.

              “Are you hungry?” he asked, calling out over the roar of rushing water.

              “I can’t eat,” she said.

              He turned after testing the temperature of the shower, and realized she was standing in the doorway.

              Ash plucked the cigarette from his lips, holding it in the crux of his first and second finger and approached her.

              “I got some good stuff,” he said, nearly pressing his body against hers as he made his way through the doorway and into the kitchen. She followed.

              White air billowed out of the freezer, hitting Hunter’s face, cooling her down as he opened the refrigerator door. She stood so close to Ash she could feel the heat coming off of him. She would’ve followed him anywhere.

              He handed her a gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream. When she had it firmly in her hands, he peeled the lid off for her. It was half eaten, but somehow that made it seem even more appetizing.

              He opened a drawer for her, implying that she should help herself to a spoon, and then returned to the bathroom.

              “Get in bed,” he called out again. “We’re going to bed as soon as I’m done.”

              Hunter stood, unmoving in the kitchen, a lump of ice cream melting on her tongue, as a warm wave of arousal rolled through her. The idea of going to bed with Ash was exciting. Her heart skipped a beat. She hadn’t felt this way, burning with desire, throbbing with arousal, for as long as she could remember.

              She took one more scoop of ice cream then returned it to the freezer before crossing to the mattress.

              She would have to lie down in her clothes, obviously, but part of her wanted to shed every ounce of clothing and lay waiting for him, nude, primed, ready.

              She sat on the bed, noting the scent of the mattress. It smelled faintly like Ash, the way his neck had smelled when he had held her close. She hoped he would again.

              From her vantage point, sitting up in bed, Hunter could see directly through to the bathroom. Ash hadn’t bothered to shut the door. The shower curtain was nothing more than thin clear plastic, but still it revealed only the shapes and shades of his body, omitting the more graphic details that she was curious about.

              She liked watching him, the movements of his arms, the way he shifted his weight as he ran a bar of soap up and down his torso and along his shoulders.

              When the water stopped running, little more than the sound of the swirling drain could be heard. The quiet called Hunter’s attention to how awkward she felt. And yet shouldn’t she be more concerned with the fact that he had killed someone in her apartment?

              Ash approached the mattress with nothing but a towel wrapped around him. Immediately Hunter hopped up, grabbed Luthor, and plopped him down in the middle of the bed. It took Luthor a few turns, following his tail, to mold himself perfectly into the mattress, but eventually he did, curling himself into a warm ball of contentment.

              He was aware that she was nervous. It was impossible to overlook. He found it cute how she wasn’t sure where to look or how to hold herself. Part of him wanted to drop the towel just to see how she might react, but he thought better of it and opened his closet instead, using the door as a shield to block her view of him. It was then that he let the towel drop and put on a pair of boxer-briefs. No matter how bashful she was, she would have to be okay with him sleeping in his underwear. It would be too damn hot otherwise.

              “You’re not going to leave the window open, are you?” She asked in a quiet voice from the bed. “What if someone comes in again?”

              “If I close that window I’m pretty sure we’re going to die in here,” he said.

              “I saw someone out there earlier,” she said and was planning to elaborate, but Ash immediately interrupted.

              “What do you mean?”

              “I don’t know, but it was scary. It was a kid, I think. He was getting beat up.”

              Ash paused behind the closet door. He knew who the kid was. He knew why he was getting beat up, but he couldn’t let Hunter find out.

              “It’s a bad neighborhood,” he said.

              Ash returned in plain view and shut off the overhead light.

              It took a moment for Hunter’s eyes to adjust to the darkness but eventually they did thanks to the lights of the city that were pouring in through the window, helping her to understand the layout of the room as it emerged in soft gray silhouette.

              Ash sat on the bed, peeling a top sheet up from the foot of the bed, then laid down on his back. Hunter slumped down as well until she was flat on her back. Luthor purred between them.

              After a long moment, Hunter took a deep breath and finally asked what she had been meaning to ever since Ash had jumped through her window earlier that night.

              “Are you some kind of a hit man?”

              Hunter wished she hadn’t blurted out the question, and yet she felt she had a right to know. She had seen him kill. She had watched him do what she couldn’t: protect herself. And if he hadn’t shown up, she would have become a prisoner like she had been all her life. Hunter realized that she didn’t so much care whether or not he was a hit man. Deep down she already knew he was. What Hunter really wanted to ask him was if he would teach her how to be one as well.

              “Sometimes,” he responded finally.

              There was something seductive in his tone of voice, the way the timbre softened as a result of lying down, that sent a wave of heat rippling through Hunter. She listened intently for him to continue.

              “Does that scare you?” He asked.

              She could see his silhouette turn. He was rolling onto his side, facing her.

              “I don’t know,” she said in a whisper, “I guess.” After another long moment she added, “Maybe it depends on who you kill.”

              “You mean like it’s not scary if I only kill bad guys?” he asked as his hand found its way to Luthor. He stroked the cat’s soft fur. Luthor purred in starts and fits, then relaxed, returning to a deep sleep.

              “Something like that, yeah,” she said.

              “People want bad people dead,” He said. “Have you ever wanted a good person dead?”

              “No, I guess not,” she answered, following his logic, but not quite buying the argument.

              “I don’t know how bad they are,” he went on. “Or if they’re bad at all. All I know is that someone out there needs them dead. Some people can’t live their lives unless some bad guy out there dies. So that’s what I do.”

              Hunter could relate to that easily.

              “Do you think this makes me a bad person as well?” he asked.

              “No,” she answered after a long moment to consider the question.

              He paused, holding his breath, unsure whether or not to say what he wanted to next. He sensed tension between them, one he wasn’t sure he liked. “I need to know if you’re afraid of me.”

              “I’m not,” said Hunter.

              Relief washed over him the second he heard the words. He believed her.

              “How did you start?” she asked through the darkness.

              “You mean who was my first kill?”

              “Yeah, and why. I mean, how does someone get into that type of work?” she asked, revealing her interest.

              “I had a really difficult upbringing that I don’t really like to talk about, but I killed my way out of it.”

              As soon as his response landed in Hunter’s ears, she felt an immediate kinship with him. What had his upbringing been like? Where had he been raised, and by what sort of monsters that he had to kill them in order to leave? The similarities between his mysterious childhood and her own were spawning all kinds of questions in Hunter’s mind. Though he hadn’t shared so much as one detail, Hunter was beginning to sense the reason behind their connection. They were alike.

              Already she admired Ash. Hunter hadn’t killed her way out of anything. She had snuck off quietly in the middle of the night, scared to death, abandoning her siblings and friends. Thomas had helped her. He had been on watch that night. His job had been to make sure no one escaped, but he had looked the other way after they had made eye contact across the field. He had been a decent person back then. What had changed? Why had he come back for her years later? What had changed in New Hampshire, at the farmhouse, that all of a sudden they wanted her back?

              “So did I. I had a horrible upbringing,” she finally answered in a whisper, “but I never killed anyone.”

              Her words hung in the air between them like an accusation she hadn’t intended. Maybe she resented him for his strength, for the fact that he was able to do what she never could. Or maybe she was beginning to wonder how he defined “difficult upbringing.” It was possible that her life in the country had been infinitely worse than whatever he had gone through. She tended to forget that, often minimizing her own hardships and giving too much credit to the struggles of others.

              “I wish I had,” she added.

              “You wish you had killed someone?” he asked.

              “Killed my way out of my family,” she said. “If I had, then Thomas wouldn’t have come looking for me. None of this would be happening.”

              “Do you want to tell me about it, Hunter?” he asked in a soft voice that was nearly an exhale.

              Hunter thought about that, considering whether or not she wanted to, whether or not she could.

              “We had rules. Not just family rules, though there were those as well. But all the children had rules, guidelines, for how to stay alive,” Hunter’s voice trailed off into a thread of sadness. “There were so many kids, so many girls where I grew up. We called it a family, but it wasn’t. I guess we didn’t know we were slaves or prisoners. Our first rule was to never make eye contact with the adults. It was a weird rule, I guess, looking back. All of it was weird. All of our rules implied that we should think that we were responsible for what was happening to us because we could prevent it with rules.” Hunter stopped for a second, snorting a laugh of disgust and pity. “But they worked for the most part. Our rules worked. If you made eye contact, it was like inviting them, inviting the adults to take you. It was like volunteering yourself to go to the barn. Don’t look anyone in the eye, rule number one.”

              Without warning, Ash’s hand was on Hunter’s, holding it. His grip was firm and warm. His hand, strong and comforting, was much larger than hers. It felt good. 

              “Was Thomas one of the adults you tried not to make eye contact with?” he asked gently while squeezing her hand.

              “No,” she said. “Thomas was one of the kids from the boys’ camp. He was one of us, but they got to him. By the time he was nineteen, there was nothing left of him. His heart had been hardened. It may have even crumbled into nothingness. That’s what they wanted at the farmhouse, to turn the children into monsters so that the horrors of the barn would never end. They wanted generation after generation to continue it, keep it going. That’s why they want me, Ash. I know too much. They think my place is with them in the country. They think my job should be taking little girls from their beds at night, dragging them out to the barn.”

              Hunter’s voice, which had grown thin and trembling, burst out into stuttering sobs. She freed her hand from Ash’s to cover her mouth, trying desperately to silence the wails of anguish from pouring out.

              The fragments of her words, the images they carried were bone chilling. Ash had to admit that very little of what she had said made sense. However, it didn’t matter. He knew exactly what she was talking about. He didn’t need the pieces from her end to fit into his own, to understand.

              He scooped his arm under Hunter’s neck and pulled her in close to him, wrapping her up in his strong embrace.

              Hunter’s tearstained cheeks pressed against his warm chest. It felt so good to be held. She felt cared for. There was something dominating and commanding about Ash. He had a way of taking charge, and always seemed to know what to do, which made Hunter feel safe and cared for. She felt like she was in good hands.

              She discovered her tears had ceased, though she was whimpering, trembling, still reeling from the outpouring of dark emotions that had sprung forth. Eventually she quieted. Had any of what she had said made sense to him? Maybe it didn’t need to. What would the details matter really? It’s not like he would be able to go back in time and save her. It’s not like anything she had survived up in New Hampshire, any information that might be stored in the corridors of her memory, could help them. Anything she had said to Ash had served only to relieve the anxiety, the pressure that had built up inside her. It didn’t matter that it had been gibberish.

              Hunter’s hand migrated slowly down Ash’s chest, then rounded up over his side until it rested on the middle of his back. She liked holding him close. She felt his back rise and fall with each breath he took. It felt good to be this close to something alive. It helped her to remember that she was alive as well. She was living. She had survived. That was not to be taken for granted.

              His body felt warm and inviting. He probably thought she was some kind of mess, nothing but issues and baggage. Assuming that, and reminding herself that a guy like this would probably never really want a girl like her, were the only things preventing Hunter from exploring his body further. He was so sexy, and the way he was holding her, the way he had accepted her embrace and reciprocated it, felt amazing. After all he had done for her that night, she wanted to give herself to Ash. But the possibility of rejection was overwhelming. Hunter didn’t dare make a move.

              Then she felt Ash’s hand lowering down until it found the curve at the small of her back. He pulled her in, pressing her body against his. Her lips pursed reflexively against his neck. She wanted more. She hoped he would take the initiate, giving her permission to touch him.

              Hunter could sense the outline of his legs, his bulge where his left leg met the right. He pressed into her in perfect alignment, guiding her legs to spread open. He was still wearing his briefs, and she had her skirt on as well, but could feel him, unquestionably straining against her.

              She wanted to lift her face. She wanted to offer her mouth to him to see if he might claim her lips with his own. Ash pressed his hips towards her, holding her firmly in place against him. His grip was tight, hungry. She could hear his breathing increase, the rise and fall of his chest growing more pronounced. Hunter knew he was aroused, growing hard.

              Finally, she lifted her face and met eyes with Ash.

              His gaze was deep, penetrating through the darkness. The way the corners of his eyes angled up alluded to something playful, slightly naughty. It was as though he wanted something from her, but was only asking with his eyes, his smoldering gaze. Hunter found herself breathing heavily, longing for him to press his lips against hers. His eyes moved quickly over her face, studying her soft features, the lines of her face, the sharp angles of her cheekbones. She knew how thin she must look. For months she had been too nervous to eat properly, too poor to buy a decent meal. She tried not to think about that.

              “How did you know to save me, Ash?” she whispered. “How did you know I was over there? How did you know a man was in my apartment?”

              “I think I have a sort of sixth sense for danger, or for darkness. I can tell when something isn’t right. I can feel evil. I can feel it when I’m in the presence of someone with cruel intentions. I was raised by the most horrendous men,” said Ash. Now it was his turn to speak in riddles, mysteriously vague and impossible to follow. “I feel like it gave me the ability to read people’s moods. I knew even before my father would get home whether or not he was furious, whether or not he had it in him to beat me raw.”

              He paused for a moment to take a breath. The sun was rising in the sky beyond the window. The apartment had brightened, though most of Hunter still remained covered in shadows.

              He couldn’t tell if any of what he said was making sense to her. He had always assumed that people who grew up in homes where a wealth of violence took place had different ways of seeing the world, different ways of relating to people and getting a read on their surroundings. But judging by Hunter’s silence, he wasn’t sure if he had been making any sense, or if he sounded crazy.

              “So you sensed I was in trouble?” she asked.

              “Basically, yeah,” he said.

              Hunter recalled how conveniently his armchair had been angled towards the window, how its position had aided in seeing directly across to her fire escape. Had he seen the danger coming far in advance, similar to how he had described his father driving home? Or was he lying? Was he avoiding telling her the entire truth? And if he was, then why? Whatever the reason, whatever he was holding back, in that moment Hunter resolved that she would find out soon enough. He was obviously here to stay, here to help. Clearly he wanted to keep her safe. It would only be a matter of time before she knew everything. The details of his family, the real reason he began killing, and how he found ways to get that kind of work now. Hunter would discover everything, and she couldn’t wait. Though it made her nervous, distrustful, and cautious, deep down Hunter knew he had the life she wanted. And Hunter was starting to feel that she would want that life not only for herself, but with Ash specifically.

              Ash was starting to worry that her interest in him and his history was overshadowing her attraction to him. That wasn’t what he wanted, not right now at least.

              “And that man had been casing your place for weeks,” he added. “I’m surprised you never noticed. I started getting a bad feeling about him days ago. I’ve been watching you closely ever since. Him as well. In a lot of ways, I was prepared and planning on the possibility that a night like tonight would take place.”