Again, she obeys.
I climb on to the bed beside her. Over her. Straddle her hips. The gun sits lazily in my right hand; the left, I use to stroke her hair behind her ears. Just the slightest of touches. The most tactile of rapes.
No little camera hidden there.
"Now. I think you and I need to set a few things straight." The collar of her shirt hangs half-open, and I run the barrel of the gun along the soft skin on display there. Watch how it makes her tremble. "Explain what you know about the incident with Miss Fordham."
"Because you've got no idea what I'm aware of." She fixes her gaze on me in the lamp light. "You don't know, and it's eating away at you."
"There are a hundred things I could do which would be far worse than blowing your brains out. Just to make that clear."
"I know," she spits.
"And your aim here is, what? You were going to hunt me down and punish me for my sins?"
"I didn't hunt you." She swallows. "You handed yourself to me on a silver platter."
"But you do want to punish me." I nudge her chin with the tip of the gun. "Don't you?"
Her eyes darken. "You deserve it. Not just Rachel. Your father, your mothe—"
I smack her across the mouth with the butt of the gun. "Fuck you, you little witch."
She recoils into the pillows, crooning to herself—I haven't made her bleed, but the blow is enough to shock her. Something flickers in her black button eyes; not pain, but the smothering rage of obsession. And where there is obsession, there is the devil on its shoulder: desire. The kind that haunts rather than teases; the kind that gets its teeth in, brings the dark things out on their hands and knees. I know it all too well.
I smooth a finger across her stinging lips. "Now tell me, sweetheart. Tell me what you know."
She shakes her head. A lone tear bursts from one eye and spurts down her hot cheek, taking grey echoes of eyeliner with it.
"Maybe we'll try a different tack, then. Hitch your skirt up. Spread your thighs for me." I climb to one side, leaving her the space to fulfil my request. "Do it."
Another tear. A watery, silent witness. Leo takes a deep breath before peeling the leather skirt up to bunch at her waist. I pry her thighs open with the gun, get them a good distance apart until I spy the silky black fabric of her panties.
"Now." I rest the gun against her bare knee, and reach to stroke the inside of her thigh. "If you know so much...tell me where I cut her."
There's something about those words that sucks the pair of us into a white hot bubble. Leo's nerves peak and grate against the surface; she visibly quivers, her gaze rolling down.
"There," she whimpers, defeated.
"Where?"
"There." She jerks her thigh beneath my fingers. "On the inside."
"Good girl." I rub my thumb against the tendons at the top of her inner thigh, draw it down along her flesh in little scratches. "Small cuts. Pretty patterns. God, she bled."
Old scarlet flashes over Leo's skin to taunt me. The ghost of an orgasm kicks and screams—the hardest I've ever had, and all sprayed over the bleeding insides of Rachel Fordham's thighs. It was like being sucked into a hurricane and spat out across a fire.
And then...there were the other things. Perhaps Rachel didn't talk about those. Either that, or Leo doesn't dare to tempt me.
I tear my gaze from Leo's goosepimpled flesh, and find her eyes. "She told you this."
Leo nods.
"When?"
"We...uh." She breathes deep; seems genuine enough. "We were in therapy together. A while ago."
Fuck.
Who the hell else has Fordham told? She—and her parents—were paid an absolute chunk to stay quiet. To refrain from mentioning names. She should be knee-deep in an unfulfilling marriage by now, reading self-help books and plastering feminist crap all over Twitter.
"You didn't think she'd talk," Leo states. Her accent expresses fear so poignantly; and here I thought stereotypical Brits were natural villains. They make exquisite victims, too. "You thought you'd got away with it, didn't you?"
"Who's holding the gun, sweetheart?"
The dim light hides many things, but not the fact that this bitch actually just rolled her eyes.
"Now who's finding it funny?" I ask.
"It's not funny. None of this is funny. But you're not safe, and you know it. Not until I'm..."
Dead. We don't say it. But the word hangs between us, strung up on a noose made of frayed thread. If I didn't know better, I'd say she was calling my bluff—yet she's clever enough to circumvent that. Doesn't she realise it will tempt me to other things?
If there's one thing more powerful than a bigger death...it's a little one.
My hand climbs up her thigh toward the black silk of her panties. "Are you going to be wet when I touch you?"
"Nice bruise you're sporting," she bites out. "What a big man you are."