Her steps took her through a maze of baby dolls, toddler-sized dolls, and nipple-less mannequins, all bald and naked, most damaged beyond repair. Her stomach turned, but she wanted to understand the source of her apprehension. He didn't seem to have any friends or family. Were these...things a distraction from the loneliness when he wasn't abducting people?
The agony of being alone and feeling unwanted was a cruel affliction. It could make one desperate for any kind of connection. Maybe even a connection with the plastic replicas of the real thing. Or with deliverymen in the dark.
Had all those men she’d slept with been some kind of coping mechanism for her loneliness? That might’ve been part of it. Like a fourth of it. Yeah, and the other three-fourths of the reason was simply payment for her deliveries. It’d been a fair trade. She hadn’t been using them, right? Her ribs squeezed, and she shoved that thought away.
She passed a tall display cabinet with a glass door, the only one like it in the room. The two dolls inside... What the hell?
A plastic woman sat nude on a chair. She was similar to Amber's height and held a child-sized doll in a red-checkered dress. The woman's brown marbled eyes stared with a glassy, far-away look. Even more eerie was the red line hand-drawn from one glass eye to the pink painted mouth. A scar drawn exactly like the one on his face. She shuddered, gasping, and covered her mouth with her hand.
The dolls in the cabinet were the only two in the garage with hair, the strands intricately woven together in various shades of brown. Why weren't they damaged like the others? Why were they the only ones safely displayed behind glass? What did they mean to him?
They held answers. Shivering curiosity drew her hand to the knob on the glass door.
“Don't touch those.”
His harsh voice made her jump, and she yanked her hand back. Shit. She shook off her nerves and turned to face him. “You collect dolls.” Hollow-eyed, creepy-ass plastic people.
Perching on a wheeled stool, he rolled toward the table and placed his palms on the surface, staring blankly at the clutter around his hands. “I make them, collect them, and...break them.”
An emotionless response, but layers hummed beneath the words. He leaned back, knees spread, hands folded between his strong thighs. He watched her from beneath dark eyebrows, his full lips relaxed and pouty. He was somewhat childlike, surrounded by dolls, sulking and rolling on the stool. Yet he commanded the room with the intensity of his sullen temperament, all that muscle, and...the stretch of his jeans cupping his cock so erotically.
She jerked her gaze up. The man was fucking sexy as hell, doll fetish notwithstanding. She swallowed and continued her exploration around the perimeter, attempting to make sense of it. As she wandered, she peeked back every now and then, finding him tracking her every movement with hooded eyes.
A weight bench sat at one end, surrounded by a mess of mismatched dumbbells. She hoped to learn a lot more about him than the location of his damned workouts. When she reached the farthest corner, she faced him again. “Why do you break them? You don't sell them?”
His huge hands cradled a small headless body, his thumb moving over a two-inch hole punched through the torso. “I'm more interested in quality control.” He tossed it behind him.
She flinched as the doll skidded across the cement floor. He broke dolls for fun. Her heart crashed into a roaring panic. Had he harmed a real child at some point? Was this his way of dealing with that? Or maybe he had been the child?
Her spine crawled with millions of icy pinpricks. Her feet stuck to the floor, the span of the garage separating her from the darkness surrounding the man she might've gravely misjudged. “Why do the dolls need quality control?” Fear quivered in her voice despite her best attempts to stifle it.
He rose from the stool and walked toward a box of undamaged bodies with a terrifying calmness. Paralyzed, she watched as he yanked out the plastic mold of a baby—its limbs attached—and dropped it on the floor. Then his bare foot came down, smashing the body with one stomp.
She stopped breathing. Was this some kind of reenactment? Horrified, she wanted to look away, but she couldn't. She had to know.
The torso cracked beneath his foot, and the head popped off. Dizziness swarmed her head, sending her ears ringing in a frenzied pulse.
With hands on his hips and his head tipped down, hard eyes rolled up and locked on her. “That's why.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist, her fingers sticky and trembling. Quality control meant he was looking for flaws, right? Was he looking for a doll that could survive a heavy foot? That didn't make any sense. Oh God, she didn't want it to make sense.
Breathing deeply from her diaphragm, she smothered her dread with a strong voice. “I don't understand. Why are you smashing them like that?”