Because the bastard knew. He knew Alexis. He knew her car. He knew she’d come.
And without a doubt, he knew it wouldn’t be the last time she came running back.
Nausea spun when I realized what it was he really wanted from her.
He wanted to bind her and tie her. Make her a pawn in his sick, twisted world. Use up her body while men slowly killed her spirit and mind.
That was how these assholes worked. They saw someone who was vulnerable and innocent and viewed them as an opportunity.
I tore my attention from the piece of shit across the street and turned it on Alexis.
She stared back at me, blue eyes wide and frantic, an overpowering collision of sea and sky. Her hair was a mess from my fingers, her cheeks pink and stained with her tears.
“He might not be, but you are.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Alexis
Zee pulled my car into my narrow driveway. He’d brought me straight home, telling me he’d figure out how to get himself home.
I’d wanted to tell him I would drop him off. That after what he’d done for me, it was the least I could do. But how did you repay someone when you owed them your life?
Besides, right then, he didn’t exactly seem like a man to be argued with.
He put the car in park and cut the engine. A hushed quiet filled the atmosphere. Darkness swept in. I was sure the tension bounding between us had become more powerful than it’d ever been.
Savage and stormy and somehow sweet.
He cut his eye toward me.
The boy was so severely beautiful it struck me like an arrow. Piercing and exquisite.
My body hummed as I was assaulted with the memory of the way he’d felt pressed against me. The weight of him. The feel of him. The magnitude of his kiss.
Sitting there, I felt as if I’d been on a rollercoaster with him tonight. Climbing the highest highs and diving to the lowest lows, twisting and turning and jerking and spinning.
Now I was experiencing that odd vertigo that set the entire world askew when the ride jolted to an abrupt stop.
I had no idea where it left us.
“It’s late,” he rumbled in that dark voice.
“Yeah. It is.”
I snapped open my door, and he did the same. Quickly, he rounded to my side. I could feel him towering over me as he kept a step behind, his footsteps heavy as he followed me to my front door.
The night danced around us, sultry and mild. The exterior lamp hanging beside the door warmed the stoop in a golden glow, and my breaths became shallow when Zee reached around me and slid my key into the lock.
He turned the knob, and the door slowly swung open to the stilled darkness that waited on the other side.
I gazed back at him, wanting to see, to experience a little more of who this man might be.
His expressions were like a map that led directly to his conflicted heart. Turmoil rippled and rushed across his face, played across his lips and trembled in his fingers. Fingers he ran down the edge of my cheek.
“You terrify me, Alexis.”
Drawn, I slowly shifted around to face him. Heat burned across my flesh. I could feel it radiating, seeping into the space between us. “I hate that I dragged you into my mess,” I told him.
I hated more that I’d needed him there. With me. Beside me. I had no idea what would have happened tonight had he not been there. When Avril had called earlier, she had promised it would just be her. That I’d be safe.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that, rather than her drawing me into the gulf of her sordid world, she’d brought it closer to me instead.
“And I hate you keep getting yourself deeper into it,” he rumbled, erasing another inch between us.
My gaze was drawn to the heavy bob of his muscular throat when he swallowed. “You would’ve gone down there tonight by yourself had I not asked you to make me that promise.”
In reluctance, I nodded. Not because I didn’t want him to know, but because I wanted the truth to be different. “She calls…and I…I think about her out there alone. Scared. And I know I should refuse, tell her it’s her own fault, but it seems tough love is tougher on me.”
His stare touched deeper than anyone before him.
And I wanted it—him to see me.
“Does that make me weak?”
Fingertips traced across my lips. “What it makes you is the bravest, most selfless person I know.”
He trailed them down, grazing my jaw and caressing down into the hollow of my throat.
My stomach fluttered, and the edge of his mouth kicked up. It would have almost been a teasing grin if it weren’t for the rough protectiveness that slid out with it.
“It also makes you the most reckless person I know.”
His jaw ticked. “You can’t be putting yourself in danger. Not even for her. There are other ways to help her than to drop everything and run down there every time she calls you.”
Everything swelled. Affection and worry. “I feel like I’ve done everything. I don’t know what to do. I feel so…stuck. Helpless.”
A strike of anger burst in his gaze. “The guy, the one who attacked you…”
Fear knotted in my chest, and I felt the tears gathering in my eyes. “I can’t believe she had him with her. That she’d put me in that situation after what happened. She knew, Zee. She was there that night…before you got there. She saw what he was going to do to me.”
“We need to go to the police with this. With a name. There has to be something they can do. That asshole was right fucking there, Alexis. Right there.”
My chest clenched tighter. “You know we don’t have a name. I have a face, and I described him to them. They said they’d do everything to find him, but I get this feeling it’s more. That they’re waiting on something. Trying to pin something bigger on him than what happened to me.”
I could only imagine what kind of drug ring he was involved in. How deep his connections might go.
I could see it. His rage at my confession, and his hand tightened on my neck.
Possessively.
A quiver rocked through me.
“I just want it to end, Zee,” I admitted through the exhaustion of it all. “I just want her to be okay. I don’t want her to waste the life she’s been given. Too many people do. It kills me she’s making that choice.”
Grief passed through his expression. “And it kills me you keep putting yourself in danger because of it. That you’re taking chances with your days, Alexis.”
Understanding coursed between us. “I don’t want to waste them, either.”
I meant it in more than one way.
I meant it for me, for him, for us.
I didn’t want to waste whatever this was.
I thought maybe he felt it, because his palm flattened and slid lower so it was splayed wide across my chest, as if he were pulling energy from the beat of my heart and allowing it to sustain a part of him.
“Lex,” he whispered. “What’re you doing to me? Whatever it is, I can’t stop it.”
Flecks of bronze and gold shimmered in his dark, dark eyes. They appeared almost black in the shadows of the night.