Page 54 of Kill Feed

“I had fun,” the man adds as he studies me, “watching you. Following you. Worming my way into your life.”

Each word lands hideously distorted, and I’m pulled back into orbit, unable to look for a way out.

“I was there,” he continues, almost fondly. “All this time.”

The masked man’s fingers curl around the edge of the ram skull. He lifts it slowly, almost reverently, like removing something ceremonial.

Bone clears his face, and a brutal stillness seizes my veins

Dante.

My balance shifts a fraction to the left, and I have to lock my knees to keep from listing. Lungs misfiring as air comes in shallow, splintered beats. It leaves me feeling like I’m breathing through a gauze pulled over my face.

Was it him all this time?

Only now is his being sowed into the persona of a murderer. The masked man that chased me. The man that bruised me. The man that wants to kill me.

My brain rearranges the data, slotting into place with sickening efficiency. And somewhere beneath the suffocating pressure, beneath the betrayal and the fury and the humiliation, lies the fact that I should’ve known.

Chapter 15

Dante

His breathing grows louder, more uneven by the second, and I love the sound of it.

“You were sloppy,” Adrian spits back in an attempt to take back jurisdiction, even as his lungs protest. “You kept showing up.”

I smile faintly. “You noticed.”

“I notice everything.”

Well fuck, the lie must taste bitter because he didn’t notice the one thing that mattered. “You let me in,” I reply, watching his carefully curated control slip away.

“You just manipulated proximity, asshole,” he shoots back before sucking in a breath. But that breath never lands.

I watch it happen. How he falls deeper and deeper into himself. How his chest expands, stalls halfway, then collapses too quickly. Again, and again, the rhythm fractures. His shoulders try to lift with it, like they can force oxygen deeper by brute will.

They can’t.

He’s still looking at me like he can win this with correction and accusation. “You-” he starts, but the word thins into nothing.

Adrian’s eyes drop, mind recalibrating.

He’s trying to breathe. Counting maybe. Forcing the mechanics. It fascinates me how his mind can command violence but not air.

I step forward. His head jerks up slightly at the movement, and both his hands shoot out instinctively, palms raised like he’s going to block me.

I catch his wrists easily.

There’s resistance, weak yet reflexive, but not nearly enough to stop me. I drive his arms upward and pin them above his head against the plywood wall.

His eyes are still lowered. Mouth parted.

I can feel the heat radiating off his flesh. I free one of my hands, cupping his jaw, applying just enough pressure to control the angle.

His skin is warm and his pulse erratic under my thumb. I squeeze slightly and tilt his face up.

“Look at me,” I murmur.