I wanted to know so much that I was apparently willing to put myself in danger by lying to protect him.
And as much as I wanted to tell myself it was curiosity, or some weird sense of justice because he’d made sure I wouldn’t get caught… I knew the truth.
I couldn’t get the look on his face, the heat in those dark eyes, out of my mind… and as much as I wanted to pretend that I never wanted to see him again, that I wasgladhe’d disappeared after everything that had happened…
Well, I was lying to everyone else. I didn’t want to lie to myself too.
Chapter 12
Otto
Iwaswaiting.Waitingforthe cops to at least put out some kind of information with my description on the television. I was waiting to hear sirens, to watch them scrambling in an attempt to find a man who wasn’t the man he used to be. The name Otto Blythe would be useless to them.
Even though the body I was in had killed before—or maybe especially because the body I’d been in had killed before—there was no trail. No trace of me.
That didn’t mean I didn’t expect London to betray me. To do exactly what I knew Nikki had done…
But there was nothing. He rode in a car to the police station, and then a few hours later he came out. He broke down sobbing on the steps, and it had taken every ounce of willpower I had not to come out and drag him into the shadows, to tease a confession out of him that he’d done it.
That he’d told them all about me.
That he was exactly the person I knew he’d been once upon a time.
But after a few minutes, he wiped his tears and called a car to take him home.
And… there’d been nothing. Either they were playing the information they had close to their chests, or the whispers I’d heard from the officers when I went back to the club to see if they were looking for me there were true.
They didn’t have a suspect. It was just some old pervert with an angry wife—no real loss to the world.
London hadn’tseenanything.
And…
I couldn’t figure it out.
He had no reason to protect me, no reason not to tell them everything about me, from my height to my eye color, because he’d seen it all.
But he kept it to himself.
And as smart as it would have been not to be curious, I couldn’t help it. Maybe that was his goal—maybe he was trying to lure me out so I would walk straight into an ambush.
Maybe he would feel better about what was happening if he let me walk into it on my own. I wasn’t sure… and honestly, a small part of me couldn’t imagine London being so devious.
Nikki would have set a trap with ease, or killed me himself. But London…
“Fuck,” I said beneath my breath. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could sit here and pretend that he was some monster from my past come to life. Not when I knew what his sweet eyes looked like gone wide with pleasure and shock.
Not when I was approaching his apartment without taking any precautions, because I was certain that London wasn’t the kind of person who would do something like set me up for a police sting.
And if they got me, had the man I’d been before been sloppy enough with his misdeeds that they’d find some kind of evidenceto put me away? How ironic would it be if I was brought back to life, just to be sentenced to death for murders I hadn’t actually committed?
I shook the thought away and slid into the building instead of focusing on things I wouldn’t allow. I’d been here enough times to know which apartment was London’s, and I’d been here enough times to recognize that the man who lived with him wasn’t here—his flashy car wasn’t in the parking spot.
I still slid my hand into my pocket, my thumb playing over the hilt of my knife, after I knocked on the door. It was strange, knocking as if I was just here for a visit. Like I wasn’t the same person who’d abducted him off the streets—the same person who’d killed a man in front of him for having the audacity to touch him.
Like I wasn’t a monster made flesh because of the things he’d done to me in the past.
There was sound from the other side of the door—a little shuffling, a low curse as someone knocked into something… then silence. My eyes flicked to the little glass circle in the center of the cheap wood. I was pretty sure he was looking out at me, my body still capable of recognizing what it felt like when his eyes were on me, no matter who he was in this life.
