“Really?” All that bravado was folding now that I’d given in to his demands, and it actually forced the corner of my lips to lift into a smile.
“Really. But I have conditions.”
Chapter 23
London
Conditionscameintheform of alist.
First, we were going somewhere better than the hotel I’d rented. As much as I wanted to protest, Otto promised he had more than enough money to handle it. He’d been given anallowancefrom Nathaniel West, and he’d gained access to hidden funds during hissessionswith Marco. It made sense that Marco had been the kind of person to have secret accounts, and when Otto had accessed them, they were full of enough money to make life easy, he’d assured me.
Either he was lying because he hated the coffee, or he meant it and money actually meant nothing to him.
I’d never imagined a world where money wasn’t an issue—there were months at a time when I only had one meal a day. It feltnormal.
Being with Otto apparently meant finding a place that had an actual kitchen. He shot down the idea of going back to my apartment, even though I told him it might look suspicious if Iwasn’tthere. When I asked him about the house he’d beenrenting, he shrugged and said something about not wanting to go back to where those memories were.
Memories.
Memories of Hudson attacking me, or memories of Otto killing him in front of me?
When he told me no one was going to find Hudson’s body, he sounded so confident that I believed him. I wasn’t sure how he’d had time to so thoroughly clean up what he’d done that it wasn’t going to come back on us, but he seemed sure.
I wanted to tell him that what we’d done after was a memory too, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit aloud exactly how fucked up I was. He probably already knew… but…
That meant we ended up going a bit out of town and finding another house that we could rent for a few weeks. When I asked him if that would be long enough, Otto assured me that he was going to figure out who was trying to hurt me before then… and then we were leaving.
It wasn’t a question.
It wasn’t an option he was giving me.
Just… we were leaving.
If there’d been anything holding me here other than my fondness for my job, I probably would have argued.
That just left his last condition… and it was that particular one I was stuck on. I was standing with a knife in my hand, Otto a few feet in front of me, and he was looking at me with a small frown on his face.
“You have to attack me, London.”
The handle of the knife in my hand felt slick, and I wasn’t sure if my palm was sweating or I just wasn’t used to it. The thing clicked out of the hilt like a spring trap, and I was pretty sure I was just going to hurt myself with it instead of someone else.
I wasn’t sure if Icouldhurt someone else, and I knew I couldn’t figure out how to do it with Otto.
Not when the knife in my hand was so sharp.
“Why aren’t we doing this with… I don’t know… sticks or something?” I tried to hand the knife back to him, and a slap came down on my wrist hard enough that my fingers went numb and I dropped it to the ground.
“Because a stick won’t do you any good, London. You tried to kill someone with a makeup brush… and I’m pretty sure if you’d been somewhere alone, he would have laughed at you and taken you to whoever is sending those fucked-up notes. You need something that’s actually going to make a difference.”
When I just stared at the blade on the ground, Otto bent down and picked it up. The way he moved toward me was all predator, all danger, and my instinct to back away as fast as I could left me stumbling into the kitchen table and scrambling across the room until my back hit the wall.
The room was filled with the smell of meat cooking in the oven, there was sunlight pouring in through a pair of pretty blue curtains… and Otto was coming at me with a knife in his hand and a dark look in his eyes that made my entire body go haywire.
How did someone who insisted on making sure you hadproper foodlook at you like he wanted to kill you half an hour after he’d painstakingly prepared dinner?
“Otto, I don’t think I can—”
The knife was suddenly at my throat, sharp enough that I could feel the sting of it at the catch of my jaw… and Otto pressing his body against mine while he held it there shouldn’t have made my head swim with anything other than danger.
