Tied Up in Knots Read online

“I want to bite him until he bleeds and chew his flesh in my mouth.”

  Barrett’s face, the terror on it, was sort of comical considering he himself had planned to kill me. “You’re a cannibal.”

  “No, no, no. I’m not some fictional character who eats livers with beans. I’m not going to cook him and use him in lasagna or such. I just want to eat some of his flesh, drive knives and perhaps skewers of some kind into his back, and I think… suck his cock.”

  Barrett’s mouth fell open.

  I inhaled through my nose again. “Since when?”

  He regarded me coolly, tipping his head to the side. “The cocksucking, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It happened during my stay at the supermax. There was nothing to do all day but think, and as you know, you’re the only thing that can fully occupy my thoughts from morning to night.”

  I concentrated on breathing because I really didn’t want to hyperventilate.

  “And you look terrible, by the way,” he commented, “but it’s not surprising.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, I’ve been dreaming about you, as usual, and everyone knows that when you can’t sleep at night, it’s because you’re awake in someone else’s dream.”

  Everything he said was always so matter-of-fact that sometimes I wondered if he was the sane one and maybe I was crazy.

  “Or nightmare,” he amended.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll try and stop so you can get some rest.”

  “Thank you,” I said weakly.

  The two of us were quiet.

  “That’s nuts,” Barrett chimed in, shattering the silence.

  Hartley turned to him, his thick short blond hair, perfectly styled in a polished fade, catching the light when he turned. He looked like he belonged in a romance novel. “What is?”

  “The ego on you. To think that you influence Miro’s sleep in any way is just insane.”

  Hartley’s lips pursed and I saw the condescending look he gave Barrett. “I think we all know who’s ill here, don’t we?”

  “Me?”

  “Well, yes, clearly you and your dead accomplice there.”

  “You’re in his kitchen with a fancy handgun.”

  Hartley tsked again. “It’s a Titanium Gold Desert Eagle, as I mentioned before, and you’re the one who shot his dog.” He opened his eyes wide and gave his head a quick shake, the “duh” totally implied. “I think it might have been Gandhi who said that the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

  “Which has what to do with—”

  “You just tried to kill a dog,” Hartley reminded him, scowling in judgement. “You’re a complete and utter barbarian.”

  “He was going to attack me!”

  “Because you’re in Miro’s house,” Hartley said implacably. “Of course he’s going to attack you. That’s only logical. It’s like getting upset with a shark because it tries to eat you when you’re swimming around in its ocean. That’s madness to take personally.”

  Barrett glanced at me.

  “Miro will agree with me. You’ll get no support from that quarter.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said to Barrett as Hartley moved the gun so the muzzle bumped my abdomen, at the same time sliding his hand around the back of my neck.

  “Are you aghast at being in agreement with me on anything?” he asked me.

  “I am.” I sighed, wondering if I was actually awake or if this was a really scary, really powerful, really vivid dream.

  “Do tell me, what are your thoughts on me wanting to taste your cock?”

  I coughed softly. “Don’t you think that’s more homicidal than sexual?”

  “How so?”

  “I think it’s the idea of hurting me that’s doing it for you.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought, but now, at night, in my bed, when I imagine you bleeding, with your back open, and me taking out your rib… I get an erection.”

  My stomach clenched but my voice remained steady. “I think you’re mixing up your bloodlust with sex.”

  “Which is quite possible,” Hartley admitted. “But I also think of you naked on that bare cot that I had you on last, and imagine lifting you to your knees and driving my penis into your ass.”

  I knew when he was talking, when we were communicating, that he was being thoughtful and so wouldn’t act. The trick was to keep his mind working on things other than homicide. “With lube?” I asked, repulsed but knowing I had to give him more things to consider. “Or without?”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “Oh, now, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because that, too, penetration without any kind of lubrication, would cause bleeding, would it not?”

  “It would.”

  “Oh, so you’re probably right, then. The desires aren’t really sexual, but are, in fact, a pathway to pain, which in the end would cause death.”

  “There you go,” I said quietly, working to sound sedate, to regulate my breathing, in and out, trying to not make a mistake, instead remaining calm.

  He tipped his head, smiling at me fondly. “You always see things so clearly.”

  “I try.”

  “The fuck?” Barrett roared. “Are you going to kill him or not?”

  That was a mistake.

  When he yelled, he startled Hartley, and because he did, because Hartley never, ever liked to be jolted or surprised, he let out a huff of air and then shot out Barrett’s right kneecap.

  Barrett’s scream was deafening, as were the others after that.

  “Do stop, or I’ll do the same to your head,” Hartley said, clearly exasperated. “I have several more rounds for the gun in my coat.”

  Not that he was out of bullets yet. I knew that, I was counting.

  Barrett quit with difficulty, having to shove his fist in his mouth and bite down.

  “Miro, do you have any more towels?”

  “Upstairs in the linen closet,” I answered, waiting for what he’d allow.

  He bit his bottom lip. “Do be truthful now; is there a gun up there?”

  “There are three: two of mine, one of Marshal Doyle’s. But they’re all in a gun safe.”

  “I really don’t like the idea of the stairs. You could turn and push me, and you’re stronger and better trained…. No, I’m sorry, I can’t risk it. Use the man’s belt, put it around his leg above the injury on his thigh, and tighten it until you see an ebb in the bleeding.”

  Diving toward Barrett, I pulled off my T-shirt, wadded it up, and shoved it against what was left of his knee, at the same time working open his belt and yanking it off him before winching it hard enough to make him cry out.

  “Oh, there, see, that’s excellent work,” Hartley commended even as Barrett passed out. “We’ll call the police on our way out, and people will be here shortly to save him and your dog.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m worried,” I began, swallowing to steady my nerves, “that whoever comes will take care of Barrett but not Chickie, and then my dog’ll die after you saved him.”

  He thought a moment. “It is possible. People might look at them both and make the wrong choice about who is the more important of the two.”

  “Yes.”

  “A quandary, yes.” He slowly lowered the gun as he gave my words some thought, as we both heard sirens in the distance. Someone was on their way, probably from when Barrett fired the first round at Chickie.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “That changes things, doesn’t it?”

  “A bit.”

  I stood up from where I was kneeling beside Barrett. “Tell me something.”

  “Anything.”

  “What’d you do with my rib?”

  “What do you think I did with it?” he asked playfully.

  “Did you eat it?”

  He made a face. “Only to void it later, an
d have it parted from me? Are you mad?”

  It hit me then, like I’d always known the answer. “You replaced your floating rib with mine.”

  His gaze was kind, almost loving, or what amounted to that, since it was him.

  “Didn’t you.” I phrased it as a question, but it was a statement and we both knew it.

  “I did,” he said, grinning in that mad way of his. “Lovely gesture, don’t you think? It hurt me too.”

  Which, to him, made us even.

  The sirens were getting closer, but there was still a lot of time.

  “So?” I prodded.

  “I want you to come with me, but your dog….” He sighed.

  He kidnapped me without a second thought the year before, but he had help. At the moment his help was elsewhere.

  “You’ll never get out of the city,” I promised.

  “Stop,” he said dismissively. “We both know that’s not true.”

  “I—”

  “Oh, I forgot to ask after Detective Cochran. Do you happen to know where he is?”

  “Why? Did you go see him?”

  “I did, but only his wife and kids were home, so I didn’t stay.”

  I didn’t need to ask. I knew he left them as he found them. He only ever kidnapped one little girl, and that was only to force her mother to intercept me. He didn’t hurt her; she’d been scared but rebounded well, as her mother had told me when she came by the office to thank me for her and her daughter’s lives. She still checked in from time to time, and I was betting I would hear from her in the next couple of days now that the news had broken that Hartley was on the loose again. She’d be worried about me and I’d get a phone call.

  “So?” Hartley prompted.

  “Sorry, he and I got in a fight and it was his fault, so he was assigned to a task force somewhere in the southwest. If he wasn’t home, I’m guessing he left already.”

  “I see. Well, I left him a note, anyway.”

  “Somewhere he could see it?”

  “Oh, he can’t miss it. I used his daughter’s oil paint.”

  I was betting his wife would want to move to Japan.

  “Miro,” he whispered, taking a step closer, pressing the muzzle of the gun up against the inside of my thigh. “Come here and kiss me and let me see if I like it.”

  I had two thoughts in quick succession: One, he might kill me if I didn’t. And two, he saved me and my dog from a guy I actually hated much more than him—Barrett had been my friend, I had trusted him. I’d never had such a bond with Hartley. He couldn’t hurt me like Barrett had.

  I grabbed at Hartley, took his face in my hands, leaned in and covered his mouth hard and fast, inhaling deeply, not wanting to breathe with him, done before he even responded. I tilted my head, exhaled sharply, and would have stepped back, but the gun muzzle bumped my hip as he turned it on me and slipped a hand around the back of my neck to pull me close.

  “You should go,” I said, refusing to meet his eyes, even as close as we were. That intimacy was reserved solely for Ian. “They’ll shoot you on sight.”

  “Such care for my well-being,” he mused before he leaned in and kissed me.

  His tongue slipped between my lips, rubbing gently over mine as his hand fisted in my hair, holding me tight and still as his mouth took possession of me, fitting us together like long-lost puzzle pieces.

  When I was a police detective, I’d once questioned a high-end call girl in a murder investigation, and because we were there late, I went out and got her good coffee and we’d talked about other things besides her dead drug-dealer boyfriend/pimp. She had told me that, much like in the movie Pretty Woman, kissing was actually much more intimate than fucking.

  “You can fake intercourse,” she told me. “You can fake an orgasm and everything else in bed, but with kissing… you can’t. With kissing, you’re right there, eye to eye, cheek to cheek, and if you don’t feel anything, your hands don’t automatically reach out to grab and hold. The opposite is true and you want to push away—get away.”

  I had listened and she’d smiled.

  “You can’t fake a kiss. If you don’t want it, it’s a dead thing, and there’s only cold and that terrible awful fear in the pit of your stomach that the other person will know and feel your disregard.” She had slipped her bird-boned hand around my wrist. “A kiss from a man you don’t want is a disgusting press of flesh and spit and his taste on your tongue chills you to the bone. Never do it, darling. Only kiss men you love or at least want in your bed.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. “I swear.”

  I’d kept my promise to that woman I’d never seen again. Kept it until now.

  It was exactly as she said it would be. It was like kissing a corpse, and my heart hurt with the horror of the act.

  But things were a jumble in my head.

  I was terrified of Hartley, but he’d just saved me. Thoughts of him near me, holding me, woke me nightly from a dead sleep in a cold sweat. The only thing that kept memories of him away was sleeping with Ian, but Ian was gone more than he was around lately, which wasn’t his fault, and I had to learn to live with that and not blame him, but….

  Hartley was here. He was the dreaded thing. He was the monster in all my nightmares and was responsible for me getting no amount of meaningful sleep and my half-ass functioning zombie state, but… he was here.

  The gun gave me my out. The gun said I had no choice but to comply with his wishes. I’d bury this feeling that I was going to show the psychopath only because he was really good at keeping secrets.

  I cupped his face again, my warm breath puffing over his skin before I kissed him, hard, grinding my mouth over his, sucking on his tongue, giving him more of me in that moment than I ever had, showing him the dark places that I was normally so careful to hide.

  I’d been abandoned my whole life, and trust came so hard. Lately I’d fooled myself that the guy on the outside, the happy-go-lucky guy, was me. I’d pulled the girls into my life in college on a fluke. Janet was first and I’d acted without thinking, and there she was, firmly planted in my life before I even realized the friendship had taken root. I’d changed, not so mercenary with my attention and affection until finally I realized it was love. Each of them I loved, but not romantically, never the drowning, devouring, soul-mate kind of love that was supposedly waiting for everyone on the planet that, combined with sex, was like heaven on earth.

  Until Ian.

  I could actually feel my heart beating sometimes when Ian walked with me. I could feel the reverberation of his footsteps inside me because he was mine, my love.

  I’d thought if I was in love, everything else was easy and fixable and good.

  The reality was that I needed Ian where I could see him. The idea of him was not enough, and instead of hiding from that, I had to face it head-on. It would hurt if we parted, but it was better than taking what I needed from a psychotic madman who would kill me if he could.

  Wrenching away from Hartley, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, horrified and ashamed.

  He took a step forward and I braced for a fight without thought.

  “You’re ravenous inside.”

  I was, and he saw it, felt it. There was no lying.

  He licked his lips. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  I couldn’t speak yet, too shaken, too guilty.

  “I don’t want to kill you.”

  I nodded.

  “Hurt, yes; kill, no.”

  The sirens were wailing now, so close.

  “Go,” I whispered.

  He lifted his hand, motioned at me with his fingers. “Come with me.”

  “We’re not… you know we’re not.”

  “It tasted like we were.”

  “Mistakes were made,” I grimaced.

  “Or not,” he concluded. He gave me a sad smile before he turned and bolted out the back door, running out into the dark night, the rain swallowing him up like he was never there.

  Chapter 18

>   I DIDN’T go to the hospital with Barrett. I went with Chickie because he needed me. The guy who tried to kill me had his own voice. My dog did not.

  My phone rang as Dr. Alchureiqi came out of his surgery room, so I let it go to voice mail and stood to talk to him instead. “I’m so sorry to call you with an emergency on Thanksgiving eve.”

  “But this is the very definition of an emergency, is it not?”

  I was too tired to think. “I just appreciate it so much.”

  “Of course,” he replied, his voice gentle like it always was, even when he was criticizing me for not brushing Chickie’s teeth or trimming his nails.

  I girded myself for bad news. “So is he—”

  “Mr. Wolf is resting comfortably at the moment, and I’m quite confident that he will make a full and speedy recovery.”

  I finally breathed. “And will he need a metal plate in his head?”

  He squinted at me. “No, no. The bullet wedged in his skull, yes, but it was a simple extraction and we were able to remove it, mend the hairline fractures and smooth the edges easily. We’ve completed all necessary procedures.”

  “So he’s all closed up and bandaged and stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’ll just wake up when the anesthesia wears off?”

  “Precisely.”

  My knees were wobbly, so I sat back down hard.

  “The tourniquet saved him from bleeding to death—that was very good of you—and Chickie is a powerful dog with a strong heart, so really, stop worrying. He’ll recover well.”

  I nodded.

  “You can see him first thing in the morning. He’s sleeping now, and we’ll be with him for the rest of the night and then tomorrow as well. You should go home and go to bed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You look terrible,” he added.

  I grinned. “Thanks, Doc.”

  “No, I’m serious. I think you need a sedative too.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  “And put on a shirt and coat, for goodness sakes. It’s freezing outside.”

  I’D DRIVEN Chickie to the vet in my truck, laid him in the front seat with his head in my lap, so I had blood on my jeans. I didn’t take the time to put on a shirt when I left the house, too caught up in the swarm of people there. They tried to argue with me about going to the hospital, wanting to take a statement, but I shouted about my dog and they made a hole for me to get through.