Page 55 of Take Her

I wanted to push her to the brink, and then catch her as she screamed.

And that gave her enough time to write her little note to me.

I was already familiar with her handwriting from the margins of her books, wherein she used other people’s words to express her delicate, lacy feelings.

But instead of sweet things, it spoke in my language, of distances, accessibility, and shipping. Corvo Enterprises didn’t need to smuggle anything anymore—we were well beyond that now—but it showed she was capable of quick thought.

I should’ve crumpled up that piece of paper and thrown it away like it was nothing.

Any other man of my stature who got a note with stars drawn around a particular word would have laughed.

But I knew her.

I was afraid I knew what she wanted

Or at the very least—I was afraid that I wanted to find out.

And those tiny fucking stars splintered the last resistance I had left.

Lia was this awkward combination of worldly and childish—wearing professional clothing now, but her heart was shining shamelessly in her eyes.

I wasn’t like other guys. I didn’t need women clinging to me to give me a sense of self-worth, or to show off to other men like so much plumage.

But I also wasn’t dead yet, and something about her interest in me was like giving a lighter to a toddler on the fourth of July. All the gunpowder in my soul that I’d kept wet for years with sorrow—that shit was drying.

And when she looked at me like that, it made me want to combust.

So instead of putting a stop to things right then and there, I’d pressed and watched her eat her note like a wartime prisoner, before showing me the soft pink insides of her open mouth—habituated, no doubt, from all the nuthouses she’d ever been in—and then she faded, almost visibly falling back into her shell, despairing from having tried so hard to take off only to be so instinctively outed as flightless.

It made me want to break her free—and I was excellent at breaking things.

“Lia,” I said, having cupped her chin in my crooked fingers, halfway to a decision already. “What is it that you want?”

I felt her pulse flutter beneath my forefinger as she lied.

“I want Corvo.”

She said it with so much conviction that I was almost—but only almost—convinced.

And then she attempted bribery and offered herself.

It was probably unfair for me to know the exact caliber of who she was and for her to not have a clue about the abyssal depths inside my soul. It was one thing for her to think she was offering herself to a man in good standing and another for her to know that the only thing that differentiated me from a killer who made the nightly news was that I had always been too smart to get caught.

Except for the once.

The moment that had destroyed everything for me.

And I wasn’t sure I could risk that again, no matter how badly I wanted to hear Lia scream.

“You think tight pussy’s worth burning down my world for?” I asked as snidely and crudely as I could, to deter her.

“Fuck me and then report back,” she demanded, and then perhaps realizing she’d crossed a line, she added a contrite “sir.”

If only she knew how much I wanted to.

How tempted I was to pick her up and throw her against the window, rip her tight slacks off her, lift her shirt up, and drag her bra down so that her breasts were pressed against the cold glass, to let the entire city see Daddy’s little girl getting railed by me.

Whatever death Nero would give me then would be worth it, as long as I got to blow in her sweet cunt once first.