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“No,” I tell her strongly, “the only cock you’ll be taking tonight and every night after is mine.”
Charlotte stills at my words, her breath catching in her throat.
“I’ll go in there. Let’s see how he likes it when someone bigger than him decides to make him the prey.”
I see the moment she misconstrues my words; the chuckle from my brother confirms it for me.
Behind my mask, I grin. “Don’t worry, little one. My cock only aches for you.” I thrust against her a few times, hissing as pained pleasure zaps up my spine when my zipper rubs my erection.
Fuck, I am so close to coming.
I tell myself I just need to wait a little longer, but my patience is running out.
Is this how normal people feel? All of the time? How do they survive, let alone get anything done?
I have always known I was different, even from my brother. It has never bothered me, not once, but I find myself suddenly very grateful. Anger, I can process, the love for my brother and the appreciation for my family, I’ll take, but the idea of this feeling, this constant throb in my pants that Charlotte causes, is something that I can’t stand for long without relieving it.
The idea of feeling that for other people, for more than just one person?Fuck that!
No, this one woman is more than enough for me. And given time, I have no doubt that Charlotte will get used to and maybe even grow to love the fact that I am the only person for her.
For now and always.
Right now, though, it’s time to exterminate a cockroach.
I press a kiss to her head, not that she feels it through my mask.
“You don’t mind if I take care of that problem, do you?” I ask my brother.
“I never mind,” Michael reassures me, his words sending me back to the second year of our hunts.
I had killed our parents the year before. The result of a therapy session, Helen, our adoptive mother, had insisted we see from the moment we joined the Cromwell family at ages seven and ten.
I smirk, knowing that stabbing my father through the eye with a screwdriver was not what poor Dr. Jamieson had in mind when she suggested we try to reconnect with the two pieces of shit who tortured us for a good part of our childhood.
But it was definitely therapeutic. The relief I felt after rivaled none.
Not even a month after moving in with the Cromwells, when I realized I no longer needed to stay awake all night to stand over my little brother’s bed to guard him, had I felt so free. Christopher Cromwell would not come storming into one of our bedrooms angry, drunk, and looking for someone to take it out on.
I had felt a true kind of peace deep in my soul the night they died, the very soul that I thought our father had beaten out of me.
No, that night, those first kills . . . gave me a chance to purge my anger and hatred in a way that would allow me to behave like other people—well, close enough at least—even if only for a small amount of time.
That itch, the one that rubs at my skin and burrows into my mind and whispers, telling me to lash out, to hurt something, that the man yelling at his wife would be quiet with a knife in his neck, had returned within a few months.
We found that it helps when I spend most of my year hunting, waiting, and anticipating. A necessity to keep the law at bay. Too many kills would gain attention even from our dumbass sheriff or, at worst, gain federal attention.
This year would have been the Clarkes’ turn. A family, headed by Andrew Clarke, the town’s mechanic and raging alcoholic. I doubt he is the only one in this town with little to do, but he is the only one I know of with a fondness to knock around his wife and stepdaughter.
The weasel quickly shot to the top of my list after I noticed the bruises on his stepdaughter’s wrist while she was at my parents’. Lulu being a close friend of my sister made it easy to find out who had caused it.
The only people more loose-lipped than the town’s old ladies . . . the teenage girls.
They know everything. And while it’s normally a case of they only think they do, when it comes to gossip . . . they actually do.
But the Clarkes get a reprieve this year. Right now, I need to take care of my girl’s problem.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN