“I think that’s called vengeance,” I say, probably more excited than I should be as her benevolent heart begins to fill with the same poison that infects mine.
Brett takes a haggard breath, “Is this how you feel all the time? Thinking about all the things he…” she trails off, “how do you live like this?”
“You’ve seen how I live like this,” I reply as I press my lips to her shoulder and leave soft kisses over the bruises blooming over her skin.
She tastes exactly how I remember—better than everyone else. She’s a pure spring where everyone else is stagnant acid runoff, and all I want to do is get caught in her current.
Suddenly, there’s rapid movement across the screen and a woman appears in frame, barging through the entryway into the living room. She marches over to Bowen, who’s standing at the kitchen island, and begins shouting at him.
I lift my head with intrigue, “What is this?” I murmur.
It’s Hildy, shoving Bowen in the chest before she thrusts her phone in his face. The feed is muted, but I don’t move to change it. When I glance at Brett, she looks oddly content. She’s glaring at the image, but there’s a hint of amusement in the corner of her mouth.
“Is it fun being so vengeful?” she asks, not taking her eyes off the screen.
I shift my eyes between the screen and her profile, “Sometimes.”
Brett slowly reaches behind her back and trails her fingers down my stomach. My mouth falls open as she slips her hand down my boxers and runs it up and down my dick, painfully hard at this point. “It gets you going, doesn’t it?” she asks while stroking my entire length, “Pain and trauma turns you on.”
“That’s what love is—choosing who you want to walk through a lifetime of pain and trauma with.” I squeeze her throat and bite the base of her neck until she winces, “Lucky for you, I already know the way.”
She slows to long, hard strokes that are fucking torture, “I can see why you like doing this, watching things you’re not supposed to.”
She’s not wrong. I was that way before becoming her stalker; doing things I wasn’t supposed to, things deemed unacceptable by the standards of others. But I never cared enough about anyone to follow them around and hang onto their every movement—until her. But by the time I saw her, the years of heartbreak and rage had given birth to a macabre amalgamation of violent lust that still feeds my addiction to her.
“I like watching you,” I groan into her ear as I slide my hands up her shirt, palming her tits. “Do you like being a ghost with me?”
“I don’t know yet,” her cheeks twitch with amusement, “ghosts only have fun when they finally reveal themselves.”
My hands move over her chest, gently inching her shirt higher with each sweep of my fingertips. But I don’t move to take it off. I don’t push her.
When I glance back at the screen, Hildy’s still shouting. Bowen reaches for her, but she swings her arm out, knocking him away. After another few seconds, she turns and storms out of the house. Bowen stares at the entryway for a few moments before turning and dragging his hands up and down his face. He goes still, and then, a switch flips and he grabs the edge of the bookcase and hurls it away from the wall.
“Uh-oh…” I hum against Brett’s cheek, smirking at the screen as Bowen begins tearing apart his house in a fit of rage.
I don’t know what he’s doing or what Hildy said to him, but it’s satisfying as hell. Dishes, picture frames, chairs—nothing is safe as he grabs for anything within reach and smashes it against the floor or the wall. A glass from the sink comes flying toward the lens, but detonates against the slats of the air register where it’s hidden.
Brett pulls her tank top over her head, tossing her hair to one side as she drops it onto the sheets. The feeling of her bare back against my skin is fucking euphoric.
“Colson,” Brett asks over her shoulder, “do you still like being a nightmare?”
“What do you think?” Against my better judgement, I hook my thumbs in the waist of her sleep shorts and slide them over her hips.
She reaches up and gently pushes my hands the rest of the way down until both her shorts and underwear drop around her knees, “Can I be one with you?”
I run my hands over her bare hips, teasing the crease of her thighs, “What’d you have in mind?”
“Give me your phone.”
Slowly, I release her and lean across the bed to the side table. Once I hand it to her, she taps the screen a few times and crawls back to the edge of the bed. I pull the rest of her clothes from her ankles, tossing them aside while I gaze at her bare ass swaying in front of me. Then she props my phone up against the base of the lamp and adjusts it until I can see her mirror image in the screen, lit by the glow of the TV in the background.
“Baby,” I say gently, “you don’t want him to have that.”
Brett settles back on her knees and shoots me a skeptical look, “You sneak into my house and rig up an entire surveillance system, but you can’t make a video self-destruct?”
I crack a smile. She’s right, I can do exactly what she assumes. And even if I couldn’t, Dallas could. Or Sergei with his endless supply of technology that skirts international law.
Fuck it. I don’t ask permission. And neither should she.
Brett raises up and wraps her arms around my neck, “What’s the point of being a ghost if you can’t scare people?” she asks while trailing her fingertip up and down the center of my shoulders. “Or are you worried I’m going to turn into you? Full of fire and ruin, burning everything that I touch.”
“Wouldn’t that be spectacular?” I smirk. “What a terrifying sight to behold, especially since you wanted me dead a few hours ago.”
I grab her waist and lift her away from me, leaving her kneeling in the middle of the sheets as I step off the bed. Then I open the closet and lift a black leather belt from the hook on the door. Shutting it behind me, I start feeding the end of the belt through the buckle.
“I’m not going to run from you,” Brett says with a slight smile, “I don’t need a leash.”
“Good,” I reach to the side and tap the dresser drawer with the buckle, “because I have all your underwear.”
She looks to the side as she feigns irritation, “You really are batshit.”
I move to the edge of the bed and nod down at the space in front of me. Like a good girl, she does as she’s told and crawls closer.
“You didn’t need a leash last time, either,” I loop the belt over her head and gently pull her hair out from under it, “but I know how much you love wearing mine.”
Suddenly, Brett’s eyes dart away, “He—um…” she hesitates, “Bowen fucked up my birth control…”
As vindictive as she’s being to him right now, it’s still cute that she feels the need to stop and tell me, as though she still has some sort of responsibility. As if it could deter me.
