Chapter 12

Hazel

Last night, I'd said I would only stay next to Pierce until he fell back to sleep. And for a while, even I thought it was the truth. But when he'd fallen asleep and rolled into me, throwing an arm over me, I couldn't bring myself to move away from him or to leave him in the dark alone. Because what if they came for him again? What if the demons who wait in the shadows for his guard to drop stepped their clawed toes back towards him, and I wasn't there?

It sounds dumb, and I know it. He's a grown man. And looking at his sleeping form solidifies that fact. He's massive and gorgeous. Scars and all.

He doesn't need me to protect him.

He doesn't need anyone to protect him, from the looks of him.

But it doesn't help the gnawing feeling in my gut. The one drawing me to remain next to him. The same one that begs me to reach out and run my fingers across the scars where someone hurt him. There's a stirring in my gut to be the one person in the world he can count on. And I don't fucking know him.

It's stupid.

It's asinine.

It's...

"Hazel?" he says sleepily, and an ignorant grin tugs my lips up.

Delusional, my head finishes for me.

"You stayed?" he asks, sitting up, every rippling muscle he owns on full display again. But this time, he's not writhing in agony. Not screaming out to the rafters for someone named Cynthia as if his last breath depended on it.

I nod.

"I fell asleep, I guess."

Liar. Lying, liar face.

I almost roll my eyes at the inner monologue. It doesn't matter that I'm a published author with many accomplishments under my belt. No, in this man's presence, I'm a five-year-old, apparently.

"I guess you did. Are you alright, after last night?"

I scoff. "Shouldn't I be asking you that?"

He shrugs, dropping his eyes away from me. The ones that show the emotion he tries to bury. I know. Because I do the same.

"I'm used to them. The nightmares, the flashbacks, the incessant intrusive thoughts."

I roll my eyes, turning under the covers towards him.

How did I get under the covers?

"No one gets used to them, Pierce. That's not a thing. And ignoring them and shrugging them off isn't dealing, either."

He opens his mouth to argue and then shuts it again. "I know. It's just hard, you know? Well, you know."

I shake my head. "No. I don't know what you've been through, and I won't pretend to. The screams that came from you, Pierce..." My eyes move past him, taking in the photos on the makeshift dresser behind him. One drawer is askew, and I fix my gaze on it.The peeling shard of particleboard, the lever that dangles off-kilter from one attached bolt.

"Trauma is Trauma, Hazel. Nothing about mine makes yours any less."

"I'm sorry. For whatever you went through." And I mean it too. Whatever he'd gone through was excruciating. And that's putting it mildly.

Catching me off guard, Pierce reaches for me and tugs me onto his lap. I go willingly. My mind is fighting every touch. Every graze of his flesh on mine that leaves behind an aching tingle of awareness.

"She was my partner."

My brows lift in question.

"I assume I was screaming her name. It's what I usually do when I'm in the throes of nightmares. I relive the same thing over and over. Her death. How they stabbed her over and over, her hands tied and her body unable to fight back. I was... unable to help her. Unable to stop them." He swallows, and I know he's struggling to keep down stomach contents that are trying to fight their way to the surface. Because it's what I do every time I wake up from a night terror.

"You blame yourself?" I ask, not knowing if it's the right thing to question, but when someone's hurting, I don't think it matters what you say. It's that fact that you're there. That you're listening.

He shakes his head. "At first, I did, yes. It took me a couple of years to realize I'd followed protocol. I did all I could. People like them," he swallows again, "they're the scum of the earth. And no matter how hard you work to counteract them; they'll figure out how to be one step ahead."

Protocol. Partner.

The words rattle around in my brain like dice in a Yahtzee cup. Only someone with extensive training speaks that way. Someone affiliated with an agency. Which one, I don't know, but his haunted eyes have seen things mine would beg to look away from. And it's left him scarred more than on the outside.

I touch his face, and he closes his eyes. "We don't have to talk about it."

"You opened your wounds to me. You let me look inside."

I had. And it had been the first time I'd spoken the words aloud. And it did something to me. Morphed my darkness into something I don't walk in alone any longer.

"I did."

"Did it help?" he asks, opening his eyes and finding my eyes with his stunning baby blues.

I nod. "It did. I don't know why, so that I can't tell you. But it helped."

He smiles. "I was glad to take on the burden," he admits.

For a while, we just breathe, staring at one another like two magnets that are moving closer together because of an attraction neither one can help.

"What are we doing?" I ask breathlessly.

He shakes his head. "I don't know. But it feels right."

I nod. Right.

When his lips crash to mine, a growl comes out of me the likes I've never heard before. My body comes to life. It feels as if I'm a flower that was on the brink of death, and the heavens opened up and rain had poured down. I'm reviving.

"Hazel," he snarls, lifting me to turn me. When I'm straddling him, my hands find his face. His tongue slips into my mouth, and mine dances against his in a stunning tango I know I'll get addicted to because I've felt nothing like this before.

He turns his face, deepening our kiss, and every vein inside my body burns. Electricity is moving through me like a current of lightning has struck him and moved through my body.

"Who are you?" he growls, gripping my hips and tugging away from my lips.

I can't breathe. How does he expect me to fucking answer?

"Are we in one of your novels? Or is this real?" he asks.

A stilted laugh makes its way from my chest, and I can't stop it. "I don't know that even I could write this, stalker."

"To be fair, I didn't stalk you that long."

My eyes go wide, my laugh deepening. "Two weeks isn't enough time to be considered a stalker? You were inside the walls, Pierce. It's fucking weird."

He shrugs. "Not all that weird. Look at you."

His hands travel up from my hips and find my sides, squeezing again tightly. I whimper, and a breath escapes me.

"I didn't know I was stalk-worthy."

"I'm sorry you had to see that last night," he says, and I'm taken aback. Someone with so much going on behind his beautiful eyes shouldn't feel the need to apologize to the likes of me.

"You have nothing to be sorry for. We can't control what lurks in the shadows. I, of all people, know that."

"We can't control what lurks there, no. But we can hunt and kill it."

I swallow. I almost laugh again, but when my eyes meet his, I know he's not kidding. They've got a deadness to them I haven't seen in them before. One that shows another side of Pierce I had to have known was in there. A killer.

"Come, let's go make breakfast," I change the subject, hopping off his lap before I dwell on what had just turned the moment on its head.

He grumbles something about it being too cold to get up as I make my way down the stairs. When I get to the bottom, I take a moment to look back up at them before closing my eyes and taking a deep breath.

Somewhere, at the back of my mind, is the very vague sense that I'm doing something dangerous by entertaining this man and not alerting someone to his presence here. Because what I'd just seen in his eyes wasn't warm and fuzzy. It was a side of him that only a few have witnessed before. And I'm certain none of them lived to talk about it.

* * *

I setPierce on chopping vegetables for omelets while I whisked the eggs and got some sausages into the provided air fryer for quick browning. A trick I'd learned to get some protein into my diet. Which means I drop said sausage into my noodle cups usually.

"Tell me when you're ready, and I'll heat the pan," I say absently, staring out the glass on the back door. Snow is falling in what looks like sheets outside, layering the already covered ground with piles of more fluffiness. It's white as far as the eye can see.

Pierce doesn't respond, and I turn around to repeat myself when I see him standing stiff as a board, the knife no longer chopping.

Taking a step toward him, I'm careful of startling him. "Pierce?"

My voice is shaky, and my palms are sweating.

The knife in his hand is wavering. His body is quivering, and his breaths sound in shaky pants. When I get next to his side, I watch a lone drop of sweat make its way down his temple. His eyes are vacant, staring off into some long, lost memory only he can travel alone.

I know better, I do, but I do it anyway. Reaching up, I touch his face to bring him back to the here and now.

And when I do, the moment takes a nosedive.

"Pierce!" I scream as he turns on me, shoving me back into the cupboards by the fridge with the swiftness of a trained assassin. His eyes are still dark and glazed over by the past, and the knife is over my throat.

"You'll shed no more fucking blood," he says absently.

"Pierce, come back. It's all in the past. It's not the now. You're with Hazel, remember? You're in your home. You're safe!" I squeak as he presses the knife deeper into my flesh.

"Hazel," he cocks his head unnaturally. "Such a pretty name. How do you want it carved into your tombstone, hmm? Should I add a last name?"

It's as if a dark alter-ego has stepped to the forefront. One that's taken him over completely.

And even though there's an obscene amount of fear radiating through my quickly pounding blood, there's also something else.

A darkness in me that rises and greets him like an old friend.

"Kind of you to take the time to personalize my headstone, stalker," I say, reaching up and wrapping my hand around his on the blade. You can't show men like him an ounce of fear, so I lift my chin. He brings an edge out in me. And I'm intrigued by it.

He snarls. "You think yourself smart, little ember? Think it wise to toy with a killer?"

"No," I admit, "but there's not much else to do in this house, now is there?"

Astounded, he drops his head back and laughs. When he does, the knife slips to the right, slicing through my neck. I hiss in pain, and he lifts it off my throat, watching as blood leaves the wound and travels down towards my collarbone.

"What a pretty little ember you are when you bleed."

I don't know who this man is. This side of him that won't seem to go back into the box. Is this him, and he finally is showing his true self? Is this some kind of personality slip, and he's unstable mentally?

Even though my brain screams at me to get away from him, my center heats from his eyes on me and from the wet blood dripping he caused to drip down my throat.

He bites his bottom lip before bringing the knife to his tongue and licking my blood from its metal. "Mmm, now that's a breakfast I could get used to."

A whimper escapes me as my body shudders.

"You haven't screamed yet, Hazel. Does that mean you aren't afraid?" he asks, stepping back into the small amount of space between us. I hadn't moved. I was pinned under the glare of a fucking lunatic, backed into the wall in front of a psychopath.

"I am afraid," I admit.

"But not enough to run. Why is that? Everyone runs when they see the truth. When they know us for what we are."

Us. We.

I swallow past a growing lump in my throat.

"And who are you?"

An ominous laugh comes from him as he leans in and covers my bloody throat with his hand. The wound is superficial, but the sting of his touch still makes me wince. Still, it doesn't stop my body from radiating heat from its core for him.

"Why, we are the hunter that lies beneath every man's flesh. But we are different, you see. Because part of us cannot deal with the other but cannot live without the other, either. Split in two, the executioner, and the damned."

His riddled words make my breathing speed up.

"Ahh, there it is. A true fear response. Smart girl. Good girl," he says.

Even his eyes have darkened.

And I don't know that I'll make it out of this house alive, or be his next victim.

And yet, still, I say, "And which do I speak to this morning?"

He smirks.