Click. Click. Click.
Van's lungs expanded to their fullest with each deep, satisfied breath. Damn straight, he was smug. Not only did he restrain himself from gutting the guy, but also he did Amber a favor. She might not have cared who Zachary was fucking—especially given her willingness to fuck him a couple days ago—but he'd read agoraphobics didn't just cling to their homes. They attached themselves to people, too. At the moment, there was only one person she could've been attached to.
Zachary pushed the girl onto her back across the truck's seat. Without bothering to close the door, he proceeded to eat her face then her cunt beneath the glow of the streetlight.
After a few more clicks, Van set the camera down and lit a cigarette. Tomorrow, Amber wouldn't have a choice when she cut ties with Zachary Kaufman. But he needed her to be convincing when she did it.
Ordering groceries online was a Tuesday morning task, an item to check off a list. But as Amber squinted at her online bank account balance, she knew her routine was about to change. A tic twitched in her eyelid. Everything her sanity depended on required electricity or water. The vacuum, treadmill, shower, laundry, online groups...
She tucked her hands beneath her armpits and hugged herself, burrowing into the couch as the weight of her situation pushed air from her chest.
This fear was different from what she was used to. When she'd stepped outside, the paralysis, suffocation, and loss of body control was a physical, heart-rate-in-the-red-zone kind of fear. But the horror of losing her connectedness—to her house, her schedule, her courier and lover—made her feel breathless, empty, and lost, like a non-person.
Who would she be without order and routine? If not a beauty contestant or a neat freak, then what? A hollow husk in a padded room like her mother?
But the most tangible threat was losing her house. Foreclosure meant she would have to leave. She'd have to go outside. She'd rather die.
She closed the laptop. She didn't need groceries anyway. There would be no cooking and no refrigeration when the electricity shut off. The city had already turned off her water service that morning.
The clocks on the wall told her she had fifteen minutes before Zach's arrival. He would ship all her packages and, in a few days, she'd receive her payments and get the utilities back on. Until next month.
She stared at nothing for a long moment, searching inside herself for an answer, a reaction, something, but all she found was the absence of value and meaning.
She set her phone and laptop on the coffee table, lining them up in right-angles, and trudged toward the hall to prepare for Zach. As she reached the bedroom doorway, the hairs on her nape lifted. She paused. Something felt...off.
A click echoed from the front room, followed by a creak in the floor. A shriek crawled up her throat, and she snapped her mouth shut, listening without breathing, heart thundering. Was someone in the house? How was that possible?
A few silent seconds passed as she trembled in a gridlock of clenched muscles and stifled breaths. She should've heard a crash if someone had broken in. She gripped the doorframe to her room, her legs shaking to run, her brain telling her not to make a sound.
The stillness of the house gathered around her, squeezing her chest and slowly, maddeningly, dispersing with her exhale. Was she paranoid now? Fabricating new horrors in her head?
Then she heard it. The soft rasp of socked feet on hardwood, approaching, gaining speed. Time seemed to slam to a halt as her body moved to escape and her eyes swung over her shoulder.
A man stood in the mouth of the hall, with broad shoulders, a baseball cap, a scar on his cheek, and a gun in his hand.
Why was Van in her house, pointing a gun? The shock of it rendered her speechless.
“You won't run.” His voice was soft and casual, exactly the way she remembered it. But his outstretched arm aimed the gun at her head, a gloved finger beside the trigger. A tablet dangled in his other gloved hand, and her phone was wedged beneath the buckle of his jeans.
She stood half-in, half-out of the bedroom, her blood pressure rising with every second that passed. Ten feet separated them. How good was his aim? If she ducked into the room, she could escape through the window. Outside. OhGodohGodohGod. She couldn't swallow, couldn't breathe.
“I'll shoot through your door before you make it to the window.” His lips slid into a terrifying smile. “And we both know you'll have a panic attack the moment you lift the shade.”
Hard to argue, but the fact that he knew what crippled her surged anger through her veins, heating her skin and garbling her words. “What do you want?”
“We'll get to that. Stand in the center of the hall with your arms at your sides.”
The audacious command made her skin crawl. Worse, she hadn't finished dressing because she didn't want to wrinkle her dress for Zach. The only clothing she wore were white lacy panties and a midriff cami. “Let me grab a robe.” And something sharp to stab him with.
“I won't repeat myself.” The eerie calm in his voice crept through the narrow space, stealing the strength from her knees. Not a hint of humor surfaced in the rigid lines of his face. He wasn't fucking around.
Maybe he wouldn't shoot her, but he knew about the agoraphobia. If she angered him, would he force her outside?
She shifted into the hall, fighting to keep her hands at her sides as the intensity of his gaze raked her legs, her panties, and lingered on her nipples pressing against the cotton.
He met her eyes. “You have three seconds to tell me how you greet Zachary Kaufman at the door.”
The blood drained from her cheeks, and a shiver raced over her spine. “What are you—?”
“Two seconds.”
“I don't—”
“One second.”
“I unlock the door and wait in the bedroom,” she said in a rushed breath. “Please, don't hurt him.” Even if she wasn't emotionally attached to Zach, she didn't want to see him harmed.
He prowled toward her with the gun leveled at her chest. Her pulse hammered in her ears, and her neck strained with tension, but she kept her chin up and eyes full of fuck you.
A foot away, he stopped and pressed the barrel of the gun against her breastbone, his eyes fixed on her breasts. The cold metal slid down the center of her chest, taking the thin cotton with it, until the neckline reached her nipples. He leaned in, his timbre low and authoritative. “Walk into your room and sit on the bed.”
Her body quivered against that voice, itching to obey. But the glow of his silver eyes rooted her to the floor, chilling her with the ferocity that hardened their depths.
She looked away, clenching her hands at her sides and popping the finger joints with her thumbs.
“Now!” he shouted.
She jumped, gasping for air and stumbling toward the room. He followed her in, and when she sat on the bed, he shoved the tablet under her nose.
She didn't look at it, couldn't drag her eyes from the man who towered over her. Thick, dark energy hummed around him, and he oozed malicious, predatory power from his pores. Not wild or manic, not throwing fists or flinging spit. It was calculating, in control, warning her.
With her arms wrapped around her chest and hips, she glared into his eyes, shivering against their sharp animalistic beauty. Maybe if she said his name, it would remind him he was human. “Van, are you going to make me go outside?”
The only thing that moved was his lips. “Look at the screen and swipe through the photos.”
Maybe he'd lied about his name. She glanced down, and her brow furrowed as she took in the image. It showed Zach in a parking lot with his hand beneath a brunette's skirt. She blinked rapidly, startled, confused, and shook her head. “How did you—”
“Flip to the next one.”
Her mind raced as she swiped the screen with a numb finger. The girl was on her back in the truck with Zach's shaggy head between her spread thighs.
Nausea twisted her stomach as she swiped again. Same scene, same girl, Zach's hips now wedged betwe
en her legs, his pants stretched beneath his bare ass. Amber's body temperature skyrocketed, and her chest tightened. What did this mean to Van? Why would he show her this? “How do you know him?”
“I met this guy in a bar on Sixth Street last night. He told me he was fucking a whack job named Amber on Tuesdays and Fridays, and he wanted to stick his dick in a real woman.”
Her hands locked into fists. He could've been making that up.