The moment Hans appears on the screen showing the rest of the basement, I jump up from the chair and rush to the door.
I pull it open just as Hans opens the outer door. And I still at the sight of him.
His hair is still loose, drier now and slightly wavy, and he has a backpack hiked over each shoulder.
With the brighter basement lights behind him, he has an almost otherworldly look.
His eyes move down my body.
My look is less otherworldly and more I stole your sweatshirt.
He lowers his eyes to my hands and the half-eaten bag of Skittles I’m holding.
Oh, right, I also stole his candy.
Hans doesn’t give me time to step back. He hooks his hand around the back of my neck and slams his mouth to mine, sliding his tongue between my lips.
He groans.
Like groans.
The fingers on my neck flex, and he cups the back of my head with his other hand.
He’s only touching me above the shoulders, but it feels like he’s consuming me.
I dig my hands into his firm sides.
He licks into me. “Fuck.” He pulls me closer. “Goddamn Skittles.” His mouth consumes mine. “Fucking seductress.”
His grip on me tightens, then he pulls back.
“We gotta go.”
I nod. Then come back into the moment. “Wait, go where?”
Hans swings one of the backpacks off his shoulder and pulls my favorite tennis shoes out of a side pocket.
I automatically drop them to the floor and start to shove my feet into them.
As soon as my second heel slips into the shoe, Hans grabs my hand and pulls me out of the strange surveillance room.
A tiny part of me was wondering if Hans would try to keep me down here, so him guiding me out of the room is a good sign. But then I remember the way he ate my ass in the garage last weekend, so Hans locking me up and keeping me as his little sex pet might not be a bad thing.
Hans pauses to make sure both doors close behind us, then we’re back to moving.
I follow him up the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the garage.
Like last time, the garage is pitch black, but Hans keeps his hold on my hand and guides me to the pickup truck.
I hear the door open, but no light comes on.
“Climb in.”
“I can’t see.”
“Oh, right.” Hans says it like he didn’t realize there is zero light in here.
His hand leaves mine, and I hear his footsteps across the floor, then the garage door starts opening.
It’s dark outside too, but there’s enough ambient light to illuminate the truck in front of me.
I climb in and am closing my door just as Hans opens his.
He tosses the two backpacks into the back seat, then gets in himself.
“So…” I start as he turns the truck on. “Can you see in the dark?”
Hans turns his face to me. “What?”
“You walk around like you can see everything when I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.”
He shrugs and puts the truck in reverse. “I just have things memorized.”
Memorized.
Hans backs out of his driveway, then right up mine, stopping with his rear bumper a few feet from mine.
Ah yes, my car that won’t start.
“Stay here,” Hans tells me, then jumps out, leaving the engine running.
Watching him circle around to the back of the truck, I realize I never got an answer when I asked where we were going.
Hans lowers the tailgate, and I watch him open a panel I didn’t know was there in the side wall.
He pulls something free, then slams the panel shut and jogs off around the corner of the garage.
My eyes widen.
Is that…?
Just before he disappears into the dark, he gives the plastic a shake, and it unfurls into what can only be described as a body bag.
I bite down on the completely inappropriate urge to laugh.
A man with a basement full of guns and camera angles of my house, who also keeps body bags in his truck, has to be a red flag. Right?
I stay turned in my seat, my eyes glued to where I last saw Hans.
If he’s running into the backyard with that, then the man must be dead.
On cue, Hans reappears with an occupied man-sized bag slung over his shoulder.
It hasn’t even been a minute.
He must be good at bagging bodies.
Hans stops at the back of the truck and bends forward with a heft of his shoulder, causing the body to thud into the truck bed.
The impact reverberates through the vehicle, and my mouth pulls into a frown.
Ew.
Hans slams the tailgate back into place, then pulls a retractable cover across the top of the truck bed, blocking anyone’s view of what’s inside.
He opens his door, but before getting back into the truck, he takes a little bottle of hand sanitizer out of the pocket in his door and slathers his hands with it.
“Safety first,” I try to joke.
Hans drops the bottle back into the pocket, then climbs in. “Can never be too careful.”
“From the number of scars you have, I’m guessing you learned that the hard way.” I clamp my mouth shut, but Hans just lifts a shoulder.
“The hard lessons are the ones you usually heed more.”
I think about that and have to agree.
Hans drives us off our street, through our little neighborhood, and toward the main highway.
“So…” I drag the word out. “Is there a reason we’re taking the corpse on a joy ride? Do cops like delivery service on murder victims?”
“We’re not involving the cops.”
His words shouldn’t bring me such relief, but I don’t want to spend my life in prison for accidentally killing someone.
“But what if people ask—”
Hans is shaking his head before I finish. “Nothing happened for them to ask about.”
“But—”
“Nothing happened, Cassandra. No one died in your yard. You want to talk about it, we can talk about it. But you only talk to me, okay?”
I roll my lips together, then nod. “Okay.”
“Far as the world is concerned, all that happened was you came over to my place, and we decided to go to a hotel for the night.”
“Hotel?”
Hans turns us off the highway and onto a side road. “We need a little space from Holly Court.”
I don’t think I’ve been down this road, and from the looks of it, there’s not much out here.
“When you said you had other houses…”
“Not local,” Hans answers. “I had a condo downtown, above my club, but the manager and her family live there now.” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “Several months ago, the ownership transferred to an overseas entertainment company, so no one should be going there looking. And if anyone does, I have good security.”
I repeat the first part back to myself. “You have a club?”
“I just own it. I don’t run it.”
“Like a nightclub?” I don’t know why I’m so hung up on this.
“More of a venue. Concerts and stuff.”
This doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Hans would like. “Why?”
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “All sorts of people are always coming and going from a place like that. Can hardly tell who’s who half the time.”
His answer is cryptic. And I feel like it might have something to do with the reason he has body bags stored in the back of his truck.
I swallow, thinking about the body bouncing around in the back of the truck. “The guy I killed… He was a bad guy, right?”
I don’t know why I expect Hans to know the answer to that, but I want to feel better about not feeling bad.
“He wasn’t good,” Hans replies. “But I need to get some more information.”
“How do we do that?”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket. “I gotta make a few calls.”
I pat my hoodie pocket, knowing that’s where I put the phone when I was still in the basement.
How did he…?
The phone starts to ring, and I see him look down at it for a second, like he’s deciding something, then he puts it to his ear.
Was he going to put it on speaker and then decided not to?
Even though the audio is going through the phone, it’s still connected to the truck, so the screen on the dashboard shows the call is being made to someone named K.
“Karmine,” Hans greets. “I have a situation.”
K is for Karmine.
Then I hear the unmistakable sound of a female voice on the other end of the line.
The jealousy I feel is so instantaneous I don’t even have time to register what I’m doing until I’m doing it.
My finger presses the screen on the dashboard, switching the audio to the truck.
It clicks over, the speakers humming with silence from the other end of the line.
“Hans?” the feminine voice prompts.
I cross my arms and glare at Hans’s profile.
He glances at me, and from his expression, I can tell he doesn’t understand what’s going on.
“Give me one sec,” Hans says, then reaches for the mute button.
“You called me!” Somehow the woman says it in a way that makes it sound like they know each other well. Like she’s dealt with this sort of behavior from Hans before.
He drops his phone into the little cubby on the dashboard. “What’s wrong?”
“Who is she?” My arms stay crossed.
“Karmine. She’s a… colleague.”
I turn in my seat so I can glare at him harder. “In health inspecting.”
This time, when his eyes dart over to me, he reaches out and grips my forearm. “Stop that.” He pulls, dislodging my crossed arms. “Don’t be mad at me.” He slides his hand down until he’s holding my hand in his. “Karmine and I work together… helping good people and hurting bad people.”
“Have you slept with her?” I snap.
I have no right asking him that. No right to feel this territorial over a man I’ve slept with once. But if he’s gonna be obsessed with me, he’d better be obsessed with only me.
When Hans lets go of my hand, I suck in a breath.
If he’s going to stop touching me while he admits to having slept with her, I’m going to hit him.
“That’s fucking one,” Hans growls.
He presses the button to unbuckle my seat belt.
I try to slap his hand away, not sure what he’s doing, but he catches my fingers and shoots a glare of his own my way. “That’s two.”
He drops my hands and, keeping a grip on the wheel with his left hand, leans over so he can reach across my body. He hooks his hand around the front of my waist, and then he drags me across the bench seat toward him.
“Put your seat belt on,” Hans bites, acting like he’s not the one who just unbuckled me.
But my heart has started racing, and my chest feels warm, so I do as he says and buckle the strap across my lap.
When I finish, Hans grips the far outside of my thigh, his fingertips digging into the soft, bare flesh. And I love it.
“I have never slept with Karmine.” He looks down at me, the headlights illuminating a straight road ahead of us. “I haven’t touched another woman since you moved in across the street. Got it?”
His intensity is intoxicating.
“Got it,” I whisper.
“I like your jealousy, Little Girl. But it’s unnecessary.” He grips me harder. “Now, unmute the call.”
Satisfaction blooms inside my chest.
He’s not trying to hide the conversation from me. And he doesn’t want to let go of me long enough to unmute it himself.
I believe him.
I lean forward and tap the screen.
The woman must be able to hear the change because she speaks immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“Possibly little. Possibly scorched earth.”
“Explain.” The woman’s tone is all business.
