Page 44 of Break You

“Yeah, well, she may hate my face when we’re in public, but that didn’t stop her from sitting on my dick the other day.”

Kane laughed incredulously. “Ha! Very funny!”

“Nah, man. No joke. It was the angriest fuck I’ve ever had, and hands down the hottest of my life, bar none.”

“No way. You have to be kidding me!” He obviously, genuinely didn’t believe me.

“Do I look, or sound, like I'm kidding? If that’s sex with someone who hates me, I literally never want to screw someone who loves me.”

“Really?”

“I’m telling you, it was like nothing else. Funny thing is, we’re supposed to be working on this assignment together, and she still can’t stand the sight of me, even after she fucked me like the world was ending.”

“Wait, so are you seriously telling me that after everything you pulled with the masks, she was still all over you like a rash?” He didn’t even bother to hide his incredulity.

“She doesn’t know about the masks. Keep up you dum-dum. Well, I mean she knows about it, but she doesn’t know it was me, obviously.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because, if she knew, she’d speak up. She’s not the kind of girl to let something like this go without a word, but we don't need to worry about that, because she’s not gonna find out.”

“How can you be so sure about that?”

“Because, I’m a pro. I covered my tracks well. There’s no way anything that went down can be traced back to me. The only possible way would be if one of the other people in the room squawked. Which obviously isn’t going to happen, because we’ve all got as much to lose as each other.

“Actually, ironically, I’ve probably got the least to lose. The cygnets will keep quiet for fear of losing their places both in Cygnus, and at Heathcote. You guys are going to shut the fuck up, because no one wants to make an enemy of me. And if someone did say something, I’m a Cross, so you do the math. Like I said before, shit doesn’t stick to me. I may as well be made out of fucking Teflon.”

Kane looked pensive for a moment, gently rubbing the back of his neck. “Okay, yeah, but don’t you feel like you crossed a line with this latest stunt?”

“How so?”

“Well, I mean, the shit at the Swan Club was pretty bad. Very bad, in fact. Scary and menacing, and now probably has her looking over her shoulder every time she leaves the house. But, somehow, even though none of those theatrics were involved tonight, it just seems worse to me. Like a major invasion of privacy and a violation of her personal space. For that reason, I think the way you’ve done this is way more terrifying than the big spectacle. I dunno, but something tells me if she was afraid before, she’ll be terrified now. I mean literally, nowhere is safe.”

Little did he know, but the show hadn’t even started yet, the best was yet to come.

Rocky

As I lay back on the bed, I heard the tiniest muffled clinking sound. It was so faint it almost didn’t pierce my conscious at all, but for some reason, something made my ears prick up. I slid my hand under my pillow, startled when they hit a small object. I cautiously closed my fingers around the item, drawing my hand out. I turned my palm toward the ceiling, slowly unfolding my fingers, terrified of what I might see, but also intensely curious. Reminded of the fate of the famously nosey cat, I looked down anyway.

It took a few moments for my brain to catch up with what my eyes were seeing, but when it did, I dropped the item on my bed like it was burning hot. What the actual fuck? It almost would’ve been better if I’d found a severed horse’s head in my bed. Somehow, as innocuous as this tiny item was, it was also way creepier. I stared at it for a while turning over all the possible and reasonable explanations in my mind.

I tried my damnedest to come up with something that wasn’t sinister as all hell or didn’t mean that someone was watching me, and worse still, had been in my apartment while I was out, or even while I was in. The more I thought about it, the more I freaked the fuck out—like, really lost my shit. I sat on my bed on the verge of hyperventilating—shallow breaths burning through my lungs—wondering what the hell to do.

I was debating with myself whether things had gotten so out of control that I needed to tell somebody—Pixie, Kik, the cops even. I thought long and hard. What would I say to the police? Where would I start? With the fake job at Swan House that had ended with nothing more than a dip in their pool and hundreds of thousands of dollars in payment? How would I explain why I hadn’t reported it sooner? How could I talk about the riddles and connection to Pixie, if at all? Was it possible to tell them what had gone down without implicating my brother and exposing his “business”? I feared not.

Now what did I have to report? That someone had possibly entered my apartment and left a key ring behind? On purpose? By accident? I had no fucking clue. And what about the shit at the DMV? Had the same person who’d broken into my home also bought me a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar car, tried to pay me around the same amount for two hours’ work, and pretended to kill me a few days earlier?

Attempting to explain it all would surely make me seem crazy paranoid. Maybe I was. I was starting to wonder if I was losing my fucking mind altogether. The whole thing sounded like the work of an over-active imagination, even to me, and I’d witnessed it all firsthand.

I padded out into the living room, still pondering the different possible explanations, and nearly ran headlong into Erykah.

“Hey, E, did you lose a key?” I held my palm out toward her, so she could inspect the key in question.

“Nope.” She squinted down at my hand. “Why would I have a BMW key? I haven’t won the lottery, or found myself a rich husband since breakfast time. Where d’you find it? I’m guessing the person who owns the black i8 parked out front will realize they’ve misplaced it soon.”

There was an i8 outside? Stupidly, I hadn’t even thought to look.

I didn’t want Erykah to think it was a big deal, so I nodded and smiled, absentmindedly murmuring “Hmmm...” under my breath. “I’m just going to go out and see if I can see anyone looking for it.”

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