Page 17 of Lamb

It didn’t matter how futile this game was, how close I was to losing everything and far I was from the goal line. Instead, calmness and excitement smothered what was left of my common sense as I buried my tongue and nose as far into her pussy as it could go without cutting her open. I didn’t want to taste her. I wanted to devour her. I wanted her inside me as much as I wanted to be inside her. A thought that was both exhilarating and dangerous for a man who knew how to use a scalpel and had plenty of practice dissecting a body.

Neither stopped me from pushing up on my knees, tugging Marisela’s legs up with me as I tongue-fucked her cunt. My cock thrusting against the side of her mattress hard enough to shift the entire bedframe closer and closer to the wall. I was grunting and she was groaning and I had no doubt the entire world could hear us. I didn’t care either.That was what this drug did to you. Made it so that you could see, feel, hear and taste everything. Smell everything. And all of it was so jumbled up you couldn’t differentiate between which was which.

She gripped the sheets and it felt like she was gripping me too. Like she was running a palm up and down the length of me. Like I was sinking deep into her cunt as she locked herself around me. Like I was so deep I was poking out the other side, curling back in and going around again. And then she was coming and I was coming too. On her. With her. Inside her. None of those, yet somehow all of them.

She pulled my face up from between her legs. Forcing me to crawl over her body. I didn’t remember climbing onto the bed but here I was, my knees digging into the mattress as my limbs melted into a pile of pink sheets before the chill of a blade bit into my fingertips. Familiar and forgiving. And I realized I was cutting into live flesh. Separating the layers and staring at the subcutaneous tissue underneath.

It was dark, too dark to see the figure in front of me. But I couldfeelthe red. The yellow. And the white of two eyes staring back at me.

I just didn’t know whose they were anymore.

PART TWO

23

ADRIAN

THE NEXT MORNING…

My head was pounding, thrumming against my temples like a jackhammer trying to crack through skull instead of concrete. A dull pain radiating down my jaw and up through my sinus cavity. My arms stiff and in desperate need of electrolytes. But I could move them. Enough to apply pressure just under my eyes, using the nasalis muscle to ease some of the tension on my face, before I cracked my neck from side to side.

I took a deep breath and immediately shot up in bed at the distinct odor of copper. Blood. Dried and tacky against my skin. My fingertips. Drip marks down my wrists. Hours old. Then I glanced to my left and spotted the little blade, its mirror image imprinted on my sheets. An outline of dark red and brown against a bleach-white backdrop. Accompaniedby the kind of splattering that suggested it had landed there wet.

I needed to think. To remember how I got here. And figure out whose blood was quite literally on my hands. But everything was a blur. Until another familiar scent made its way to my nostrils. My shirt smelled like her. Her bodily fluids mixed with her perfume. Marisela. I could still taste her on my tongue too. Salty and addictive.

I’d scaled the side of the estate and climbed into her window again. Sat in her room and waited. She’d been upset over something. And wanted to forget. And I’d wanted to be the one to help her do it.

There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for that girl…

I remembered placing the tab on my tongue—I had to increase the dose to account for our combined body weights. And even though it wasn’t an exact science with all the variables that came with skin-to-skin absorption, one tab shouldn’t have been enough to leave me feeling so disoriented. Unless I’d cooked up a bad batch.

I knew I hadn’t. I was too good at what I did.

I pushed up from the mattress, stained with blood that I was certain wasn’t my own, and followed the trail that led to my bedroom door. Down the long hall and out the back entrance. Where it stopped abruptly. Likely absorbed into the grass and washed away by the rain I could still feel thickening the air.

This place was a giant crime scene with a bright-red arrow pointing in my direction. But that wasn’t the worst part. No, the worst part was I didn’t remember doing it.Who it was or how the fuck I got home. Which made covering my tracks that much harder, especially when the white spot on my black pants suggested I’d left a decent amount of DNA behind.

I couldn’t panic, though. Panicking was what got most killers caught.

So I shoved down the memory of Marisela clawing at my back, refusing to even consider the implications, and got to work.

I might have fucked up. That didn’t mean I had to be a fuckup. I could fix this. Ihadto fix this.

24

ADRIAN

Ilowered my face to the ocular lens and stared at the glass slide with the help of a microscope, adjusting the magnification until I found what I was looking for and hoping against. Or should I say what Ididn’tfind?

The lack of a Y-chromosome amongst the cell staining told me exactly what I was dreading. Female. Whoever this blood belonged to, they were genetically female.

I tried to shake away the terror gnawing at my insides. The insecurities I hadn’t felt since I was old enough to stare at myself in the mirror.

The fact I’d been with a woman didn’t mean anything. Statistically, women made up half the population.

Not so statistically, some darker part of me knew the sample could only belong to one person. And she wasn’t answering any of the text messages I’d been sending her from the burner phone I purchased this morning. In cash,just to be safe. The last thing I needed was my number popping up in some murder vic’s call log.

I also knew she wasn’t that. Marisela wasn’t justsomeanything. She meant more to me than I realized until the thought of not having her became a very real possibility.

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