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  “Yeah.” She didn’t ask how I knew, possibly realizing I’d overheard it earlier.

  “That guy you were with…” I paused, glancing around to be sure he wasn’t lurking nearby while trying to decide how to frame my question. “Do you know what he’s into?”

  “Trying to steal my ride home, are you?” But the smile remained, suggesting she was teasing. “Or are you warning me off? Because if you are, I already know what I’m getting into. I’ve gone home with him before.”

  My jaw clenched, and I had a strong urge to claw her eyes out.

  At the same time, the back of my neck tingled with excitement. Maybe this night wasn’t a waste after all.

  I stepped toward her, closing the small gap between us. “What’s he like? Is he…?”

  “Is he good?”

  That wasn’t exactly the word I’d been looking for, but I nodded for her to go on, hoping she’d give me something worthwhile.

  “He’s real good, actually. If you can take a beating.” She smirked. “Fortunately, I can.”

  Now as I looked at her I saw the signs I’d missed earlier—the fading bruises on her arms, the red marks at her wrists from some type of bondage.

  “He is a sadist,” I said, more to myself than to Sasha.

  “You could say that. Roughest time I’ve ever had. Best time too. So thanks for the warning, if that’s what you were about, but also no thanks because I’m good.”

  For the first time that evening, I gave my own smile. “Good for you. Enjoy yourself.” I turned away before she could say anything else. I didn’t need any more from her, and I was eager to get out of there in case Edward came looking after her.

  With a satisfied buzz, I headed back to the main foyer. Checking out was as efficient as checking in had been. After producing my wrist for inspection, I was given my items, the bag they’d been contained in still sealed.

  One of the hostesses that had greeted me called an elevator for me, and by the time I’d gotten my purse and my phone out, it had arrived. I stepped inside feeling smug. I’d gotten what I’d been after, and, even with the inconvenience of running into the devil himself, I was leaving undiscovered.

  Except, before the doors could close, a familiar voice shouted to hold the elevator. A familiar British voice.

  Fuck!

  I did not want to share a ride down to the lobby with him. What if he talked to me? What if he expected me to talk to him? What if I did and he recognized my voice?

  Panicked, I hit at the door-closed button, but the hostess stuck her arm in, blocking the doors from shutting, and a few seconds later Edward and Sasha joined me in the elevator.

  I huddled in the corner, hoping I’d go unnoticed, even though there were only the three of us in the car. Hoping they’d be too wrapped up in each other to pay attention to me.

  It was a hope I didn’t send into the universe with much energy, though, since I simultaneously wanted him to never look at her again.

  Unsurprisingly, his eyes fell on me. I could feel them even with my head turned away.

  “Look, Sasha. It’s our new friend. I wonder if she enjoyed your performance as much as you did.” He was as patronizing with his tone as he ever was. I’d learned that tonight, too, I supposed. That he was this way with everyone. That it wasn’t a demeanor he reserved explicitly for me.

  I hugged my arms around myself. Maybe I could play shy. Or rude. I didn’t care what his impression of me was as long as he didn’t know it was indeed me.

  Sasha draped her arm over his shoulder possessively. “Oh, she enjoyed it. I heard her in the bathroom rubbing one out.”

  My entire body flushed with equal measures embarrassment and anger. I had wanted that to belong only to me. It was bad enough that Sasha had witnessed it. I had definitely not wanted Edward to find out. Even with him not knowing who I was behind my mask, it gave him too much of a win. I hated that he had that power over me. It made me sick that he knew it too.

  “That’s a lovely shade of red your skin turns, little bird. That has quite an effect on me. It’s going to be a miserable ride to my hotel, thanks to that.”

  My head shot in his direction, and I couldn’t help but glance at the effect he referred to. He was visibly hard again. This close, I could see the outline of his cock through his slacks. It was big and brutal, just like he was.

  My pussy throbbed in response, that traitor, and without thinking, I lashed out in response. “Your misery is not my problem, you asshole.”

  Fuck, I thought too late. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Did he recognize my voice? Could he tell it was me? He stared at me, his eyes narrowing, and I held my breath, waiting for him to call me out.

  “Of course it’s not your problem,” he said, eventually. Harshly. “Considering the kind of party you just left, I thought you’d find the information stimulating. It was certainly stimulating for me to tell you. Pardon me for my erroneous assumption.”

  My heart thudded wildly against my rib cage, and it took almost all my restraint not to throw a punch. It took just as much strength not to fall down at his knees and beg for him to give me his kiss, his hands, his cock. To take out his misery on me.

  How could every word out of his mouth make me hate him more while also turning every cell in my body into a blazing cell of want?

  “Don’t worry about this,” Sasha said, palming his thick bulge. “I’ll give you what you need.”

  I hated her for that, too. Perhaps she was my enemy as well.

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t give Sasha any morsel of his attention, his stare staying planted on me. It should have been unnerving, and it was, but it was also something else. Something warm and electric. Something I couldn’t identify.

  The elevator doors opened in the lobby, and I rushed out ahead of them, dying to get away from them. Stupid, it turned out, since I had to wait while the doorman hailed a cab. Edward already had a car waiting outside.

  I refused to look directly at either of them, but I also couldn’t help watching them out of the corner of my eye. He opened the back door of the sedan and let Sasha slide in first. Then, before he got in himself, Edward called to me. “Do you need a ride, little bird?”

  I scowled in response.

  But just because I had no control where he was concerned, because he made me reckless and insane, I corrected him. “I’m a dragon, not a bird.” At least I’d remembered to change my voice this time, making it lower than my usual pitch.

  He paused, considering, those wicked eyes boring into me. “No. You might think you’re a dragon, but you’re definitely a bird.”

  I shot daggers after him long after his car had pulled away from the curb. He stirred so much inside me, feelings that had been dormant for so long.

  They were the kind of emotions that could be burned as fuel, emotions with energy—hatred, vindictiveness, disgust. Spite.

  Lust, too, but even that would be beneficial.

  I intended to use them all, and now that I had what I needed, there was nothing he could do to stop me.

  The game was on.

  Seventeen

  Most games didn’t take much time to prepare. A few days. A week at the most.

  This scheme with Edward was different, though. It was going to take a level of dedication I hadn’t pursued before. I would need bandwidth to commit. My entire life had to be cleared.

  Conveniently, I only had the one client, and his project would be wrapped up by the end of summer. Renee would be gone by then too. Her resignation, it seemed, had turned out to be fortuitous. All the dominoes were lining up, and I was motivated by the desire to get to the day I’d see them all knocked down.

  The one concern I had was Edward’s patience. There were five weeks still before August ended. Would he still be in the country then? Would his offer still stand?

  Luck, however, continued to be on my side.

  A handful of days after my visit to The Open Door, a Thursday on the last day of July, Renee walked into my
office carrying a glass vase filled with the most stunning bouquet of flowers.

  “These just arrived,” she said as she set the arrangement on the corner of my desk. She handed me a small, sealed rectangular envelope with my name scribbled on the front. “Either you’re seeing someone you haven’t told me about or you have a secret admirer.”

  I often received flowers. It was the nature of the games I played. So many times the goal was to make them fall for me, and that led to a myriad of romantic declarations.

  While I didn’t ever tell Renee the entire truth about these liaisons, I usually fed her a story about whatever current relationship I was pursuing. It had made things easier in the beginning, prompted fewer questions. Over time, though, I’d come to enjoy these narratives as much as the reality. They were pretty stories, fairy tales with potential for beautiful happy endings, and I found something sweet in Renee’s belief that they were happening to me, even while I was aware of the lie underneath the prose.

  The satisfaction wasn’t about that lie, though. As much as I loved playing strangers, I never found it gratifying to deceive the few people close to me, Renee being one of them.

  No, it was about the hope. The brief glimpse of what was possible, seen through the eyes of my assistant. It was the closest I’d ever get to my own happy ending, and while I’d given up on that dream a long time ago, there was a nostalgic peace in letting the pretense exist, in letting it hang in the air before it again dropped into the bleak nothing that extended before me.

  I didn’t currently have a story for her, though, and the arrival of the flowers was as much of a surprise to me as it was to her.

  I didn’t like surprises. I hated being thrown off guard.

  I studied the cursive on the envelope, the hasty scrawl of only my first name—Celia. It wasn’t handwriting I’d seen before, and I made a mental list of possible senders. My current client had been in that morning, and his current frustration with a hiccup in his installation didn’t lend to sending flowers. A former client seemed unlikely. Blanche, perhaps.

  Edward?

  Sentiment wasn’t his style. On the other hand, the floral arrangement was familiar.

  Renee read my hesitation as a sign. “I’ll give you your privacy,” she said politely, closing the door behind her as she left.

  I barely looked up at her departure, and I was already smiling when I tore open the envelope to read the card inside.

  I head back to London tomorrow. My offer stands.

  – Edward

  “What happened to not courting me?” I asked the air.

  As if in answer to my question, I found a postscript on the back.

  P.S. The flowers are for your secretary.

  I laughed out loud. Bullshit they were for my secretary. The bouquet was a near duplicate of the arrangement I’d dropped at the International Media Innovators’ Banquet. It was definitely meant for me. He’d picked it out for me.

  And the message had been handwritten instead of typed like when ordered online. If the handwriting was his, and I believed it was, it meant he’d seen to the transaction personally.

  “London, huh?” Again I was talking to an empty room. “I can work with London.”

  As I sat back in my chair, I halfheartedly gazed at the beautiful display and began to think through altering my plans, all the while pretending that the flutter in my stomach had everything to do with excitement about my scheme and nothing to do with the man it centered around.

  Exactly four weeks later, I walked through the empty rooms of my office, turning off lights as I went, looking for anything at all that might have been missed. The space seemed so much bigger now. I’d forgotten how spacious it had been that first night. How weird to realize how filled it had been with a life of nothing.

  The nothing made it easy to pack. My apartment had been sorted through over the month. I owned my own condo—well, my father technically owned it, but it had been a gift from my parents when I’d graduated from college. He’d never gotten around to transferring the title, but the point was, there wasn’t any need to move anything to storage since no one else would be living there in my place. I’d only had to crate what I couldn’t live without. These I labeled and stacked in my living room so they were ready to be shipped when the details of my future life were arranged.

  The categorizing of what was essential and what wasn’t had been so simple, I realized, because there was very little I was attached to. My extravagantly designed space was filled with high-end furniture and art, my closets overflowing with expensive clothes, and none of it mattered to me in the least. There had been only one item I’d deliberated over, or, one set of items, rather—the diaries I’d kept over the years documenting the details of the games. On the one hand, they represented everything I’d been living for, and I wanted them with me for that. They were comforting. Familiar.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want them to be found. By anyone, but especially Edward. That made them safer packed up as well, but instead of stacking them by the door for shipment, I hid the crate in the guest room closet.

  The office had been even easier to deconstruct. Renee had taken the task on herself, hiring laborers when needed, and even when the client design was finished ahead of schedule, the office space was ready to be emptied the following day.

  All that was left was to hand over the keys.

  “Where the heck is everything?” Scott Matthews’ voice boomed across the vacant rooms.

  I retreated from the kitchen and walked out to greet him. “Gone, obviously.” There had been snark in my comment, and I chided myself silently. I had meant for this to go peacefully, and this wasn’t a good start.

  Putting on a smile and a cheerier tone, I tried again. “I’m closing up shop for awhile. Leaving town.”

  He eyed me warily. “And I’m supposed to hold this until you return?”

  “No.” I stepped toward him, my hand held out toward his. “I’m giving you my key. The space is yours.”

  I had debated about keeping it, about holding on to it for whenever I came back, but not only did I have no idea when that would be, I also needed to look like I was truly shutting down my life in New York. I’d miss the place, of course I would. But it was greenery from a season that had passed, and there wasn’t any good in clutching to the dead remains. If and when I returned, it would be a new season, and there would be a new space.

  Scott was still skeptical, and, after everything I’d put him through, who could blame him? “What game are you playing now?” he asked, not taking the key.

  I chuckled at his coincidental choice of terminology. I’d never referred to these schemes as games to any of the people I’d played. “No game. Well, not with you, anyway. I’m simply returning what I no longer need.”

  “Let me guess. You want something else from me. What is it? Money? Another space? Whatever it is, I’m not—”

  “Scott, I don’t want anything from you. Take the damn key.”

  He paused a moment longer before snatching the key from my hand. Once it was safely in his pocket, he visibly relaxed. “So,” he said, strolling past me to stare out the windows. “You’re leaving town? For good?”

  I pivoted so I was addressing his back. “For good for now. Unless something changes.”

  “I guess I got used to you being in my life. I kind of thought I was stuck with you. Like, you’d be a permanent fixture.” When he turned around, his eyes were filled with something I hadn’t seen in them since the first night we’d met. He took a slow step toward me. “What do you say about visiting that kitchen again? For old times’ sake.”

  I pressed my fingers at the inside of my nose, trying to contain the explosion threatening inside. “Jesus Christ, Scott. I’ve blackmailed you for seven years, and you still want to fuck me? What is wrong with you?” He deserved what I’d done to him. If I’d ever had any doubts, I didn’t now.

  He shrugged with one shoulder. “What can I say? You blackmailing me has always been kin
d of hot.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re sick.”

  But I couldn’t really judge him. The games that got me off were just as sick.

  He grew serious, anger brewing in his eyes. “Okay, I’ll take that as a no. If there’s nothing else you need, I’d best be leaving.”

  His resentment toward me was earned, and it gave me an idea. “Wait. There is something else you could do for me.”

  “Aw, fuck. I knew it. I knew you’d never just walk away from this.”

  “No, no. Not like that. It’s nothing that will cost you.”

  He raised a cautious brow and cocked his head, waiting for me to go on.

  With my spine straight, I pushed my chin forward. “I want you to slap me.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m completely serious.” And I was. I’d been punched once, by Hudson’s wife when she was still his girlfriend. She’d broken my nose, and it had hurt like hell.

  But that was the funny thing about pain—even though I could remember in my head that it had been an excruciating experience, I couldn’t remember it in my body. Could I take it on command? Would it make a difference knowing it was coming?

  Scott shook his head vehemently. “Nope. No way. I’m not falling for this, this...whatever this is. You’re recording this, aren’t you? I knew you were setting me up.” He scanned the ceiling, searching for a hidden camera.

  “I’m not setting you up, you asshole. I’m asking you for a favor.” I was annoyed, but not so annoyed that I wanted to give up on my request. My annoyance actually cemented the idea in my head. “Here. Give me your phone.” I held my hand out. “And unlock it.”

  He was reluctant, but he was also curious.

  His curiosity won out, and a second later he was giving over his unlocked phone.

  I quickly found his camera app and, after setting it to selfie mode, I hit the record button. “I, Celia Werner, am asking Scott Matthews to smack me across the face.” I held my arm out to the side so the camera would capture my profile. “There. How could I possibly use this against you now? Just do it, will you? I know you want to. You’ve wanted to for years. I’ll even record it, and you can replay it over and over, whenever you think about all the shit I put you through. How close I almost destroyed your—”