Before He Lapses. Блейк Пирс

of her, pressing his full weight into her back. Her head reeled from the strike and for a moment, Marie legitimately had no idea where she was.

      As she got her hands under her to fight back against him, his hands were in her long blonde hair again. This time, he drove her head hard into the wood floor. Marie fought against it for a moment, but she quickly started to feel the world swimming away as a flaring pain radiated in the back of her head.

      Somewhere very far away, she was aware of him grabbing her by the waist of her pants and pulling them down. Then the world went black for a moment and she only came to after that because she felt his mouth on her, roaming seemingly everywhere.

      It made no sense. She would let him do just about anything to her and would, in return, do just about anything for him. So why would he…?

      This thought was also interrupted by the floating darkness that came and went. But this time when it came, it stayed for quite a while.

***

      It had involved more work than he’d thought but he was finally able to relax around two in the morning. The hardest part of all had been knocking her unconscious. He simply didn’t think he’d have it in him. Strangling people was one thing. It was just a matter of convincing yourself to do it and then applying the pressure once their neck was in his hands. But slamming Marie’s head into the floor had taken more grit than he had been expecting.

      When she was out, the rest of the work was hard but enjoyable. And as he went about the tasks, he started to feel comfortable with the decision he had made.

      He’d killed Jo Haley and Christine Lynch outright. With Jo, he’d slept with her, enjoyed the encounter immensely, and then strangled her when round two had gotten started. And perhaps the sex was to blame, but he had almost changed his mind—had almost chickened out. He’d learned a lesson there and opted to skip the sex when it had come to Christine. And then her body had been found and he’d seen the story on the news—just a blip, really, but an eye-opener all the same. It had made him rethink things…that he couldn’t just kill them.

      But he had to retain them. The ones beyond Christine, the ones that needed to be silenced. There would be more, including Marie. And if he could not kill them outright and just leave them where they fell, that meant he had to do something else. He had to be more discreet, more careful.

      He looked at his work and thought he would be fully capable of getting away with it. He stood in front of the opened coat closet that was located in the hallway. Marie was in the closet, completely nude and hanging by her bound wrists from the coat rack that ran horizontal across the width of the closet. There were also three strips of reinforced duct tape covering her mouth. Her body was hanging downward but her arms were stretched up over her head from where he had tied her wrists together. It was an oddly seductive pose and it made him regret not sleeping with her before he’d taken her captive.

      He’d been standing there, staring at her and enjoying the sense of power and accomplishment, for nearly fifteen minutes before Marie started to stir. She let out a little groan, trying to lean forward and sleepily realizing that she was being held in place. This seemed to alert her, her eyes flaring open and her legs standing upright. She looked around feverishly, taking in her situation: aching head, stark naked, bound to an iron bar in a coat closet, being watched with malicious intent by a man she had been sleeping with quite regularly over the past two months.

      She tried to speak, a single syllable trapped by the duct tape. A sound that he thought as a question: “What?”

      It was the only word she could get out as the severity of the situation came slamming into her.

      He walked up to her and cupped her chin in his right hand. She jerked back away from him only to find that it caused her bound arms to pull back at an awkward angle. He slowly ran his hand down from her chin, across her right breast, toward her inner thighs. For the first time since they had started sleeping together, she closed her legs to him as he explored downward.

      He laughed at her. In return, she tried screaming through the tape. It sounded like someone might be running a vacuum cleaner elsewhere in the apartment. He had shut her mouth off well, stretching the tape from ear to ear, reinforced three times.

      “No need for that,” he said. He did his best to ignore his flesh-driven needs and the excitement that pinged every nerve in his body. There were important things to get down to here—things to discuss and sort out.

      She moaned in response, silenced by the tape.

      “There are some things you and I need to talk about,” he said. He then showed her the gun he had been hiding behind his back—a gun he had picked up two years ago and had never used. He’d only ever picked it up a single time since purchasing it. And he honestly had no intention of using it now.