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"I hate you."

"You keep saying that, and yet here we are …" He pushes my knee wider with the back of his wrist. "Open."

My thighs are shaking when he starts cleaning me because this is so intimate. More intimate than the sex I just had with Charles, or anything I've ever done with a man. Why is he doing this?

He wipes another man's release off the inside of my thighs the way he'd wash somebody's grandmother before her daughters come in to see her. Slowly. Back to the tap twice for hot water. His free hand is flat and warm on my hipbone, keeping me where he wants me. I have stopped breathing at this point. My face is on fire. I swallow hard. I am beyond mortified, yet I cannot move. I cannot imagine a moment when he’s not touching me like this.

And then he starts talking.

"I've had four years to think about how I'd do it," he says. "You don't spend that much time not killing a man you want dead without working out exactly how you would."

I feel cold sweat gathering on my brow. How could I have been so stupid with Charles tonight? "You're not touching him. This won't happen again. It’s over."

"Wednesday. He skates Wednesday mornings and hasn't missed one since he was nineteen." The cloth runs over my pussy, warm and slow. "He parks in the same space on level two every week, and there's no camera covering that whole area—it broke in February and nobody's fixed it because the company that maintains it belongs to me. So I could take him out of that garage and there'd be no footage of it. No witnesses. Nothing for anyone to find."

"Laszlo—"

"This time there would be no one else." He looks up at me. "That's what you keep not understanding. You think I'd make a phone call and have it done at arm's length. I wouldn't. This one I’d do myself." I know he's looking down at me but I don't return his gaze. This is too much. "My hands are good at this, and I'd take my time. Hours, Manon. Not minutes. I never do this, but there are exceptions. Like this time."

My hand is still over my mouth and I can hear myself breathing through my fingers. My eyes are shut tight but my body does its own thing. I should push him away and run out of my own house.

But his touch…

"I'd tell him who you belong to. I'd want him to say your name, and then I'd make sure he couldn't anymore." The cloth rubs over my clit and I gasp. "Then I'd take him back to Bedford, put him on my table, and do the work myself. I'd make it better than anything I've done for anybody. I'd do the best job. Jaw set, mouth exactly right. He'd look like a man who died in his sleep."

"Please stop talking."

"Open casket, because his mother will want one and she'll get one, and afterwards she'll hold my hand with both of hers at the door and thank me for what I did with his face." He wrings the cloth out. "I'd carry him myself. People find that sort of thing touching."

I’ve told Charles he'd be made to disappear and never be found. But Laszlo would be mad enough to produce the body and take care of it for burial.

Shit.

And my hips move. “You promised,” I gasp.

My hips lift up off the counter, an inch, and back down against his hand, chasing it. He's just walked me through murdering a man I care about and dressing the body for his family, and my hips are asking for more. The sound I make isn't a no. It isn't anywhere close to a no.

I put people back together for a living. I've had my thumb in a nineteen-year-old's thigh holding his femoral shut today. Now my body is betraying me, wanting a man who's kneeling between my legs and telling me he'll spend an afternoon killing somebody I’m supposed to love and then make him beautiful for the funeral.

I'm soaked and want him to put his mouth on me to finish me off. No matter what words are coming out of him, all I can think about is his fingers inside me, his tongue licking me.

The cloth stops moving.

He doesn't look up straight away. His gaze is fixed on the most intimate part of me, and I'm bare in more ways than one. He sees that the cloth came away clean two passes ago yet I'm still wet… He goes very still, and I feel his thumb move once against my clit.

Then he looks up, in my eyes.

He can see right through me. His pupils have gone wide and black and there's color high on his cheekbones. He is staring at me like a man who's just been handed something he's wanted for a lifetime and can't quite believe is his.

"Oh," he says in a whisper. "Oh."

"That's not⁠—"

"Tell me you're not fucking wet because of what I just told you. Tell me and the cloth goes in the sink, then I'll put my coat on and you’ll never hear about tonight again." He waits. He genuinely waits. "Go on."

I keep my mouth shut as I take heavy breaths.

Dropping the cloth, he puts his mouth on the inside of my knee. His hand goes where the cloth was, and he isn't gentle with it now at all. I'm drenched, and my heart is pounding.