Authors: Kate Kinsey

Red (33 page)

Chapter 40

I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.

—A
NAIS
N
IN
,
Delta of Venus

T
here had been no commitments made, but most of his clothes were now in Gina’s closet and his toothbrush snuggled up to hers in the bathroom.

Hanson was pretty damned happy about that.

She was on the sofa, with a pillow behind her head and a blanket tucked around her. She was watching
The Usual Suspects
again, one of the DVDs that Griggs had brought over.

Hanson stumped over to the chair and fell into it, letting his crutches clatter to the floor.

“It’s late,” she said, turning down the volume. “Bad day at the office, honey?”

“Something like that.”

“Griggs brought over pizza. There’s plenty left. You want a beer?”

“No, thanks. And you can’t have one, either. Not with the meds.”

He watched her move toward the kitchen. She was still slow, but she didn’t suck in her breath every time she moved now. She had told him to stop fetching and carrying for her, or she’d never improve.

“I know. I’m getting another glass of tea.”

Hanson stared at the television until she’d come back and resettled herself.

“So?” she asked. “Are you gonna tell me what kept you so late?”

He looked at her, feeling very tired.

She was so beautiful, even with the ring of fading green around her eyes.

He pulled a plastic bag from his coat and tossed it onto the coffee table.

Inside the bag was a tire thumper.

She looked at him, and neither spoke for a very long minute.

“Imagine you’ve got a string of murders, victims all linked together in a tidy little package,” Hanson said softly. “And there’s somebody else who could be made to fit into that package with very little effort. If you hated that person, it might be tempting to slip in a murder of your own, don’t you think?”

“Some things,” she said carefully, “are better not to think too much about.”

“Funny, Daubs said something like that to me after you shot Knoll.

“I can’t help thinking, you took an awful big risk shooting him like that. You broke every rule in the book about dealing with a hostage situation.”

“I just reacted. I told you, I had a shot and I took it.”

“Still, we never got to question him, did we?”

Hanson nodded toward the thumper. “You didn’t even bother to clean it very well. You just dumped it back into Quinn’s toy bag after you’d used it to bash his brains in. You knew we’d already tested it, so we wouldn’t even look at it again. Lucky for you, no one noticed that the evidence seal on the bag had been broken.”

He waited for her to say something. Anything.

“So why
did
you look at it again?” she asked.

Hanson shrugged. Suddenly he felt very weary.

“Daubs claimed he didn’t kill Quinn.” And there was something in his face when he said it. Like he was enjoying a private joke. He knew you’d done it, somehow he had guessed, and he thought it was funnier than shit.”

“So you checked the thumper in Quinn’s bag,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “Did you tell anybody else?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“I didn’t go there to kill him,” she said, so softly he could barely hear.

“So you were the one that called him that night?” Hanson asked.

She ducked her head into her hands, then took a deep breath and looked up again. But she still did not meet his eyes.

“He left a message for me—”

“Can I hear it?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said wearily. “I deleted it, naturally.”

Hanson felt the muscles in his chest clench. He could still check the phone records, to see if she were telling the truth . . . If he wanted to.

“He said he had things to tell me—”

All day he’d been imagining how it might have happened. How Quinn had lured her to his studio, how that smug little bastard had tried to get under her skin with more of his mind games. Or had Quinn gotten physical with her?

“He said he would tell me what he knew, but only . . . Only if I let him use me, one more time.

“Don’t you understand?” she begged, tears unshed along her lower lashes. “I hit him, I pushed him away—”

“And he got angry.” It was more a statement than question. Hanson shut his eyes, trying not to let the images form in his mind.

“I got angry,” Gina snapped. “I was so . . . Goddamned furious! That he thought I was just this, this . . .
thing
he could take like he always did!

“The thumper was there, and I grabbed it, and I hit him. I hit him again and again, and then when I realized he wasn’t breathing anymore . . .”

Now she was crying, silently with tears slipping down her cheeks. She brushed them away angrily.

“I thought I could make it look like just another victim. But I had to . . . to do all the things that the killer did.

“It was . . . unimaginable.”

Both were silent as time crawled by. Hanson watched her wipe her face with the bottom hem of her T-shirt, and saw the fading bruises across her stomach. Finally she looked at him, and she must have seen the struggle in his expression, for she got up and crawled into his lap, bringing her face close to his.

“Please believe me.” Her lips were close enough to his ear for her breath to tickle. “’I didn’t know what else to do.”

She took his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth; a deep, soft kiss that tasted faintly of lemons.

“I love you,” she continued, clutching his shoulders so hard it hurt, rubbing her still-damp face across his chest. “I don’t want to lose you. Please . . . tell me you understand why I had to do it. Tell me that you don’t hate me now.”

But he couldn’t find the words. His heart twisted, aching, rising into his throat and robbing him of speech.

She slid from his lap and stood up, wincing briefly before her expression went slack and dead. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked like a child: defeated, lost, abandoned.

He watched her shamble toward the bedroom with an odd kind of grace in spite of her awkwardness. Watched the shape of her ass stretching the satin of her panties, the way her breasts strained against the too-small T-shirt.

How could he still be so stirred by her, even now, after hearing her awful confession? He wanted her still. Not just her body, but her mind and soul.

He understood now. Whatever hold Quinn once had on her soul . . . she now had on
his
.

He wanted so badly to tell her what he’d done for her. That he’d committed cold-blooded murder to protect her.
Because I couldn’t risk Daubs talking, and neither could she.

In the doorway, she turned one final time, those amazing eyes pleading with a kind of naked need he had never seen there before.

“Please,” she said again in a small voice. “Come to bed.”

And, with one small prayer of contrition to whatever God might be listening, he did.

K
ATE
K
INSEY
is a lifelong writer who has been very involved in the BDSM community on both local and national levels. Education within the community is one of her passions

“Sex,” says Kinsey, “is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. It affects who we are and how we feel about ourselves. When that drive carries shame and repression, it cripples us in a very real and pervasive way.

“The stereotype that people who embrace BDSM—or indeed, any kink considered outside the mainstream of ‘normal’—are somehow sick or damaged could not be further from the truth. It takes courage and self-awareness to seek out the things that fulfill and satisfy us. People who do what we do are among the healthiest and happiest people I know.”

To learn more about Kate and BDSM, visit her at
www.katekinsey.weebly.com
.