Taint (Formerly Claimed) Dark Midnight 1

Chapter 14

Why are you here?

Eliot didn’t know how to answer that. 

To be fair, he didn’t usually find himself on the other end of such a question.

Whenever he broke into someone’s house, he typically never got caught.   

Or, on a more morbid note, back in the days when breaking into mortal’s homes had been the normal way he fed, he made sure to never get caught. 

Ever. 

Because he usually left the occupants dead. 

But Miriam wasn’t dead…and he had no intention of killing her.  So, he was left to answer that infernal question—for the first time in nearly a hundred years. 

“Your door was unlocked.”

She swallowed, and her hands hefted the bat a little higher. 

“I know.”

They were at an impasse.  An unspoken dare; who would go first?  Who would break the suffocating silence?

Eliot wasn’t inclined to do so, but the look she was giving him, eyes all wide in an effort to hide her fear, irritated him enough to try. 

“I thought that you were…” He fished around for the right word and only found two.  “In trouble.”

She gulped.  Her pale throat jerked with the motion, unintentionally displaying a ripe, throbbing vein right at the curve of her shoulder. 

Eliot stared.  She had such a nice throat actually—perfectly slender and white like ivory.  Even the thin, blue veins feeding her heart were clearly visible, snaking underneath.  He couldn’t help the way his eyes narrowed, taking it all in…and she noticed. 

Ever so slightly, she moved the bat higher so that her neck was hidden behind the wood. 

As if he couldn’t still hear the slight thrum of her pulse playing like a taunting lullaby. 

“W-why would you think that?” she asked.

 Her fragile brave routine was slipping; a moment more of this tension and Eliot knew that she would break. 

A dark part of him almost wanted to see it. 

Would she cry?

Break down in shivers?

Or maybe scream?

“I…I could call the police, you know?”

The tremor in her voice made him glance up—he was still gazing at her throat—and into those big, brown eyes.

He mulled over her words, but he already knew the answer. 

“But, you won’t.”

He knew it because of several reasons, actually.

One was that he could literally break her neck before she could even reach the tiny cellphone sitting out in plain sight on her desk. 

Though, he wouldn’t go that route, he decided. 

Another—the more obvious reason—was that with that clumsy grip on the bat, he could easily knock her off balance should she be brave enough to try and use it.    

Hell, a part of him almost wanted her to try…

Funnily enough, he got his wish. 

She shifted, aiming to dart for the desk—but he blocked her easily, in a motion so quick she barely even saw it.