Not if you don’t get caught, a helpful little voice offered.
I shook my head. Now wasn’t the time to have an internal debate with my intrusive thoughts. There was nothing to say this wasn’t just a simple home invasion. Crime rates were average in this part of the city – not as high as some parts but not as safe as others. Aly’s car wasn’t in the driveway because she’d taken an Uber home. The person on the other side of the door probably thought the house was empty. It was only my catastrophizing brand of generalized anxiety that made me immediately assume it was something more nefarious.
I focused on the door, plastering myself to the wall as I neared it. Once the potential burglar got the knob unlocked, they’d realize there was still a deadbolt, and I didn’t want them to break Aly’s door and rouse the whole neighborhood with the noise. Slowly, silently, I reached out and painstakingly slid the bolt free.
Now I just had to decide what to do when they tried to enter. Stand here with a gun pointed right in their face, or hide somewhere nearby and jump out at them from –
The door flew open.
I reacted instinctually, all thoughts gone from my head, my body moving on its own thanks to the years I’d spent practicing martial arts. My fist pistoned out as a man wearing a balaclava like mine stepped into view. I threw my full weight behind the punch, picturing my knuckles moving through his head like my first karate teacher taught me all those years ago.
My fist crunched into his face as I cold-cocked him, and he collapsed in the open doorway like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
To ensure he was out, I hauled him up by the shirt front and shook him. His head bounced around in a boneless way that was hard to fake. I lowered him carefully to the floor and shut the door behind him, relocking the deadbolt in case he had a partner waiting nearby. Between the balaclava and the large backpack he wore, this was looking more and more like a home invasion.
The sound of an indrawn breath drew me up short.
No. She. Didn’t.
I clenched my jaw and turned to see Aly standing not five feet away with her gun pointed at the intruder. Of course, she hadn’t listened and stayed put in her room.
I narrowed my eyes at her, but she was lasered in on the unconscious man and didn’t see the censure in my gaze. “We are 100% about to have our second fight.”
Her face was pale in the darkness, her expression drawn with what looked like genuine fear. Instead of some snarky response, she motioned at the man with her gun. “Take his mask off.”
“Aly,” I said, wariness snaking up my spine.
“Do it,” she bit out.
I reached down and yanked the man’s balaclava free.
God. Fucking. Damnit.
It was Bradley Bluhm.
His face was still swollen from his previous beating, and his nose was now ruined, too, blood gushing down his mouth and chin, but there was no mistaking the rapist – and most likely murderer if the cops were correct in their suspicions – that Aly had a run-in with last night.
The implications of him being here were horrifying. Aly had pissed him off, called him a coward, and he’d tracked her down to do what? Get revenge? Make her his next victim? If not for the alarm I’d set, we might have woken to the sound of him kicking in the back door. He could have caught us off guard and done something to Aly before I realized what was happening.
The sound of her chambering a round snapped me out of it. I wheeled toward her, my arms outspread in front of Brad’s prone form. “You can’t shoot him.”
She immediately pointed the gun toward the floor but still motioned at me with it. “Move.”
“No. Aly, listen to me,” I said in my normal voice. Talking like Batman was giving me a sore throat, and I’d already slipped up enough that it felt foolish to keep the charade going. “If you shoot him, you’ll wake the whole neighborhood, and then someone will call the cops.”
She flicked the safety into position and set the gun on the nearby table. “Fine. We’ll beat him to death. Quietly. I know people who can dispose of the body.” The look on her face as she strode forward told me she was dead serious.
I held my hands up to stall her. “Think for a second. He has a backpack.”
She stopped at Brad’s feet, fingers curling into fists, her face a thundercloud. “So, what?”
“So, he might have a phone in there,” I said. “And if he does and then goes missing, it will get traced straight to your house. Grab me a pair of those latex gloves so I can check.”
Her expression turned mutinous, but after a tense moment, she stomped away from me toward a kitchen drawer and produced the requested gloves.
I tugged them on and riffled through Brad’s backpack, my rage returning tenfold as I realized I was looking at a kill kit: zip ties, rope, a bottle of chloroform, trash bags, a serrated knife, bleach, rags – everything you would need to murder someone and then clean a crime scene. It made me certain that Brad had killed before. You didn’t get this bold unless you’d gotten away with it a few times.
I knew that better than most. When I was six, I found one of Dad’s victims in our basement freezer. He said it was a mannequin and he was going to play a prank on Mom with it, and if I told her, he would beat me, so I kept my mouth shut and only realized when he got caught what I’d really seen.
I moved on to the smaller pockets, but there wasn’t a phone in them either, so I set the bag down and flipped Brad over, checking his jeans and jacket. Nada. He wasn’t as sloppy as I thought, which was as relieving as it was concerning. On the one hand, I might get the chance to enact my plan to end him; on the other, there was still a risk that his phone was somewhere nearby, most likely left in a parked car.
“No phone?” Aly said.
I sat back on my heels. “No phone.”
She stepped forward and hammer-stomped Brad’s crotch so hard that his legs lifted off the ground. He wheezed and curled in on himself like he was starting to come out of it. I might have been planning the man’s death, but I still wanted to puke, thinking of how much that must have hurt. Before I could stop her, Aly stomped on his ribs next. A crack ricocheted through the room, and then a low, tortured moan as the pain pulled Brad back to reality.
“No, you don’t,” she said, leaning down and punching him in the temple so hard it snapped his head around. He went boneless again, and Aly straightened, shaking her arm out. “Fuck, that hurt.”
I took her hand, inspecting her knuckles in the dim light. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “Did I see rope and a knife in his bag?”
I pulled her into a hug, both of us trembling with unspent adrenaline and more than a little fear. “Yeah.”
“He came here to rape and kill me,” she said.
“Most likely.”
I tugged her closer, petrified on her behalf, on behalf of all women, because men like Brad were something they had to worry about constantly.
God, I was a fucking asshole. Brad and I might not have had the same intentions, but we’d both broken into Aly’s house, and I hated the idea that I’d caused her similar distress. What had I thought to myself less than two weeks ago? That I would never regret what I’d done? I wanted to go back in time and kick the shit out of my past self for it now. This kind of violation was unforgivable, and I couldn’t believe Aly had given me a chance instead of shooting me in the face like I deserved. If I had to spend the rest of our time together making it up to her, I would, happily.
“Brad needs to die,” she said, her voice muffled from how tight I held her to me.
“He does,” I agreed. “But I can’t be the one to do it, and I don’t want that for you either.”