The back door opened and closed again. Footsteps sounded in the kitchen, in the hall. She bit down hard on the gag and tried to beat back the tears with her lashes. Don't show fear. He feeds on fear. It gives him power.
"All right, Laurel," Danjermond said, kneeling down to untie her feet. "We're going to go for a little drive." He looked up at her and smiled like a snake. "To my little place in the country."
Laurel knew the action was both futile and foolish, but she kicked him anyway, as hard as she could with her bare foot, catching him square in the diaphragm. He fell back, wheezing as the air punched out of his lungs, the look on his face worth whatever price he would make her pay.
Coughing, he rolled onto his knees and forced himself to his feet with one arm banded across his belly. He leaned against the hall table, sending her a sideways glare of pure, cold hate.
"You'll pay for that, Laurel," he ground out between short, painful gasps.
She met his glare evenly. Don't show fear. It gives him power.
"Defiant little bitch," he said, straightening slowly. A fire lit in his clear green eyes, glowing bright as he came toward her. "Just as your sister was," he said, smiling. "Right up to the end. She defied me. Dared me. I think she quite liked being tortured. There was a certain… exultant quality to her screams.
"And she laughed," he said softly, bending over her, careful to stay to the side. He brought his face down even with hers so she could see the wicked pleasure on his features as he spoke. "She laughed as I took my blade and cut her breasts."
Slowly, he reached out and cupped her breast with his long, elegant hand, testing its weight, molding its shape. He rubbed his thumb over the hard nub of her nipple, around and around, his gaze locked on hers, then began to tighten his fingers, squeezing and squeezing until she could no longer hold back the whimper of pain.
"She was completely insane by the end," he whispered.
Laurel shuddered, trembling with revulsion as much as fear. She had expected him to strike back at her physically, but this was much worse. Psychological torment, giving her the intimate details of her sister's murder. She would rather have been beaten. And he knew it.
"She wanted the sex," he said, untying her wrists from the arm of the chair. "Even when she knew I was going to kill her, she had an orgasm. Even as I tightened the scarf around her throat, she had an orgasm as powerful as any I've ever experienced." He met her eyes once again, that slight smile curling the corners of his wide, sensual mouth. "But then they say death is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Perhaps you'll experience that kind of ecstasy, as well, Laurel."
She was shaking uncontrollably as he hauled her up out of the chair and tied her hands behind her back. Thoughts of Savannah flashed through her mind. Thoughts of the two of them as children, before Ross had entered their lives and twisted the paths they would take. In that moment she hated him as much as she hated Stephen Danjermond. More. But it wasn't going to do any good to dwell on the past. The present held a clear and imminent danger. She was going to need all her energy, all her strength-physical and mental-directed to getting out of this alive.
Danjermond guided her out of the house the back way and took her around the side to an old carriage house that now served as a garage. They bypassed the Jaguar in favor of an old brown Chevy Blazer. He stuffed Laurel in the passenger's side and closed the door.
While he walked around the hood, she twisted around awkwardly to see Jack facedown on the seat behind her. He lay motionless, body bent at an awkward angle, feet on the floor behind the driver's seat. The dark blanket had been tossed carelessly over him and covered him from chin to boots.
In minutes they were driving out of town without having passed a car or a pedestrian who might have taken notice of them. When they were well beyond the town limits, alone on the bayou road, Danjermond pulled over and untied the gag.
Laurel spat the wad of cloth out of her mouth, glaring at him in the gloom of the cab. "You won't get away with this," she charged hoarsely, her throat and mouth parched.
Danjermond flicked a brow upward as he slid the Blazer into gear and started them on their journey once again. "What a trite line, Laurel. And ridiculous. Of course I'll get away with it. I've been getting away with it since I was nineteen."
He chuckled at her involuntary gasp of horror, like an indulgent adult amused at the naivete of a child. "I was a college student," he began, leaning over to push a cassette into the tape player. Mozart whispered out of the speakers, orderly and serene. "I was an excellent student, naturally, with a great future ahead of me. But I had certain sexual appetites that required discretion.
"My father introduced me to the pleasures of the darker side of sex-indirectly. As a boy I once followed him on a visit to his mistress, and watched them through a window, fascinated and aroused by the games they played. I followed him many times after that before I realized he knew. When I was fourteen, he allowed me to visit her myself. To be properly initiated.
"I learned the privileges of wealth and the wisdom of discretion early on. So I knew better than to appease myself with a coed. Whores are much better at pleasing a man, anyway, and so much more expendable. I got carried away with one. Strangled her while we were in the throes of passion.
"No one ever suspected me. Why would they? I was the handsome, talented son of a prominent family, and she was just another whore who fell victim to a professional hazard."
Laurel listened, shocked and repulsed at the lack of feeling in his voice. He was completely without remorse, completely devoid of conscience. Emotionless, soulless; he had said so himself that day at Beauvoir. There would be no appealing to his sense of mercy or humanity, because he didn't have any. Escape was their only hope, and that hope was so slim as to be nearly nonexistent. She couldn't leave Jack, couldn't take him with her even if she could somehow get away. And what chance did she have out here, barefoot with her hands tied behind her back? None. If Danjermond didn't get her, something else would.
They turned off the bayou road and onto a narrow dirt track that led deeper into the swamp. Branches slapped at the sides of the truck as it crept down the path. The growth was so thick, the headlights barely penetrated. Laurel felt cocooned within the dark confines of the Blazer, cocooned in a bizarre world where Mozart played while a murderer calmly told her his life story.
She tried to memorize the turns they took, tried to gauge how far they had gone, but everything seemed distorted-time, distance, reality. Her arms ached abominably from being held in such an unnatural position. Every lurch of the truck sent pain shooting between her shoulder blades.
She glanced into the backseat at Jack, and her heart flipped over as his left eye blinked open for a moment. He was alive. Though not much, it was something to hang on to.
"You surprised me, Laurel," Danjermond said. He slowed the Blazer to a crawl as he piloted it through a shallow stream. As they climbed back onto what passed for solid ground out here, he stared at her across the cab, his lean face lit by the glow of the dashboard instruments. "I really didn't think you would break into my home. Even after you lied to Kenner, I believed you were too 'by the book' for that."
"I don't give a damn about the book," she said. "I believe in justice. I'll take it whatever way I can get it."
He smiled at that, truly pleased, and faced forward again as the path turned and ran along a bank. "I was right. You're much stronger than you thought, Laurel. It's really too bad I had to catch you with evidence that could incriminate me. I would have enjoyed a longer game."
He would have put her through Scott County all over again-the accusations, the disbelief, the desperation, all of it-for his own amusement. Laurel wanted to berate him for calling life and death a game. She wanted to rail at him for playing with the system he had sworn to uphold, but there seemed no point in it. He believed he was above it all-the law, the rules of society. And to date he had no reason to think otherwise. He had fooled everyone, had gotten away with the ultimate crime again and again.