Deadly Desires

Playing psychologist

"They won't be dying quickly, I want them begging to meet their end when I'm through with them," Nikolai says. I nod along as I tear off a piece of bread and bite into it, chewing slowly.

"So you've said," I reply, looking at him. He shoots me a look and I sigh, I didn't mean to be frank with him. But I was bored, not working was boring and we were on week two of being unemployed.

But we couldn't be unemployed the fun way, we had to be even more undercover than usual. Shadowborn and Lotus both wanted us dead and probably had multiple agents looking for us. I had to move out of my apartment and drop off the face of the earth. Being on the run wasn't as fun or as glamorous as the movies liked to make it seem. It was tiring, and long and I was fucking sick of it.

"You swear they didn't touch you?" He asks me, sipping his coffee at a coffee shop near the edge of town.

"I told you I wasn't raped," I snap, my eyes narrowing at him, "So what if was. Then what? You don't care," I tell him. Nikolai gives me a strange look as he tilts his head to the right.

"The fuck are you on about?"

"You're psychopathic, you can't feel empathy. You don't care what happens to me, not really. You'd kill them all sure, but that's more beneficial to you. You just like hurting people," I say to him, looking down. I know I was approaching a slippery slope.

I wasn't even angry with Nikolai. But I had been subjected to torture for hours on end and I was still bitter about it. And now I was on the run. I wasn't feeling pleased about anything, and unfortunately, Nikolai was the subject of my misplaced anger.

"Don't do that with me Ivy, don't play the psychopath game with me," He says, hardening his grip on the coffee cup, turning his knuckles white.

And because I was a bitch with no self-preservation skills, I didn't listen. Instead, I chose to provoke him even further. I guess I just wanted to see how far he'd let me push until he pushed back. Only Nikolai didn't push back, he annihilated.

"Why did you save me from Dominic and Marissa? You don't care about me, you can't so clearly I must serve some purpose for you. What is it? What do you want from me-"

Nikolai reaches across the table and grabs my wrist, hard, forcing me to look at him.

I hold my breath at the hardened look in his grey eyes, "What about my behaviour over the past month has given you the impression that I don't care about you?"

"Is it even possible for you to care about me?" I ask him, trying to hold his piercing gaze.

"Ivy, psychopathic individuals are capable of forming attachments and caring for others in their own way, without necessarily intending to harm them. It's hard to manage and elicit those emotions out of us but it's possible. I care about you, you're one of the only people on this earth I care about," He replies, his voice filled with poison. 

I pull my hand out of his grip and I tuck loose strands of hair behind my ears, "Who are the other people?" I asked him, my curiosity peaked. I didn't want to fight with him, I couldn't.

Going down the road of what feelings Nikolai was and wasn't capable of would only hurt me. I was fairly certain I loved him, there was no way I couldn't be in love with him after everything. What hurt me though, was knowing he couldn't love me back. It wasn't that he didn't want to. He just couldn't.

Nikolai sits back in his chair, watching me, "My brother Damien...Alex...sometimes Josh," He tells me.

"Alex is the one with blonde hair, isn't he?" I ask him, Nikolai nods and I think back to the other names. I knew his brother of course and...Josh. "Josh is the one whose wedding we attended, his fiance never made it down the aisle did she?"