The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer
Chapter One
It happened by accident.One of life’s coincidences, where inertia and circumstance connect people who are meant to be together. It had begun years before, when he’d first met Cole in a stifling interrogation room.
At the time, Cole’s visits had been the only bright spots in the dreary monotony of Ian’s incarceration. He’d stared at his cell walls day in and day out and felt them closing in. Not even replaying each of his kills in the darkness behind his eyelids had made his heart flutter. What was the point of fantasy if he could never wrap his hands around another man’s neck? Never feel the life fade away, see the panic in another man’s eyes spike and then dissipate, like mist burning off under the sun?
Then Cole had appeared. Agent Kennedy. So young he still seemed to fluoresce neon green. Ian wanted to crawl across the room and pin Cole back, knock him to the ground and kneel on his chest, get his hands in Cole’s hair and his nose and his lips on Cole’s skin, on the delicate, paper-thin flutter of flesh between jawbone and neck. He wanted to smell Cole, inhale the essence of him. The smell of his fear, beneath the soap and the deodorant and the laundry detergent. The smell the dogs tracked.
Young, eager Cole Kennedy, working on his doctorate, newly out of Quantico. So motivated to crack the mind of the FBI’s most intriguing serial murderer.
How many months had they spent together? Days and nights lost their meaning, and Cole’s eyes became the sun and the moon Ian’s world orbited around. Cole’s voice, replaying in his mind, his memories changing until Cole was whispering in Ian’s ears, saying the things Ian wanted to hear more than anything else. Things Cole would never say. At least, not willingly. What would Cole feel like under him? He’d wondered, so many, many times.
The only drawback to his escape eight years ago was that it ended his days with Cole.
Six months ago, he’d landed in Iowa. New hunting grounds, where he could pick and pluck the men he needed, the perfect ones, when he felt that buzz in his fingers, the hum in his veins. That hunger, a desperate, howling need, the kind he quenched when he had his hands wrapped around a throat and felt a body struggling beneath him.
Suddenly—like a lightning strike—there Cole was again.
It had been a perfect January Saturday, the air crisp and brittle, the taste of fresh snow from the night before on his tongue. He’d been at the base lodge at Seven Oaks, a postage-stamp-sized ski and snowboard hillside north of Des Moines. To others, he appeared to be people watching, maybe waiting on a wife or a child to finish their day frolicking in the snow.
He’d been hunting, actually. Watching the herds move on and off the ski lifts, careen down the snowy hillsides.
He let his eyes linger on the single men. Alone. Isolated. Ledges State Park was due south, a perfect place to take a man and a car. Ditch the car and take the life. Only the right man, though.
Ian heard Cole’s voice before he saw him.
He’d never forget that voice. It still echoed in all his empty places.
He searched the crowds, scanning and discarding faces left and right, until he found the tall blond man helping a young woman on a snowboard to her feet. He was laughing, and so was a dark-haired man, older than Cole, standing beside him and helping the girl up as well. They both had their hands on her elbows, steadying her. Both had smiles stretching their ruddy cheeks. Both were laughing.
There was something about the way they stood. Angled together, as if they’d just broken apart to catch the girl. They’d been holding hands. He was sure of it.
The girl’s long brunette hair was braided in pigtails, the ends poking out from beneath a knit beanie. She was squawking, grasping the two men with both hands as her snowboard slid out beneath her. She was sixteen, maybe. He’d never been good at guessing young girls’ ages. He didn’t have experience looking their way, letting his eyes travel over their features. For a man like him, any girl under twenty might as well have been fifteen or eleven.
Was she Cole’s daughter? No. It had only been eight years since he’d seen Cole. Cole had been young and single back then. Painfully single, if the hours he showed up at the prison were any indication. No boyfriend or husband to go home to, no child he had to tuck in at night, whisper “Sweet dreams” to as he kissed her brow.
She was the older man’s child, then.
Older man. About the same age as Ian, now. Jealousy slid up his spine. He hissed, almost crumpling his paper coffee cup.
Tell me, do you like your men a little bit older, Cole?
Eight years where he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Cole, and on a bright, sunny day, Cole reappeared in his life. Happy, laughing, and with an older man and a young girl. He’d made himself a family.
Ian watched as they steadied the girl and led her back to the bunny slope. She turned around and waved as she stood on the moving carpet that took her up the gentle hill. Cole sagged into the older man, who threw an arm around Cole’s shoulders and buried his face in the crook of Cole’s neck. They were laughing again.
So happy. So fucking happy together.
Ian watched the girl bobble down the hill, arms straight out, teetering left and right until she reached the bottom. She was heading straight for Cole and the other man, and she clearly had no idea how to stop. She screamed and then pitched backward, landing on her ass in a puff of snow at their feet. And the routine of helping her up began again.
So fucking happy.
He’d waited for an hour, watching—cravingyearningscreamingragingneeding—until a man coming off the cross-country ski trails stopped at the base area. Ian’s gaze lasered to the man, taking him in micron by micron. He felt the quickening, the heat curling through his blood. He followed the skier into the parking lot, ditching his coffee cup on the way and making a show of looking for his keys. The man glanced at him and then away as he strapped his skis to the roof of his car.
It took nothing at all to come up behind him, to subdue him and bring him down silently. To push him into the back seat of his own car, restrain his hands and legs in plastic ties as he lay unconscious on the cold bench seat. Ian was out of the parking lot and driving the man’s car south, to Ledges, in under a minute.
* * *
It was all wrong.
He’d started the day needing to scratch that itch. He’d needed his moment, his hit, his rush, and instead had found the last thing—the last man—he’d ever expected. The skier was supposed to plug the chasm that had opened inside him when he saw Cole, like shoving chicken bones down a drain to block the deluge.
The man didn’t sound like Cole. He didn’t whimper the way Cole would if Ian were thrusting inside him. He’d had time to imagine how Cole would sound, unfurl the fantasy in his mind, all those days and nights over the past eight years.
Ian fell into the past and into the darkness as he growled, as he thrust. The darkness of a grave, water spilling over the muddy sides, soaking dead skin and swirling in eddies inside open eyes and mouths. His mind kept flashing back to Cole. Haughty, arrogant Cole. Delicious, delectable Cole. The way he’d smelled, the brief taste he’d managed to steal that day by the lake.
Cole laughing. Cole smiling. Cole holding hands with that dark-haired older man. Cole across the interrogation table from him, hungry eyes searching inside Ian, trying to unlock all his secrets. Both of Cole’s hands moving over that pencil, over wood and #2 graphite. A young man’s nerves, encased in steel but betrayed by his fingers.
Memories shook his world, made the center of the sun tremble. Snow puffed around the man’s face, screams rising as Ian squeezed tighter. The universe narrowed, focused down to the rush and the tremble of the man beneath him, a fish dying on Ian’s line. He whispered Cole’s name into the skier’s hair, and everything went white, his mind going nova as heat emptied from him—and for an instant, the hunger poured out of him while the man thrashed and weakened and then, finally, went still.
Ian breathed him in, nose buried in the sweaty hair at the nape of the skier’s neck.
Cole.
Wrong, all wrong. That wasn’t the scent he’d held on to for eight years. That wasn’t Cole beneath him.
His rush left as fast as it came, darkness and disgust sliding on its heels. Not what he’d wanted. Not even close. He sighed, pushing off the back of the man’s still head.
There was no substitute for Cole. He’d been a fool to believe that.
What would it be like to take Cole? What would Cole’s fear taste like? Not his youthful nerves. True fear. The slick heat of terror. The stink of it. Ian could almost imagine it, but the true essence eluded him, a shape in darkness or a shadow at midnight. There was nothing he could compare to Cole.
So many different layers to fear. So many different permutations. Different vectors that led straight to the quick. He’d poked at Cole’s psyche all those years ago, had tried to stir those primal fears inside his young mind.
Back then, Cole had so much less to lose.
A teen girl. A dark-haired man. So much fucking happiness.
Ian closed his eyes and imagined Cole spread in front of him. Tied down. Pleading. Terror soaking him. Would he cry? Maybe. If Ian was good enough, he could taste Cole’s salt.
He stirred, his erection rising again. This time he held his breath so the skier’s wrong scent couldn’t invade his mind, ruin the fantasy. This time, behind his eyelids, it was Cole beneath him. He savored the moment, running his touch up and down the cooling form. And when he came, he breathed Cole’s name, shuddering as he pushed his forehead between the man’s still, cold shoulder blades.
He gave himself another minute, letting the aftershocks quake through him, before he pulled back and tucked himself away. He sat on the skier’s legs as he pulled out a square of paper from his jacket pocket. After so many years, he could fold these birds in seconds.
Ian grabbed the skier’s hair and lifted his face out of the snow. His mouth was open, frozen in a scream, and it was easy to tuck the crane inside his cold lips, deep into the dark hollow. He pushed the jaw closed after. Rigor would take care of the rest.
Now, it was time to get to the grave.
