“Do you have to kill to keep alive?”
“You mean like a vampire?” he questioned, take another sip of sake.
“Yes, like that.”
“No,” he chuckled. “I do not need to kill or hurt people for sustenance. Quite the opposite actually.” He noticed she was about to ask something out of turn, and raised a single finger to shush her. “Do you know how to cook food from scratch?”
“You mean like making noodles from scratch and things like that?”
“Making things without artificial ingredients and preservatives,” He rephrased his question. “I don’t eat things like that. I just want to make sure that when you are cooking for me, you make things the way I like it, not just tossing together some pre-made boxed abomination.”
“Yes, I can cook that way as long as you get me the ingredients and gave me the time to make it,” she said confident in her cooking skills. “So besides food, how do you survive?”
“Bad question number one, try again,” he smiled, clearly having too much fun.
“Then, are you dating anyone now?”
“Seriously?” he leaned towards her, a bit shocked she would ask such a childish question, and then back against the sofa dramatically. “No. I am not. And I do not. There’s no point. How many men have you dated? And anyone, before you were eighteen, doesn’t count.”
“Five, and why do you think there’s no point to it?”
“Bad question number two, try again.”
She had to be careful now. One more overstep and she was done.
“Are you really going to help me, or are you just messing with me?”
“A little of both, to be honest,” he admitted, resting his arm back on the armrest of the sofa. “It’s a mutually beneficial situation. Are you really going to help me, or get cold feet and back out when it’s time to get your hands dirty?”
“Oh, I’m in for the duration,” she promised stubbornly. “Would you kill me?”
“As of right now, if given a good reason, yes,” Levi replied, smirking. “I don’t know enough about you to be able to trust you. Over time that could change, but right now, if I needed to, I could definitely kill you. But enough of that doom and gloom, how well can you hold your liquor?”
“Probably as well as the average person. I’ve never participated in any drinking contests. I’ve also never had a hangover.”
“That doesn’t really say a lot,” Levi chuckled under his breath.
“Do you have any family?”
“Bad question number three,” he sighed, disappointed. “You really need to get better at this.” His voice dropped to a low, seductive purr. “Perhaps next time you’ll get farther with me.”
With that, Levi stood gracefully from the sofa and walked briefly into the kitchen to pour himself some more sake. When he returned, Madeline’s excitement had cooled, and he stole a quick glance at his cell phone before sitting back down on the couch.
“Besides the obvious, was there a point to all that?” Madeline asked, switching her game back on.
“Yes. There are going to be times you need to get information out of someone, and the majority of the time you’re not going to want to be direct. You’ll want to get bits and pieces in such a way as to not arouse suspicion.”
“But when I asked you if you’ve ever killed anyone,” Madeline responded, “That was pretty straight-forward.”
“True, but what is intrusive to one person, might not be intrusive to another. For instance, I don’t care if you know that I’ve killed because it serves a purpose for me by giving you that information. By knowing I’ve killed, it makes you think twice about crossing me. That gives me power. However, if I was someone in a prominent position, or held a respectable title, that question would have made me nervous, had I killed someone. Knowing that would give you power. Understand?”
Madeline nodded. His reasoning made complete sense when he put it that way.
Reaching for the remote, he continued watching his tv series, and Madeline went back to playing her game. It wasn’t much longer until the pizza arrived along with a bottle of wine. Her eyes followed the motion of Levi’s hips into the kitchen while he divided up the Margherita pizza and retrieved a glass of the wine. Taking their plates and her wine to the coffee table, Levi sat and began translating the series he was watching for Madeline, adding some witty lines that couldn’t possibly have been in the show, to see if Madeline caught on.
The rest of the evening comfortably unfolded, and Madeline found she was actually getting drawn into the odd series Levi was watching. Being in the company of an attractive and flirtatious man certainly wasn’t normal for her, but it was definitely something she could get used to. The more wine she drank, the more she found herself giggling at just about every word he spoke. She was tipsy and knew it, but couldn’t stop smiling at his roguish grin.
“Well,” he said, as an episode came to an end, “Time to get some sleep. Tomorrow I’m going to start teaching you about everything that you’re likely to come across, and hopefully, some things you never will.”
Levi smiled, absorbing some of the desire the wine warmed up in Madeline. It replenished the energy he used throughout the day, causing him to be just as wide awake as when he’d gotten out of bed this morning. Having her around was going to be incredibly convenient. Feeling the need to be a gentleman, or maybe it was his renewed energy, Levi gathered up the plates and glasses from the table and brought them into the kitchen to rinse them off and set them in the washer. In the room behind him, he could hear Madeline stretch, gather her game, and head off into her room.
“Goodnight!” she called cheerfully from around the corner.
“Goodnight,” Levi replied quietly. It had been a long time indeed since he said goodnight to a woman that was not already in his bed.
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