Chapter Ten
The days passed uneventfully from one to the next. I still thought of Alia—too much. Execute from the mind; I’d learned to do that well with other people, a practice I’d perfected when I needed to erase someone from my life. But Alia wouldn’t be erased that easily. She lived next door. She’d mangled my heart. My cellar still held the mysteries of a hundred scenarios that we’d never play out. My study bore the imprint of her submissive form slumped before me. And one of my upstairs bedrooms had a showroom’s worth of sophisticated spying equipment still trained on her private life. I could still smell the haunting aroma of her body, her perfume, and the sweet-sour fragrance of her wet cunt. Even my most sacred territory, the attic, was populated with late night images of her in
