Cold-Blooded Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

  There’s nothing that’s going to stop David from killing me.

  He’s an out of control monster. Real. Breathing. Not a movie bad guy that will receive an Emmy for portraying such truths. There is no fair play here, there is no long monologue where I get to reach for his gun and exact my revenge. This is it. My real end. This sucks, and it isn’t the way I wanted my life to end, but you don’t get to pick this kind of shit in your life.

  I will promise you this, the man better kill me quickly, because the minute that man comes close enough, and I can get my arms to move, I’m fighting with everything I have left in me.

  “And what’s fun, is that this time, I don’t have to bother making this look like a suicide. I can just torture and kill you slowly, because everyone but that fucking nutcase writer thinks you’re dead.”

  Blacking out. Hard to breathe.

  “Do you think your little writer will come and save you?”

  Yes, I wanted to say. Yes, if he knew where I was, yes he would, but my mouth wouldn’t move.

  “Just because you believe in something, it doesn’t make it true. Just like you believe I’ve done some very illegal things, but, it’s not true. It was you, all along, it was you. Your name is all over those papers, but rest assured, he will find you, eventually. But believe me, he’s not going to want your rotting corpse when he gets here. Besides, wife, I left him a little note. He thinks you left him to start your life over without him. You think he’s too possessive and jealous and suffocating.”

  Drool dripped out of my mouth. I felt it stream down my chin and land across my chest. As soon as Kade finds out what you did, I garbled incoherently, you’ll be dead. He’ll blow your brains out in broad daylight. In cold blood, he won’t care. I know I’ll be avenged.

  “Having this power over you is intoxicating. Dance little puppet, hang yourself with my puppets strings. To you, Samantha, I’m God, because I have the power to let you live, or let you die. Every minute, I choose your outcome. Just like at the hospital. I will break you, my pet.”

  His hands tore at my shirt, fists pulled at my hair, bruised, and pounded on my skin. I could do nothing. Nothing to lift my arms to defend myself. Nothing to make him stop. My body was useless, frozen. All I could do was take the pain. Over and over, live through it, without giving him what he wanted.

  “Come now, pet…I want to watch the suffering. I want to see your tears. Give them to me,” he whispered fiercely, as he ripped my pants open with the knife. His clammy hands slid over my flesh, following the contours of my body, making my skin crawl and rage on the inside.

  Oh, God, no. Please, don’t let him do this to me.

  Trailing the knife up my stomach, he slipped it under the front straps of my bra, slithered the cold metal under one of the cups, and savagely sawed through it with the blade of the knife.

  He stroked my bare skin, and then brought his lips to my neck, raking his teeth sharply against the cuts and bruises that lay there. “Oh, Sam baby, your nipples are so hard. You like it rough, you little whore?”

  No! Not with you. Please don’t, my mind screamed.

  The cool steel of the blade skittered over my nipple, and drew circles around it over and over again. I waited for the pain, but there was nothing but the terror and anticipation of it, making me want to claw out of my skin.

  Scraping his unshaven cheeks over my breast, he flicked his tongue against my nipple. “I bet you’re soaking wet.”

  Lowering his ear over my heart, he smirked and wrapped the hand that held the knife around my throat. “I can feel your pulse beating so quickly, pet,” he whispered, darkly. “I can snap you little neck right now, can’t I, Sam?” Yet his hands slid down my sides.

  Oh fuck no. Please don’t let this happen, please. Please let this drug wear off. Please let me be able to fight back.

  Thoughts raced though my head as he moved his body lower on mine. “Your heart beats like a little hummingbird’s. I love your fear, Samantha.”

  Jesus Christ, how could I ever have loved this man? How did I not see the emptiness in his eyes? Black holes of emotionless shit. Please stop, David, please stop, don’t do this to me. However, no words could come out. I cried in silence, inside my mind.

  The tip of the knife skimmed down the swell of my belly, taunting me. Then he was tearing my panties with the serrated edge of the blade, as he laughed and licked the skin of my inner thigh. His tongue branded me with unimaginable terror. My mind screamed with panic and wailed for rescue. For something, anything, for the ceiling to cave in over us, killing us both, or my heart to seize up and die. But there was nothing. All there was were parted lips, heavy grunts of breathing, the smell of sweat from his efforts, and the pool of saliva dripping from the corner of my mouth. Dormant muscles, heavy and unmovable, lay paralyzed under the tip of his knife and under the brunt force of his body. I couldn’t even move the muscles of my eyes to look away. I wanted to leave myself, jump out of that skin and abandon its terror, but the terror rode me hard and held me steady. My extremities turned to ice, making me shiver from the inside, and slowly my blood flowed to an alarming sluggish speed. “Yes, pet. Yes,” he grunted. “Give. Me. Your. Tears.” And he gruesomely lapped up each one.

  I prayed he’d kill me after, because I’d never be able to look at Kade in his beautiful gray eyes again.

  Chapter 11

  My phone was ringing. I could hear it, muffled deep inside the blankets of the bed I was sleeping on. Yes, I was alone, thank you for thinking so highly of me. No, I have NOT touched another woman since I had my hands on Samantha. My dick was completely useless to me. The stupid thing was still waiting for Sam, protesting against any use of pleasure for me. Stupid, selfish-Sam-obsessed dick. I was lucky it still pissed right.

  I let the phone continue to ring that stupid bloody song that reminded of Sam.

  Five damn times.

  Someone called me five damn times. If I heard that song go off once more, I was going to crush the phone into little bits of crumbs, mash it in a blender, and shove it up the caller’s arse.

  Peeling my eyes open, I searched through the covers to see what bloody moron would be calling me at two o’clock in the morning. Stumbling around on the bed, I found the phone and read the moron’s name.

  Of course, it was Jennifer. I believed she was crowned Queen of the morons, and hundreds of idiots sacrificed their intelligence for her daily, because of the cleavage she always showed. Stupid tart.

  “Yeah?” I snapped harshly into the phone.

  “Do you ever answer your phone?” she asked, annoyingly.

  I sighed heavily into the phone. “What do you want, Jen?”

  “I want to know if you are okay!”

  “You do bloody realize that there is a five hour difference between where I am and where you are, right?”

  “What?”

  “Jen, it is two o’clock in the bloody morning! What do you want?”

  “Oh, shit. I thought you guys were five hours behind us, not ahead of us.”

  “Trust me, love, we are far ahead of you.”

  “Kade, stop making fun of me. You’re such a crude jerk. I’m just calling to see if you’re okay.”

  “Well, love, I’m not. See, I’m trying to sleep and my bloody phone keeps ringing and waking me up.”

  “Seriously. Your brother is worried about you and he doesn’t want to call and push, so I did.”

  “Thanks, Nurse Ratched. I believe he didn’t want to call because it’s two in the bloody morning. He never cares about pushing me; he’s like a thong, always trying to creep up someone’s ass.”

  “Are you…are you fucking drunk, again?”

  Yep, I might still be.

  Wait let me think…

  A bottle of brandy for breakfast this morning. One for lunch. Oh yes, and another for dinner. I believe I think she might be right, give the lady a prize. Crude, yep, that’s me. I have a perfectly good explanation for being so crude. I’m drunk as hell, and I have
an even more perfectly better explanation for being drunk as hell, but right now, I’m too drunk to remember. Which is perfectly fine.

  I haven’t been sober at all here, probably due to all the awesome pubs. Oh wait, now I remember…it was the bloody fucking fact that I had my heart ripped out of my bloody chest and thrown clear across the world. Double-stuff-fuck-everybody. I laughed loudly into the phone, “Bloody hell, you’re just a happy little bundle of bitch to wake up to. My brother is so bloody lucky.”

  “Fuck you, Kade!”

  “Mmm, sounds mildly interesting. Maybe when I’m deeper in my pit of despair, I’ll want to dive even lower and stick my dick into you. Yes. Have your bloody people call mine, and we’ll pencil you in. I’ll schedule some vaccinations first. You’re a nurse, you should bloody know… Do they have any that protect against stupid useless soul-destroying cunts?”

  She spent a few joyous seconds in what sounded like the slamming of her phone against a table, until I could hear my brother yelling and wrestling her for it. Being piss-ass mean made me feel so much better.

  “Who is this?” My brother’s voice sliced through her unladylike cursing on the other end.

  “Your brother,” I barked out a laugh.

  “What? Kade? Why the hell is my girl trying to beat you through the bloody phone?”

  “She sounds wrong in the head, mate. You should get that checked out.”

  “Oh, bloody hell, Kade, you’re drunk again? Fuck you.”

  “Mmmm. Incest. Yum. However, your clever little woman there has already propositioned me. Are you both so bored already? Have you thought about therapy? Ah, bloody hell, Dylan, I wouldn’t trust the whore though, since she was friends with that bitch.”

  “You are a miserable broken sod, and it’s no bloody surprise why she up and left you.”

  Click.

  Hmmm. Maybe now I could bloody sleep.

  And I did. Until I was sober again, the next day, and I found myself feeling half dead looking out the window, not wanting to do anything but write the world’s worst apocalyptic horror story, where no one survives. Maybe I’ll start with a beautiful ginger haired heroine, who contracts a raging infectious disease from wherever the hell she’d been hiding, and her stupidity and selfishness wipes out the whole of humanity. Maybe I should even name the character, Samantha Matthews. What could possibly happen, she sues me? Then she’d have to face me.

  I was starting to hate that woman.

  It had been one week. Seven days. A grand total of one hundred sixty-eight hours since Sam left, and things didn’t feel like they were going to get any better, they felt worse. I was deteriorating back to being my charming reclusive self. Fuck this world.

  Look, truth be told, I knew I’d get over Sam. I knew life went on, and all that crap my therapist would say. But Sam was my obsession, my addiction. She bloody made me quit her cold turkey, and I was going through withdrawals. I let her bloody destroy me. I wanted her to. I knew she wasn’t coming back, I knew it was over, I had faced it, yet, all I wanted was to be bloody well left alone, and nobody would listen. I stared at myself in the mirror for hours, wondering who the fuck it was staring back. Was that me? Surrounded by the cold lonely shadows, blood-red eyes, rambling hopelessly about a woman who I should be grateful for, showing me there was hope? The muscles at the back of my jaw twitched just beneath my skin. She might have abandoned everything we had, but she fucking loved me, and for that, I should be grateful, for that. I should sober up and move on. Let her go. Just bloody let her go. I had erected a fortress of isolation around myself; she was the only one to get in. She showed me how to live better, and I should. I bloody fucking should.

  My fist slammed into the reflection, shattered the mirror into shards of a broken me. Falling, scattering, fists against the cracks, until my reflection was gone. My head softly thuds against the place where the mirror once hung. Forehead to the cool metal, knuckles seeping blood, I say her words as her voice echoes in my mind. I’ll get through this. I always do. It feels like I can’t, but I sure as fuck will.

  Then my cell phone rang, yet again. It was one of those rings, too. You know exactly the one I’m talking about, that ring, the one that after you answer it. You knew it sounded different because it brought the message of bad news.

  The ominous ring screamed from my phone and vibrated little electrical shock waves through my hand. The number was unknown.

  “Grayson,” I snapped into the speaker.

  “Grayson, it’s George. Huge clusterfuck here. I just got word NYPD never brought in David Stanton. They had another doctor from the hospital they were questioning, some guy named David Resner. No one has seen Stanton since the day before the warrant was executed. He’s MIA.”

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t care less. Sam skipped out on me seven days ago. I don’t have a clue where the fuck…” I trailed off. My heart seized in my chest and convulsed. Fuck, no.

  Oh, fuck no.

  They were both gone for seven days? “What the fuck do you mean no one has seen Stanton? No one has seen him for the last seven days? Are you telling me he disappeared the exact same time as Sam?”

  “They have a warrant out for him, but he skipped town. No one knows where he is. Fuck, Grayson…I didn’t know she left…I thought we made her feel safe here…it’s a shame really, she would have made a great witness against them in court.”

  “George, shut up and think for a bloody second! Is there any way that, I mean could David have had a clue that he was going to be brought in? Do you think he knew she was still alive? Do you think he knew what was happening on our end? How did he know to leave?” My stomach wrenched with pain. “George. George, Sam…she wouldn’t just leave a note, would she? She…wouldn’t…”

  “What’s going on in your head, Kade?”

  “Last week, Sam left me a note in her office saying she was leaving me. She’s been missing for a week. She’s not answering her phone. She just left all her stuff in her office in the hospital and disappeared. She only took her phone and her car.”

  “Just left like that, huh? Same time that Stanton went missing? I’ll be right over, Kade,” he growled into the phone.

  “Fuck, mate! I’m in ENGLAND! Go to my house and talk to Dylan and Jennifer. I’m catching the first flight I can. FUCK! George…” I ran to the closet and started throwing my shit in my bag. My mother stood at the door to the guest room worrying her lip.

  “Fuck, George. Please…fucking find her. Just…I don’t even care if she fucking left me…just find her, okay? You just find her. Find her and if she left me, fine. FUCK, George, it’s Sam, my Sam…she wouldn’t just leave me like that…she bloody fucking wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah, Grayson. We’ll find her,” he said, disconnecting. The harshness of the dial tone throbbed in my ear.

  Anger ripped through my insides. “BLOODY FUCK!” I screamed, slamming my clothes together. Fucking hell, I bit hard at my bottom lip to stop my throat from knotting and my eyes from tearing. Fucking hell, she could be fucking dead.

  Dead.

  Dead.

  Dead.

  Glazed green eyes staring blankly into the sky. A pale bluish hue to her cold skin. Sticky congealed blood caked and drying beneath her once soft warm body. Purplish chapped lips open, empty of breath. Pulse still. Blood stagnant, thickening, drying, tissues rotting, seeping into the earth. My beautiful Sam, decaying, melting and crumbling into dust that flits away from my fingertips. I breathe in her ashes. Absorb them into the tissues of my lungs. She helps me breathe. Her and her cinnamon apples.

  “Kade?” my mother’s voice whispered from the doorway, shaking me from my imagery.

  I wiped at my face, zippered up my bag, and leveled a glare at her. Hands twisting hard around the luggage handle, squeezing it as if it were Stanton’s neck, snapping it completely off. I should have killed him long ago.

  “Kade, love? Talk to me. What’s happened?” Mum asked.

  Sucking my lips in, I couldn’t form the
words in my head. Couldn’t process the truth, the heavy fear that was eating me inside out. I crushed my hand over my mouth, squeezing my eyes tightly shut. Samantha Matthews would never have just left me with a bloody note. He fucking took her, he fucking killed her, and now I’m going to end him in the most brutal way I could possibly think of.

  Her soft hand touched my shoulder and I tensed.

  “They never had David Stanton in custody. He…uh…he has been missing as long as Samantha has been,” I mumbled, barely audible.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, giving my shoulder a bit of a squeeze.

  “It means that…fuck, Mum. It means she might not have left me and he just took her. Bloody hell,” my tears were falling. A grown man crying like a baby. “She could be dead. He wanted her dead. Oh, God. I didn’t believe she loved me enough to bloody stay, and she’s probably dead.”

  Opening my phone, I called my PA. Without even saying hello to her, through tears, I demanded she get me on an airplane instantly. Yelling and cursing, barking and ranting, I made not one shred of sense. Softly my mother took the phone from my hands and explained to Help Desk what was happening, while I slid down to my knees and finally broke down. I could hear none of her conversation over the thundering pound of the blood that rushed into my ears. All I heard, all I saw, and all I felt, were the sight, sounds, and feel of my hands around Stanton’s throat when I finally killed him.

  “Get in the car, love. Henry will drive us to the airport. Mrs. Heldist just booked us on a private, long-range jet to Adirondack Regional Airport. We’ll have a car waiting for us there. It’s about an hours drive from there, right love? We’ll be there in a few hours.” I looked up from the floor. My mother stood over me with a bright red backpack slung over her right shoulder, and stern determination across her brow. “Let’s go, love.”