by Stella Hart
I should’ve known what she was up to the second she started looking at me like that and implying she wanted me to fuck her. Should’ve resisted her succubus charms and pushed her away.
Fuck.
If I were being completely honest, I did know what she was up to in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t enough to stop me. It was like she’d cast a spell over me. She was filthy and wild-looking, with grime coating half her body and hair that was stringy with grease, but she was still beautiful.
Too fucking beautiful.
There was some sick, soft part of me that had difficulty understanding the danger a girl like her represented, even though she was a murderous little bitch. That part of my mind could only process her stunning beauty, so when she started touching me earlier, plump lips spilling all those sinful words, I couldn’t resist. It took over the rest of me, drowning out even the strongest shouts of protest in my brain, and before I knew it, I was grabbing her and tearing her panties away, ready to fuck every hole she had until she bled.
And fuck, she wanted it just as bad.
When I mercilessly plunged into her the first time, she wasn’t quite ready. She was too tight, and I saw the pain-stricken wince on her face as I shoved myself deeper, inch by punishing inch. But then she started dripping all over me, soaking my cock as full-body shudders wracked her. She was greedy for me, raking her nails down my back and whimpering, demanding more and more until I forced her to come undone around me. Even then, I didn’t stop. I was greedy too, pounding her with the force of a madman until she was close to breaking.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
If only I could say this was the first time something like this had happened. But I couldn’t.
First I jerked off to images of Alexis from the bouquet camera for weeks on end. Then I made her get naked and blow me in the gazebo. Then I went into her dorm, touched her, and made her come on my fingers in the middle of the night. Each time, I promised myself it was the last time, but I should’ve seen the stark truth—my behavior was ramping up, and it was only a matter of time before I gave in and fucked her.
My overall plan seemed solid to begin with, but I failed to account for all that sick, twisted temptation. I thought I could be strong, so I pretended I didn’t see it happening. Then, like a window chipped by a stone, the slight crack in my resolve turned into deep fissures that spread until it finally shattered into pieces.
Alexis was the fucking stone. The weight on my shoulders. The fucking albatross around my neck.
There was no telling what would’ve happened if I hadn’t left her cell a moment ago. I already knew I didn’t want to stop fucking her. Every nerve in my body was sparking and begging me to take her all over again.
But I couldn’t. It was wrong. So fucking wrong.
She was the enemy.
I rubbed my temples and grimaced as I thought about it. It felt like a band was tightening around my forehead, squeezing even more regret out of my brain. I knew that falling for the wicked allure of Alexis’s pussy wasn’t the worst part of what happened today.
While I was cutting into her earlier, I couldn’t stop the guilt from rushing in, burying me in an avalanche of secret shame and disgust. It wasn’t that I thought she might be innocent—she definitely wasn’t. It was horror at myself for taking something so beautiful and trying to destroy it.
No matter how much I shoved that guilt down and told myself it needed to be done, it rose back up inside me and fired spears straight through my guts every time I looked up and saw those big blue eyes leaking all those tears.
What the fuck was I doing to this girl? What was she doing to me?
A thought bubbled up unbidden. I should end this. Let her go. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt this—the nagging feeling that what I’d planned for her was worse than anything she’d ever done. Even now, the mere thought of her anguished face caused a shifting sensation near my heart; a vicious pang that made my chest tighten.
No. No fucking way. I sped up my stride and balled my hands into fists.
What the fuck was wrong with me? Even though I’d left Alexis behind, rotting in the dark, I was still letting her get to me. It was exactly what she wanted.
I had to stop falling for her sad little acts. She wasn’t innocent. She wasn’t undeserving of punishment. She would gut me like a fish and bleed me dry if she were given half a chance, just like she did to those poor girls at Blackthorne. Just like she would’ve done to so many more people if I didn’t remove her from society.
There were only a couple of things that she was actually innocent of—she didn’t kill Emilie, and she didn’t kill my father or my Uncle Greg, either. I shouldn’t punish her for their demises, but the cold way she spoke about them drove me fucking insane. Sorry, but I’m not sorry, was what it boiled down to. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t have to feel bad because she thought her father was innocent of Emilie’s murder, and she definitely didn’t think she had to feel bad for the accident that killed my father and Greg because she was even more detached from that.
Fucking bitch.
I pushed aside the mental images of her face and body and let Emilie’s smiling face flash in my mind instead.
I still remembered every little bit of her, even though I was only a kid when she died. Those friendly brown eyes that always crinkled around the sides when she saw me. That little button nose that wrinkled and twitched with amusement whenever I said something silly. Her round cheeks, always pink with exertion when she chased me around the house. She was pretty, but not in a way I’d ever find attractive. She was too close to me for that. Like a sister. That was the only way I’d ever see her.
It wasn’t as easy to conjure up a mental picture of Uncle Greg. He wasn’t around much when I was a kid, so the details of his face had faded in my mind, but I remembered that he was tall with dark wavy hair, just like my mother. I remembered how much she cried at his loss, too. Just as much as she cried for my father.
Dad. His loss felt like a red-hot knife in the guts when it happened, and that pain hadn’t lessened over the years.
He wasn’t like most of the Arcadia Bay parents. Wasn’t cold and aloof or obsessed with image and reputation. Wasn’t from a background worth billions, either. He married into the Lockwood dynasty and even changed his last name to become one of them, all for my mother, but his attitude remained solidly middle class. He was a decent, hardworking man who loved and cared about his family above everything. He didn’t deserve to crash off a cliff and have his corpse ravaged by animals until most of it was lost forever, leaving us with only a few mangled bits and pieces to bury.
He should still be here today, but Peter Covington made sure he wasn’t.
Alexis was a real chip off the old block. She cried innocent, but I knew the truth. She was here to finish her nasty father’s dirty work and destroy even more lives. It was just like I said to her the other day. In all her mad delusions, she truly thought he was innocent, but in trying to exonerate him, she’d turned into the exact same monster as him.
She was a crazy fucking bitch, evil to the very core.
Every time I thought about what she’d done, it felt as if there were a flame inside me, filling my entire body. The rage gripped me, and I didn’t want to let it go. It energized me, and I wanted to stay in that hot furious state forever, ripping things up and slamming my fists into walls. Each destroyed object was a surrogate for the girl whose face and body I really wanted to break.
I knew I could turn her in to the cops and let them deal with her, but that wasn’t the sort of justice I wanted for her. I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to feel exactly what she made those girls feel, and I wanted to be the one to make it happen, as if I were a god tasked with judging and punishing the wicked.
The legal system favored rehabilitation over punishment these days, and in most cases that made sense. But in some bloodlines the evil ran so thick and deep that it couldn’t be fixed. It could only be stamped out with sheer force.
That was what I needed to do to Alexis. Stamp her out just like some mysterious vigilante stamped out her psycho father’s life ten years ago.
Doing that definitely didn’t involve fucking her brains out or letting her soft lips get to me with their pleas and cries of innocence.
I knew I was only human, and I couldn’t stop my body from reacting every time she was near, making my dick ache with the need to sink inside her and my fingers itch with the need to touch her. But I had to get control of myself. I had to remember the answer to one fundamental question: what did I want more? Her, or revenge?
Obviously, it was revenge. Cold, merciless revenge.
Regret sank cold black talons into my chest all over again, and I took a deep breath and shook my head. Earlier, I lost my damn mind.
It wouldn’t happen again.
17
Alexis
Nate didn’t return to torture me for four days. When he did, I was ready.
As soon as I heard his footsteps thudding down the cold, dark tunnel outside, I curled myself in a ball on the mattress and affected a pained grimace. “Stop,” I muttered to myself. “Please stop!”
Nate’s footsteps drew to a halt. There was a heavy clumping sound as he dropped his torture kit. “Who the fuck are you talking to?” he asked as he unlocked the cell and stepped in. “The voices in your head?”
I looked up at him with wide eyes, pretending that I’d only just noticed his presence. “Nate… help me. Please. Something’s wrong.”
He didn’t step any closer to me. He just stared down at me with a dispassionate look on his face. “You’re probably hungry.”
“No.” I shook my head and then added in a little whimper for extra measure. “It’s not that. You left enough food last time.”
“Obviously I didn’t.”
Another fake cry ripped itself from my lungs, and I squeezed my eyes shut and clutched my stomach even harder. “Nate,” I gasped. “I think… I…”
“You think what? Spit it out,” he snarled, eyes narrowing.
“I… I might be pregnant. We didn’t use anything the other day, so…” I let my voice trail away, leaving my statement hanging in the air.
Nate laughed. “Pregnant? That’s not possible. It’s been three days.”
“Four.”
“Whatever. Same deal. You wouldn’t know anything yet, even if you were pregnant.”
I grimaced again. “I know you usually wouldn’t. But the blood…”
“What fucking blood?”
I rolled over slightly and nodded toward the bucket. There were wads of toilet paper around it, smeared with blood.
“When I woke up today, I was bleeding,” I said, peering up at him through my eyelashes.
Truthfully, the blood came from the inside of my cheeks. I’d been chewing on them and spitting the blood on the toilet paper for the last two days in order to give my story credibility.
Nate took one step forward and peered down at the bloody tissues. He still wasn’t close enough for me to get anywhere near him without raising suspicion.
“We were probably too rough the other day,” he said, lifting a shoulder in a nonchalant shrug.
I let out another whimper and shook my head. “It’s not that,” I choked out. “Please just listen to me.”
“Fine.” Nate rubbed the back of his neck and rolled his eyes upward. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s not just the blood,’” I said. I paused and drew a deep, shaky breath before going on. “I’ve been having these horrible cramps for hours now. It’s not in my stomach, so it can’t be hunger. It’s lower. Feels like period cramps.”
“Then it’s your period.”
“No. It hasn’t been long enough. I had it when I first came here, remember?” I said. “And I’ve only been here for two weeks, unless my estimate is totally off.”
He rubbed his chin and stared wordlessly.
“I think the blood might be implantation bleeding,” I went on, faking another wince. “It’s when a fertilized egg burrows into the uterus a few days after conception. Some women get cramps and bleeding when it happens.”
From what I recalled from high school bio, egg implantation and the subsequent bleeding that came with it didn’t cause crippling cramps like the ones I was currently faking, and it also didn’t occur until at least a week or two after conception. I was counting on Nate being a typical ignorant male when it came to those sorts of facts.
There was no way I was actually pregnant, because I had a tiny contraceptive rod implanted in my left arm. It was the last thing I’d tried out to get my monthly bleeding under control. While it didn’t work for that issue, it still provided protection against pregnancy, and it was active in my bloodstream for at least six more months.
Nate kept staring at me, doubt flickering in his eyes. I let out another moan and scrunched my face up again.
“Fuck!” I groaned. “It hurts so much.”
He crouched down to look at the bloody scraps of toilet paper. Then he looked at me again. “You’re not pregnant,” he said. “Even if you were, why the fuck would I care?”
He spoke with conviction, but I could see a flicker of worry in his eyes.
It might only be a few-day-old clump of cells we were talking about, but I knew it would still give him pause. Unless he was a true sociopath, knowing that he may have impregnated me would activate some primal region deep in his masculine brain, and he’d feel at least a shred of duty toward me; the same way most men felt when they were informed they were going to be a father.
“Please, Nate,” I whimpered. “Just give me some painkillers.”
“No.”
I conjured up some crocodile tears and let them roll down my cheeks. “Please… I can’t do this,” I murmured. “I know you want to hurt me, but I can’t… I can’t be pregnant. Not like this. It hurts too much.”
With a sigh, Nate finally relented. “Try to get up,” he said, stepping all the way over to me.
He held out an arm for me to grab onto.
“I… I don’t think I can,” I moaned.
“You can,” he said. His voice was stern, but there was a slight hint of tenderness there too. “Let me look at you.”
“Okay.” I let out another moan and squeezed a few more tears out. Then I reached my left arm out and let Nate help me off the mattress. His strong arms wrapped around my left side, guiding me to a standing position. He was so close that his face was only inches away, and I could feel his warm, minty breath on my cheek.
Close enough.
I straightened my shoulders and brought my right arm around to the front. In my hand, I held the knife I’d purloined from Nate’s bag the other day.
My nerves were electrified, and my vision was crystal clear. It was now or never.
Before Nate could even process what was happening or react to my movements, I thrust the knife into his upper abdomen. “Fuck you,” I hissed as I sank it deep.
His eyes went wide, and he let out a choked groan. His legs swayed slightly, and I gritted my teeth and dug the knife in even deeper, silently praying I’d hit the right spot between his third and fourth ribs.
In all my research over the years into murder and mayhem, I’d learned a thing or two about the best places to stab someone if you wanted them to die quickly. The very best spots were high up, like the back of the spine or the carotid arteries and jugular veins. Unfortunately, Nate was too tall for me to effectively manage that, so I’d chosen to go for the liver instead. Wounds to that area were fatal if they weren’t treated immediately.
“I guess you were right about me after all,” I murmured as I gripped the knife handle, twisting the blade in his insides. “I am a killer.”
He couldn’t blame me for this. He always went on about how I’d evolved into a monster during my search for answers for my father, but he failed to see that he was actually the one who’d turned me into a monster. He’d trapped me down here in the darkness with
no dignity, no reprieve from pain, and no hope. That was enough to turn anyone toward terrible violence, if only to save themselves.
Nate reared back, wrenching himself right out of my grip. The knife went with him, still stuck in his abdomen. He sucked down air and dropped to his knees, wheezing. “You… you fucking bitch,” he spat out.
I watched him impassively as one hand weakly clutched at the knife handle. If he pulled it out like I thought he would, he’d do even more damage to his insides and hasten his death from internal bleeding. If he didn’t, he’d die slower, but he’d still die.
Either way, he was fucked.
“I knew I was right about you,” he muttered, staring up at me through heavily-lidded eyes.
“No. You made this happen,” I said, folding my arms.
He grimaced and took a deep, shaky breath. Then he slowly brought himself to his feet, still staring right at me. There was something so menacing in his eyes, so cold, that I took a faltering step backward.
“You’re fucked now, Alexis,” he said, clutching at the knife handle. His hand was surprisingly steady.
I shook my head and took another step away from him. “No. You are. You’ll be lucky if you live another three minutes.”
All of a sudden, he charged forward. His free arm shot out and shoved me, harder than I thought was possible for a mortally wounded man. My head cracked on the floor, cushioned only by the thin mattress.
I gasped and blinked, trying to clear the stars in my vision. Blood rolled down my throat and bile surged upward.
Coughing and spitting, I made it back up to my knees, breathing raggedly through the pain coursing over every inch of my body. That was when I saw Nate’s shoes right in front of me, spattered with droplets of blood from his injury.
With a roar, he kicked me in the guts and sent me flying backward. Then he stumbled to the cell door, slammed the bars shut, and fumbled with the padlock.