The room fell silent; people turned their chairs to see. Though Vitor stared at me not Isak.
His face...Isak’s eyes shone with tears and I watched as one overflowed and made a shining path down his face.
Something was wrong. This room was like a picture two degrees off-center.
If I put my hand up and stopped him?
He’d cut it off.
“Red and I were discussing life. What do we all value in life? Money? Sex? Power? I value trust and I’ve discovered that a guest of mine has violated that trust. The guest of honor in fact. The lady we are here to farewell.”
To farewell. Me?
A joke. Tentacles of unease crawled my insides. He meant me, I could tell, especially when he stretched out his arm and unfolded his fingers toward me.
“Red.”
Something was terribly wrong.
The room teeter-tottered. Darkness ate the walls. My vision shrank until he was all I saw clearly, though I could hear the titters of laughter. I hadn’t eaten much but it was possibly about to be thrown up all over the table.
“What did you do wrong?”
“I...” I should not say. Whatever he intended to do would happen anyway. Being guilty wouldn’t help. Maybe he didn’t know what I thought he did.
“What did you do?” Rhetorical, not a command.
He picked up his goblet and swirled the tiny amount of remaining liquid.
I said nothing. Soon the scythe would fall.
“Vitor told me. I substituted while you looked away. I should tie you down and let them all screw you.” A flicker crossed his face. His eyebrow raised as eloquently as a courtier’s, then he lifted his head and shouted. “Everyone out! Fucking out! You!” He thrust a finger at me. “Will stay.”
I waited, glued to that chair as they filed out, most of them grumbling, some laughing. It was noteworthy how he had dominance over this varied audience. His house, his rules, maybe. More than that though, the walls had vibrated with his anger when he shouted.
When we were alone, he angled my chair out from the table, roughly moving away plates en masse. A goblet toppled and shattered into pieces that slid and glistened on the table cloth before me. Calmly, he sat on the edge.
“You tried to dose me with the poison Wolfe gave me.” His teeth showed fleetingly. A façade of a smile.
I let my lip curl. Mocking him was rarely possible but disappointment overcame prudence.
“Your sacred drug, yes.” If I didn’t get this out now, I never would. I hurried on. “You should use it. Can’t you see I was right? You’re a terrible man as you are now. There is a better way. There is.”
“Stand.” He beckoned and I stood, his girl on strings, his terrified girl on strings. “Lie on the table.” He pushed up the table cloth so the glass fragments were gathered in the cloth above the bared table.
I lay with my face turned toward where he sat – the skin of my face and arms stuck to the timber.
So quiet. I waited for the storm, the lightning strike. When he leaned over me, I felt him draw my dress up. When I was exposed to above my bottom, he paused.
“Lovely ass.”
He wouldn’t.
My toes dug into my high heels. “You said you wouldn’t –”
“Fuck your cunt? And here you’ve threatened me, tried to poison me. I’d be justified in fucking you with a whole set of steak knives and forks, let alone my cock. Did I tell you to drug me? No, I didn’t.” He tugged on a strand of my hair, pulled it across my face, let it fall away. “Red hair. I named you well. Remember your old name?”
“My what?”
My old name? He named me? The tunnel collapsed in on me, the one above that led back to my real world. Red wasn’t real? Who was I? Fuck, fuck, fuck.
And I whispered, “What’d you do to me?”
Evil reigned in this house.
Flicker, flicker. There. His face. I’d spotted something. A switch of expression.
But who was I?
“What’s my real name?” I blinked away tears. “Please tell me. Please!”
“Shhh.” He patted my ass. “You don’t need it anymore.” Then he stood and went behind me, I heard him unzip. “Just once. Hmmm?”
His cock pushed at me and I was wet, already, for him, oozing around his intruding member like a well that’d sprung a leak. How dare my body do that? How fucking dare it.
I even wriggled, begging.
“Just once...you slutty temptress.” He halted though, and a moment later stepped away.
Something hard, slender, and cold pressed into me, slid inside.
“One knife,” he murmured. Another length slipped up there. “Don’t move. Two. Only handles but imagine how fun it would be if it were the other end. Three. Feeling stuffed?”
The heavy weight of the cold metal and his quiet threats had me shaking.
“Stop. Please.” I’d forgotten my name and now this.
“Really?” He churned them in me as if stirring a recipe, then the knives slid out and clattered to the floor between my feet. One landed against my ankle before it slipped down to clunk onto the others. “Damn.”
I ventured a quiet, “Thank you.” My relief – that this was his limit for the occasion – burgeoned.
“Thank you, Miss Cuntworthy? What I see back here inspires me, makes me think I can go beyond what I thought was possible.” He lay on the table beside me, making dishes clatter, and pulled his splayed fingers down my face. “Look at those tears. I was worried I’d never let you go if I took your cunt, because I’d want to keep you and then my monster would find your secret.” He kissed my cheek, my mouth. “But you tried to poison me and I’m getting compensation. Keep your hands at your sides.”
He stood and levered my front half off the table by pulling at my hair. “Keep those eyes shut.”
I screwed up my eyes, and so I didn’t understand the sounds he created as they were mostly quiet.
“Let’s see what happens when soft meets hard.”
He dragged my dress up above my breasts and kept it there with a fist between my shoulders, then made me sprawl stomach down on the table again.
Bare stomach and there was cloth under me. There was sharp that sliced skin. Glass. My mouth opened, face contorting as I registered this. He had me lying on the glass. I went to rise and shrieked instead as he pinned me and the glass writhed in the cuts. Wetness seeped, glass sliced, blood slicked my belly.
Though I frothed out a mix of words and shrieks, he shushed me with commands.
“Shh. Shh. Small sounds. Only small. Open those legs wider.”
His first thrust rode me harder onto the glass. If he’d left big pieces I might be hurt irreparably, bleed to death, but I couldn’t scream as he fucked me onto them.
Each thrust caused a muffled, gurgling whimper.
“You’re going to come, dear girl. Let it build. Your pussy likes me. Ignore the blood, the cuts.”
I moaned, unsure where that noise came from.
Another thrust and I slid, shrieking quietly, arms at my side, with a small piece embedding in my cheek. Another, and I warmed below. Tinkles above my head as the uninvolved glass pieces tapped on each other.
“I could’ve...” he began.
A thrust and I gasped at the intrusion, the swell of cock in cunt, the mesmer hold on my mind messing with my perceptions. My clit liked being squashed to the timber and pulsed, rising.
Sex was a compulsive rhythm.
“Red? Is that your name? Come soon or I might find a big piece and fuck you with it.”
What parent named a child Red?
He tongue-fucked my mouth, he invaded between my legs. Lust injected, intensified, heating me like whiskey in my veins, as he reamed me, as the glass wormed further in. I moaned and my legs shook and tensed, shook and tensed.
“Your cunt’s sucking me in, Red.”
No. I groaned, blinking away the sweat, the tears, desperate to be me, and not his toy, even if I had to feel the f
ragments eating at me.
A violation was to be fucked on broken glass, worse was to be made to like it.
“No,” I whispered then “no” again, cracking my throat with denials.
“Yes. You can’t say no to me.” Another fuck and slide on cloth. Rocked forward, rocked back as he sucked out. “How I wish,” he murmured into my mouth, at my face. “I wish,” was said again to my neck.
Hot breath. So many wishes. I closed my eyes. Cock pushing into me. Pain? There was none. Sobbing, I pushed back, tightened, arched my butt, squeezing down. I raggedly moaned then mindlessly slammed into an orgasm like the obedient toy that I was.
And still he fucked me, shoved me across the cloth.
“...wish I could keep you.”
He jammed into me, deep, stayed there.
His own climax was a chaotic tide of pleasure merging with the shreds of pain, with every throbbing wound in my stomach and breast.
He had to turn me over to mop up the blood. I flopped there, on my back, arms out, legs apart, knees bent at the edge of the table. Dull within a foggy world of sloth, I watched him kneel above me on the table, flourishing some instrument. He’d gone away, come back. Bloody of hand, he held me, made me be still, as he plucked out glass and punched staples into my cuts.
If I screamed, it was distant. I could barely register my heart, let alone my screams. The ceiling faded in, faded out.
“Good little Frankenstein Girl.” He grinned, lowering the stapler. “Look at that. I fucked you and I still want to sell you. What a rush.”
I half expected him to giggle.
Not that he would.
I recalled the flicker of expression when he’d switched from less bad to this, before he’d fucked me on glass... He’d almost been nice. None of him was good. Over the years the goodness had leaked away and left mediocre evil and whatever this was. This thing he was now was barely human.
He led me to the bedroom and had me stand, wobbly though I was, while he dabbed iodine on the stapled cuts. Put me to bed, collared and naked. Then he left.
I was Red, wasn’t I?
The blood that was smeared and mixed with the yellow iodine on my belly seemed to underline that idea. One cut on my breast, one next to my navel. One on my thigh. A few tiny punctures. The longest stretched to an inch. I wouldn’t die from this. He still meant to get money for me.
I wasn’t Red. Deal with it.
He’d taken away my name. That was worse than cutting me. When I held my hands before my face, they trembled.
Despite the well of my tears and the waning shock, something incongruous about the room drew me to survey it.
In the gloom, in the far and shadowed corner, sat a huge suitcase.
CHAPTER 11
The slam of the car door entombed me in air-conditioned silence.
I sat, strapped-in by the safety belt, with an air bag in the door to save me if we hit another car, thinking about what I’d done to Red.
The red under my nails from when I’d stapled her wounds remained. Visible whenever I turned my fingers over. I’d soaped up my hands but left my red-red nails. Loved the reminder of her whimpers, of her squirms, as pain overcame my commands.
The wetness of the cuts had contrasted obscenely with the neat seams after I’d stapled them – snicksnack. My Frankenstein girl.
Maim her past wanting her? I grinned. Seemed that was almost impossible to do.
And in the very back of my mind I was rocking and saying sorry, sorry, over and fucking over. I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t like hurting her, shouldn’t have a hard-on at the memory.
My mouth twitched up.
My distant ineffectual conscience. Maybe if the last day hadn’t been so traumatic my ritual would’ve been better? The day after that woman had left me on the eve of our marriage. What a fucked-up time to remember and use as my gold standard of life-before-mesmer.
What a farce.
If she’d been a susceptible female, we might’ve had a very bloody wedding.
Sorry, not-sorry.
I let my back hit the seat behind me. Best I lose Red before she made me lose myself.
Sell her and forget her.
CHAPTER 12
The suitcase was red.
If I did nothing, I was going to be a sex toy for a criminal. It couldn’t be good, might be worse than Isak. He’d hinted I might be tortured. Though dead was worse than alive, most times. I imagined an existence of constant pain that might make a person beg for death.
I should be vomiting at the prospect.
In the middle of the night, alone on the bed, I did sit against the headboard for a while, hiding in my hair, my hands at my head, or my fingers stuffed in my mouth, as if that might keep me safe. The cuts throbbed an unpleasant reminder. Normal? Hell, no. And if it hadn’t been for the application of Isak’s will that seeped through the house and into my being, I’d be slumped in a corner shaking.
Should I be raging at someone. Yelling? I’d lost sight of normal. My forefinger ended up with tooth marks, and blood-colored bruises.
By morning I came to the conclusion Isak had gone somewhere. Left the villa. Perhaps to arrange the final points of my sale.
Vitor confirmed it when a servant wheeled in breakfast.
Neither of them blinked at the sight of the staples on my body.
“When he’s back, you’ll be going soon after.” No elaboration except for, “You can wander around in here, to pee and whatever. He said so. But not out there.” Vitor nodded at the deck.
Then he walked out. As if...as if he knew I wasn’t going anywhere.
Eat, then a long hot shower, washing myself clean, hissing at the stings, trying to unfog my brain. I sat in the stream of water, getting tile marks on my back, thinking.
Collared but free. I had a hankering to examine the desk, and that suitcase.
When dry, I wrapped myself in a fluffy white towel and padded over to the desk. His place. I’d raided it before, taken the capsules.
This time I searched thoroughly, not having to worry about Isak catching me. I found the knife, of course, set it aside on the desk top, next to a sculpture of a hunting dog. If Vitor watched via some camera, now would be when he’d burst in.
He didn’t. I waited some more, watching the wall clock tick through ten minutes.
He wouldn’t let me keep a knife, if he knew?
No.
A flaw then. They expected zombie girls to be obedient. But I wasn’t one of them. How long did I have before Isak came back? Could I kill him?
Could I stick this sharp point in his chest or stomach and drive it home?
I sighed, poked the knife handle. No.
So I sat in the chair and searched the other drawers, found the little diary of the day he caught me and he talked to the man, Wolfe. The top pages were dog-eared. The bottom ones were less so. The pages were out of order and the lower ones were those that detailed his earlier life. His fiancée. His almost wedding. It seemed he’d not read these for a while.
My god. He was a human after all. Sitting in a fluffy towel, in a gorgeous room looking out over the sea, remembering what he did when he was bad...I became sad, and how dumb was that.
The suitcase had been sitting like a living lump waiting for me to attend to exploring it. I walked to it. Very wide. Two and a half feet. Four foot long? When I unclasped and unzipped and opened out the side, I found leather straps inside, at middle, and at both ends. The arrangement at one end was clearly meant to take a head. There were covered holes as if to allow someone to look in...or for breathing.
This was meant for a person. I took a few shaky steps backward. For me, most likely...to transport me.
“Holy fuck.” Why couldn’t the man do anything without invoking terror?
My head wasn’t doing its thinking job very well, of course – blame that on Isak mindfucking me. It wasn’t until late in the day that I realized I could run. I could’ve run any time, since he’d left me.
I
sprinted through the implications, vomiting logic.
Isak was gone.
I’d glimpsed a boat with an outboard motor below the decks. I could go.
Simple. Just, maybe, wait for darkness.
I found clothes – underwear, shorts, and a top that fitted. Miraculous. When did the man let his victims have clothes?
“When is he coming back?” I casually asked Vitor, when I saw him.
“Late. Ten maybe. Eleven. You eager to go to your new owner?” I couldn’t tell what this man was thinking. His face was as readable as cardboard, though it bore lines, so he must be able to smile. Probably when someone died.
“No.”
That drew a laugh. First ever.
Fuck you.
Ten o’clock. I had hours. The sun was down at six, approximately.
I would do this. What did I need? Or rather what did I dare to take? Knife. Food and water would be nice but I’d leave with nothing but myself if I had to. They’d scour the waters for me, maybe use a floodlight, expect me to stick to land, so I’d chance it and go directly out. No storm, light winds.
And if the boat had no fuel? Pfft.
I could do this. No matter what.
From the noises, the house seemed mostly deserted.
At ten past six, I walked out onto the deck and paused. If he was coming... No footsteps sounded. Just the susurration of my breathing and the sea. I found the stairs that led down and sneaked to the next level, went past the landing, and kept going.
The ground floor was below. The steps leading to the beach and the boat were a few paces away.
Vitor pushed through the door that led outside, staring at a cell phone, then he raised his head and saw me.
So I stabbed him. The knife tip punched through his shirt. Shock hit his eyes. He flailed then sagged. Blood welled. I kneed him, hard, pushed him, left the knife in so he didn’t spurt blood all over me.
The pain of my own cuts made me clasp a hand to my stomach.
What else could I do? Hand to hand combat wasn’t foreign to an agent. Or knife play. Gun would’ve been nice but noisy, was all I thought as he staggered, fell against the closing door, slid to the floor, and died, gargling his last breath.
The Book of Red: ISAK & Red and bonus prequel Used Page 6