The silence thickened. I looked up and felt certainty when I saw his face. The man was imagining dollars. Lots and lots of dollars.
Me? I was imagining sticking a knife in his ear. Red blinked at me. “But I want her wherever you put me.”
Ted rose. “Take that Keppra stuff off of him and lock them in the basement. Two men on the door, all night, armed. Put a bed in there. Check him hourly. Be careful. Midday, I will see you. I’m off home to see my wife.” He cocked a pretend gun at me and fired. “Bang. I will keep your offer in mind. Demo tomorrow. Don’t disappoint me.”
So this wasn’t his home. Or it was one of many. Maybe one he kept for illegal stuff, killings, kidnappings, the annual general meeting of thugs.
He left the room while his men were cleaning up and hauling Red to her feet. The front door opened. I heard a yell then both felt and heard the run of girl-child feet in a hallway, heard her shouting to her dad that she needed to go pee. She drew closer, with the adult steps trailing after her.
More startled yells sounded from the man escorting her into the house, as she ran toward my room. There was a dulled whisper outside, and I could have recited, verbatim, the words she said to the guy on the door. After a series of curses and a thump, the door was opened as if kicked. It banged to the stopper, bounced out a few inches, and there was Stephany, the boss’s daughter, with a Glock pistol held to her throat… Behind her, a man looked stunned, his face frozen and morphing into fear.
Of course. How could he have guessed she would lean into him and whisper a strange rude story then snatch his holstered gun?
By her own hand, the muzzle of the Glock pressed at her throat skin, denting it. Her eyes met mine and stayed on me, and I slowly levered myself from the chair as their voices erupted.
“Fuck.”
“What the hell is she—”
“Get it off her!”
“How?”
The initial gabbled exclamations from the men around her stilled as she backed into the wall beside the door. They weren’t courageous enough to snatch it from her, or stupid enough.
When her father, Fake Ted, entered the room, I waded into the silence.
“She’s obeying my commands.”
His expression lurched from confusion and worry to anger as he deciphered my statement.
“Touch me or Red or her, and she will blow her own head off.”
His teeth bared in a snarl. “How f— You cunt! Let her go.”
I smiled. “When I’ve been gone for an hour, she will return the gun, place it on the floor. She won’t remember what she did, so go easy on her. I want your car keys and a gun. Red and I are leaving. Interfere and bang-bang. Or more likely, one bang only, because her head will be gone. Come into the room and wait over there. All of you.” I pointed.
The girl was slim, fair-haired, and completely unafraid.
I gathered up a pistol and then Red, with a hand under her elbow, and we walked out of there, alone and untouched apart from the damage we had already suffered. I picked up our shoes in the hallway and was struck by the strangeness of sneaking along this hallway, barefoot. I might have been Peter Pan off to a fairytale world.
Peter was a helluva lot more innocent. So was Wendy.
Outside, nighttime was leaving us, and the stars had given way to a paling sky. The street was a quiet cul-de-sac.
We drove away in Ted’s glossy black Jeep. Red did the driving since she was in better physical condition than me. On side roads, I switched vehicles a few times, grabbed lone women who gave me their car keys without blinking. I kept doing that, every hour, until dawn fell… or rose. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure of up or down.
I kept the car when it was one taken from a woman who could logically think she had sold it, and her friends and relatives would not miss the vehicle. By then, I had gathered several thousand in cash. I’d get more.
That part was easy.
The rest…
The throb of pain had dulled but not enough.
“We drive north.” I’d find a place we could stay for a while.
Finally, I stopped the churn of my thinking and rested my gaze on Red. Her taut arm muscles and thigh as she shifted in the driver’s seat or turned the wheel caught at me. New scratches marked her neck. Those were from the enemy. Even recently violated and barely washed, she looked more angelic than anything had a right to be next to me. The red curls of her hair slipped over her shoulder. Her eyelashes glimmered for an instant in the dawn light. Cars washed by, going the other way in a distant roar and hum.
Her dress was ripped.
She was, I realized, definitely an essential part of my world. Didn’t know why. Currently, I did not care. The anger still swirled and possessed me. How dare he touch her, let alone have his men do it.
The headache fed more swirly mess into my brain. That repetitive litany sprang up.
Sometimes… sometimes it got me in a loop.
How dare I… How dare I…
I shut my eyes again and leaned into the seat upholstery. More painkillers?
I pulled the packet from my pocket, and it blurred in and out of existence.
Not those. Not those.
The sheet of ten Keppra pills taunted me.
I’d almost had a kid blow her head off. That was when it hit me. The monster was me. And he always had been me. Mesmer deformed and infected, yes, but still me. For some reason, right now, I was less monster.
The headache?
My hand shook. Was it that? Or was it the anger? The concussion? Or was it something I had missed? Either way, I would return. I, the monster would come back once everything had settled again.
When had I regretted doing anything for the last… was it a year? Two?
I had almost had a kid blow her head off.
What did the world hold? More than fucking? More than control over females? More what?
What else was there?
I could no longer understand what else there was that meant anything at all, but before I could change my mind, I punched out a pill and swallowed it down, choked it past my dry throat.
There, it was done.
There must be more than this.
Must be.
Now to see, what it would do.
To me.
I shut my eyes and fell asleep to the hum of the car.
CHAPTER 3
RED
Days and days may have passed as we traveled through this foreign, pale gray-green land. I should not be driving, my whispers told me. This was how my life had been for ages. Sounds were muted and barely there unless He indicated I should listen. I obeyed as I always had.
I drove until we entered a forested area where trees, greener than before, towered to either side. The trees fluttered as we passed under them, and I imagined them peering down at our passing vehicle, curious and mute. A strange feeling filtered through the grayness in my mind, and it said we were mere minions. Nature was playing with us. One day it would blot us out.
I wasn’t sure I would care if it did.
The red, low-slung Porsche slotted into a parking bay beneath a little house on stilts. It was a house that might walk, I decided, staring up through the circle of rustling, splayed tree limbs and falling leaves. Feathers fluttered. Tropical birds swooped – bizarre daubs of bright paint against a blue sky or darkened forest.
More days passed. Rain poured in and cleared, left the decking puddled, the window glass speckled.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I became aware of my existence, of being a real person, of being… me.
Aware of my hands.
I turned them over, examining a line of bone and tendon, and the crease at my finger joint when my finger bent then extended. The smell of lush rainforest moistened the air.
I lifted my head and breathed. I consciously breathed, for what seemed the first time in years.
I was still with him, with Isak.
With fucking Isak.
Scenes of putrid yet orgasmic debauchery pour
ed in, swamping me. He could make me come whether I wished to or not, make me want him, whether I wished it or not – this was the loathsome power of a mesmer. I remembered. Those memories were not perfect, yet I could viscerally sense the immensity of how much and how often he had used me, and that he had let others do the same. He had made me into a thing.
“Fuck.” My croaky voice shocked me. How long had it been since I had been allowed to speak? Beneath me was a cushion of exotic, bright cloth on a cane chair. Soft. I squeezed the upholstery, suddenly afraid.
How much had I lost?
What to do? What was I to do? My heart squeezed in tight, then beat a rapid, irregular tattoo which became so loud in my head it made me worry my heart might explode and stop.
No.
I curled over and wrapped my hands over my head, slid them over my scalp and pulled myself down into a ball. For several crucial moments I stayed that way. Get a grip. It wasn’t in my nature to give in, I reminded myself.
True.
Though he was here, somewhere. The verandah where I sat extended beyond the entry to the garage. There were no doors on that garage, and through the slats of the floor, I glimpsed the red of the Porsche. It would make a great getaway car. If I could get myself to leave.
I hadn’t dreamed of freedom since forever…
Yet even if I left him, he would not be gone. It was the curse of being owned by a mesmer.
Go, or stay and be abused until I was dead? One would think that a simple choice, and one would be dead fucking wrong. I sighed and unwound myself a little, straightened, pulled my hands from my hair.
Tensioned wire supported the decking and allowed it to cantilever beyond normal limits so that the surrounding forest could be best appreciated. I sat in the middle of an amazing place of natural beauty, of birds, other wildlife, and that sweet chaos of swaying branches. So peaceful. There was irony in this.
To my right a winding, elevated timber trail led deeper into the forest.
Below it was a sandy track and a sign: To the Beach.
A lazy lizard clung to the top of the sign, tongue flicking.
Butterflies wafted by in search of pollen, and yet here I sat, still doomed.
How to escape him?
I massaged my neck and squinted at the treetops where they framed a flare of sunlight and blue sky. The muscles felt strong under my hand. The wriggly hem of a soft material lay on my thighs. I wore a flirtatious, blue-and-white dress with string straps.
I am me. I told myself this.
And he was behind me in the living room, lying down. I felt him there – as if I’d acquired mesmer radar.
My heart freaked out, again. Shush. Calmness needed.
I bit my lip, to let the sharp pain center me and recalled the layout. An open kitchen and living room, sofas, bright-painted walls, the bronze vases with steel-stemmed enamel flowers. And there were seaside portraits on the walls.
The Petalwork Rainforest Resort.
That was this place.
A bigger, more urgent question occurred to me. Why was I awake and aware?
I searched for and found more memories:
Of being trapped when I arrived to kill him.
Of sex with his friends and being fucked on a table covered in glass splinters.
Of being cut and bleeding.
He had stapled my lacerations without anesthesia. I shuddered, recalling the ker-thunk of the device and the pain.
There had been a drowning of women. The wash of the waves had brushed their hands against my legs.
He’d told me that was my fault.
Belated tears crawled down my cheeks, and I swiped them away.
Something had let me waken now, and perhaps that meant he was less powerful?
There had been more recent events. They came to me like a list of ingredients in a recipe: sex in an alleyway, a beating of Isak, abducted to a house, where I had been bent over a sofa by two men.
They’d taken me so roughly I should be sore – which only proved that must have happened days ago.
A man called Ted.
Yes. Such a plain name.
I swiveled in the cane-backed chair, crossing one leg over the other to twist myself enough, daring to see if he truly was where I thought he was. Isak, my boogie man.
For once, someone had hurt him. He couldn’t control men as he could women, then I realized he had left his coterie of followers in another country – those men would have done anything for him, because he’d supplied them with women and, indirectly, with power.
Which made the here and now unique. Isak was weaker.
I untangled my legs and stood. The sliding doors leading inward were rolled back, opening up the front of this resort house. There were twenty of these small houses. Information I could not remember being given to me arrived in my head. I let my gaze flit to the sides of the deck and beyond, looking outward, searching. The other elevated houses were camouflaged and only visible as lines of timber, reflections on glass, or leaf-scattered plains of roofing tiles. This was five-star accommodation in…
Where were we? This was not the USA or Brazil or anywhere near there. Out of all my fractured memories, none were of traveling by plane or ship to another country, and that was scarier than anything else. How much of me was missing?
A green-and-red parrot screeched and glided by, barely flapping.
A different bird chose then to cackle maniacally – a sound that was unique to one country. It had to be a kookaburra. I’m in Australia.
How the fuck?
Somehow, Isak had brought us to the country of kangaroos, raucous bird life, big spiders, and apparently, criminals who knew how to take him down a peg.
I approached the opening and wrapped my hand over the edge of the glass door.
My heart raced, again. Was I a mouse? Or had I acquired an arrythmia on top of whatever STDs I might have been infected with due to being handed around like a box of tissues?
A fucktoy. He had often called me that. I grimaced then swept aside the bangs that fell over my eyes.
There he was. Isak.
This most evil man lay on his back on one of the paired dark-blue sofas, staring at the ceiling. He hadn’t seen me. His body dominated the length of the sofa, from one armrest to the next. His hands were tucked under his head, elbows crooked and flopped out to either side, as if he slept. His dark T-shirt had rucked up, and a dusting of sandy hair showed over his stomach. His navel made him seem strangely innocent.
How could this beast have ever been born as a baby?
Whatever else he’d been doing, Isak was still a fit man. Muscles shifted, enticingly, as he breathed.
Enticingly? It was true.
My response to this specimen of abomination was unnerving. Below, from between my legs, heat spread, flooding outward. My body automatically readied itself… for sex. My nipples tightened. I could feel how they pressed at the thin material of the dress.
I shut my eyes.
Forget him, forget the feel of his hands running over my skin, the clench of his fingers in my hair and around my neck, the smell of him as he fucks himself into me. The wet, slapping sounds of our bodies meeting.
As easily forget the feel of air in my lungs. He was in my very pores, injected into me in as lust, blood, and come. I’d had so much of him in me and on me, our genetics had probably merged.
I wanted to throw up.
If he took control of me again, as thoroughly as I had been controlled until today – subsumed by his persona – I might never surface as myself again.
My courage rebooted, and I raised my head, ready to snarl like a cornered bitch.
I took a step.
I had been important, once upon a time? I frowned. I’d been a CIA analyst. I’d made myself learn the techniques of a sniper, for no other reason than that it would help me to make him dead. That had not been a weekend attempt – I’d trained for years.
Yet I had failed, and my failure had brought me to the verge of des
truction. I cranked my mind back through the more recent blurred days, the nearly soundless days that ran together like sticky syrup. Smell, sound, taste, touch, all my senses had been made lesser. Even the pain had been lessened.
Though I vaguely recalled screaming for hours.
Isak had my volume control.
Why was I not dead?
The last exquisitely clear memory in my timeline was of crawling into the suitcase, of being strapped in, and then—
My breath rasped. My hand shook when I raised it, and my eyes stung. Why had he not killed me as he had threatened to?
I took another step and found the timber floor cool under my sole. I placed my other foot beside it. Should I say something? To him? My throat constricted.
No.
Not yet.
Not fucking yet. Not until I buried a knife in his chest? If only I could.
Think. If he was in a coma, maybe I could leave? How long had he been like this? This was surely why I was awake – because he was not.
A foil sheet of oblong pills lay on a glass-topped coffee table. Three pills were left. Was he drugged?
Cautiously, I took another step.
A Porsche was parked downstairs.
I crept closer until I could look down at him and run my gaze from those naked toes – feet were always ugly – up his long legs to the bottom of his black gym shorts. I twitched my gaze past the swell of the cloth above the join of his legs, past the waistband with the knotted cord and that starkly bared navel, past the twists of hair. The T-shirt was thin, like my dress, and clung to his chest. I paused at that and the masculinity of his neck, breath caught, mind caught. Begrudgingly, I found his face.
I almost made it, almost said goodbye, I’m gone, I’m fucking walking out of here, when his eyelids rose.
They opened. The shutters to his not-soul. The heralds to my Hell.
“Greetings, Red.” He saw my gasp, my step backward, and my fear.
I was gutted, breath stilled.
“I have a task for you.”
“What?” I whispered that, as if by being quiet I could deny he had spoken words.
Then I swallowed as unobtrusively as I could – not that there was much point in concealing my reactions from him, because of course… he knew.
The Book of Red: ISAK & Red and bonus prequel Used Page 9