I lean over and spit some of the blood on the floor beside me, completely uncaring at how that might look. After all, Dornan’s the only one watching, and I’m pretty sure he’s used to my blood by now. The room reeks of dying - of dried metallic blood, and piss, and resignation. It doesn’t reek of death yet - death has a completely different smell to actually dying. Death smells of rotting flesh and old blood that’s no longer circulating, no longer able to well up on a blade’s painful cue. Dying, my dying, is full of energy and pain, but death is quiet and cold and so very final.
Soon, I’m sure of it, death and I are going to meet in this room, and then I might finally have some relief from this hell.
***
Time passes, but everything remains the same. The torture. The food. The sickness. Until one day, Dornan visits me, and he does something different.
“Do you want to die today?” he asks me. I stare at the ceiling from my spot, tied to the bed frame, still wearing the same bra and panties and ruined shirt.
How nice of him, giving me the choice. I shiver as his hand slides down between my legs.
“Do you know what the French call an orgasm?” I gasp in surprise as he applies pressure to my clit and begins to knead it ever so gently. Tears prick at the corner of my eyes as I fight to retain some semblance of control.
It feels awful. It feels good.
I’ve had nothing but pain for the past days and weeks. Nothing but blood and electric shocks and water boarding. Nothing but knives and broken glass and hate.
“They call it petit mort. The little death. What do you want today, baby girl? The little death? Or the big one?”
He stops, and I take a long, shuddering breath attempting to compose myself.
The word please sits on the tip of my tongue, feathery and desperate, and I physically bite down to stop myself from uttering it. Begging would be foolish. Begging just makes it worse.
He licks his bottom lip thoughtfully and grabs the knife from beside my head, holding it vertical with the pointed end of the blade pressing lightly into the bare flesh directly above my heart. I try to recoil, but flat on my back, there’s nowhere to go.
“I could cut out your heart,” he says, pressing the tip of the blade a little harder. I wince as it breaks into my skin, a nasty, stinging warmth bubbling up from my chest. My blood. Again. He seems to read my thoughts.
“I wonder how much blood you have left inside you, Julie?” he muses cruelly. “I could drain it all out of you, slowly. I can make your death last a lifetime.”
Part of me wants to say Better get started, then but I don’t. I close my eyes tightly as his other hand takes some of the blood seeping from my chest and pushes my bra down, smearing the blood over my nipple. It’s warm at first but turns cold almost immediately, and I cringe as I feel my nipple stiffen to a hard peak.
He repeats the action on my other nipple, pinching it hard. The cold blood makes my skin prickle and I shiver involuntarily.
“You like that?”
I squeeze my eyes shut tighter as he dips his fingertips in the wound on my chest and applies that same finger to my clit, pushing my panties to the side and rubbing shallow, wet circles.
“Open your eyes,” he says.
I don’t. He responds to my disobedience by pressing the knife harder into my chest.
“Open.Your.Fucking.Eyes.”
The blade reaches deeper into my chest, hitting that hard spot above my ribcage. I cry out and open my eyes.
“Good,” he says. “Now, you didn’t answer my question did you?”
I just stare dully into his black eyes.
“Do you want to die today, Julie?”
Fresh tears prick at my eyes and anger blossoms in my fragile heart.
He started this. He got what he deserved for killing my father and setting his sons upon a defenseless teenage girl.
“Funny,” I whisper. “I never gave your sons a choice.”
It’s suicidal talking like this, but I can’t help it. I’m battered and broken and beyond caring what happens next. Rage fills his features and he clenches his teeth so hard, I could imagine them shattering from the pressure.
But as Dornan’s knife sinks deeper into my chest, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, I can’t help but struggle. I pull at the ropes binding my wrists and ankles, twisting while at the same time trying to keep my chest from moving. Trying to keep Dornan’s blade from going any deeper.
Is this it? Is this really the end? It can’t be, not yet. Surely he’s not finished with me.
And of course, he’s not. He removes the knife from my chest with a sickening squelch noise and places it beside my head. I turn my eyes and strain to see it, laying on the coiled bedsprings beside me. It’s so tantalizingly close, but with my arms bound tightly, there’s no way I can reach it.
I’m torn back to the moment by his hands at my panties. He tries to yank them down, but my weight is on them and they won’t budge past my thighs. And I’m not exactly helping him out with my dead weight and my clenched thighs.
He reaches for the knife and with two swift movements, he’s sliced my panties off and thrown them on the ground. Now I’m wearing nothing except the shirt and the bra he’s already cut open.
In an instant, before I can blink, he’s straddling me, still fully dressed, his pants unzipped, and his cock hard and ready in his palm.
And once he begins, I want to die. I want him to stab me with the knife. Anything but this.
I can’t describe the feeling so much as what’s happening to my heart. It’s breaking, like an old porcelain mug—the crack that goes deep but just looks like an innocent little line in the pattern, until one day you lift it to your lips to drink and it shatters in your hand, sending boiling hot liquid down your chest, scalding your skin and making you scream.
That’s what my heart breaking feels like.
He leans over me, his tattooed arms on either side of my head, so that no matter where I look, all I can see is Dornan. He fills my gaze just as he fills me inside. Roughly. Painfully.
I begin to cry as I close my eyes, tears running down my face and pooling in my ears, some making it past and sliding down my neck. He doesn’t miss them either; swooping down, he presses his lips to the tender spot just below my ear.
“Does that feel good?” he asks, smiling widely, his lashes drooping ever-so-slightly from the pleasure he’s obviously feeling.
I shake my head angrily back and forth. No. It doesn’t feel good. It feels like I want to die.
The springs pull at my hair as he continues to drive into me, pushing me up the bed with every upward thrust until I’m convinced most of my hair is embedded in the bed springs forevermore.
“I’ll try harder,” he murmurs, biting my neck as he reaches down and applies a thumb to my swollen bud of nerves.
My legs begin to shake and my breath quickens as I fight to resist his touch, the way he’s scratching the itch inside me. If I weren’t tied up, if he weren’t a monster, we might be two lovers entwined, bringing each other close to the edge, to—as he called it—the little death.
I can’t. I won’t. “Please, stop,” I beg, as the circles he’s rubbing threaten to make me explode.
What’s happening to me? The way he’s touching me shouldn’t matter, because it’s Dornan. The man who destroyed everything; the man who is destroying the last pieces of me right now on this bare bed. I should feel nothing, but after weeks upon weeks of horror and pain, the primitive part of me is screaming for this release, for this small act of pleasure, for some fucking break from the relentless agony that is my existence.
But my brain interjects – my higher intelligence demands that I can’t possibly let this happen.
“Stop!” I cry, louder this time. What else can I do? This is far, far worse than any pain he’s inflicted on me yet.
Because my body likes it.
He doesn’t stop. He kisses me instead, right on the mouth, and before I can think to bite dow
n I’m opening my mouth wider, groaning, exploding into a million dying stars. My heart sinks as I clench tightly around him. Pleasure and devastation mark my voice as I weep and come underneath him, crying out into his mouth.
“Good girl,” he says, his grin wicked, his pace quickening. I close my eyes and sob as he pulls out of me, and a moment later I feel hot spurts cover the spot on my torso where he’s excised all the pretty colors and left a giant, weeping mess of blood.
I squeeze my eyes shut and continue to sob brokenly as his weight shifts from the bed, my loud wails tearing through the tiny room.
He waits patiently while I cry and scream, making noise until there’s nothing left. Then, I stare at the low ceiling, at the spider webs and cracks and the dull, flaking paint that someone must have put up a long time ago. He stays still beside me for so long, I almost forget he’s there.
“I thought it was pain that would break you,” he says finally. “But pleasure? What a fucking surprise.”
He reaches down and wipes the tears from my cheeks, then sucks every bit of my blood and my tears from each fingertip.
“And as far as tears go,” he adds darkly, “I think yours taste the best.”
FIVE
Confucius said, “Before embarking on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
Now I know why.
And now I know, that there is something worse than death.
This.
SIX
My arms and legs alternate between fire and numbness, and I can feel my back bleeding from the bed’s springs caught up in my skin. I stopped crying a long time ago, and the blood and semen on my stomach has long turned cold, most of it sliding slowly across my hip and dripping onto the floor underneath the bed frame.
I’ve got nothing left inside. I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want revenge.
I just want to die.
The door opens and I continue to stare at the ceiling impassively, refusing to acknowledge him. I count the cracks in the paint and try not to shake when footsteps approach the bed.
Not that. Not again.
A face comes into view and my eyes widen when I see it’s not Dornan. Nobody else has ever come in here the entire time I’ve been imprisoned in this place. But now, there’s a young Hispanic guy undoing my arms as I stare up at him, his face stirring some vague, faraway memory long buried. I briefly wonder where I’ve seen him before. He must be a club prospect or a Ross cousin, but his eyes are a piercing blue, so if he’s a relative, it’s distant. He’s got a teardrop tattooed just underneath his left eye, and when he moves to the right I can see a tattoo of a gun on his neck. The rest of his visible skin seems pretty unmarked, which will no doubt change if and when he’s initiated. His head is completely clean-shaven, the harsh bulb that dangles from the ceiling making the top of his head shine. He looks young—twenty-five, at the most?— and pretty fucking ferocious. He kind of reminds me of a pit bull. He’s not unattractive - just the opposite, in fact. He’s good-looking, he’s just fierce. Which I guess is the whole point.
“Who are you?” I demand. I thought I’d be more ashamed at the state I’m in, but since he isn’t looking at me, I don’t really care. It’s like I’m not even inside my body. I’m just an onlooker, observing from the sidelines as my body slowly fades away.
He undoes the last rope and I immediately sit up, bringing my knees up to my chest to cover my almost-naked body as much as I can.
His blue eyes swivel to me and I have to fight myself not to cringe. He’s the most intense motherfucker I’ve ever encountered stare-wise, and that includes Dornan, chilling as that sounds.
“I’m your worst fucking nightmare,” he says, smiling like an arrogant bastard. He’s got a slight accent that I guess is Mexican.
“I really doubt that,” I reply deadpan, thinking of Dornan. Nobody could possibly be as evil as him.
I’m about to add some other snide comment when he straightens and pulls his T-shirt up and over his head, throwing it at me. I grab it quickly, wondering that the fuck he’s doing.
“Put that on,” he says. “Unless you want to walk around with your tits out on display. I don’t mind either way.”
I roll my eyes, quickly losing my ruined shirt and bra that Dornan cut open at the chest. I pull the T-shirt over my head, thankful for the warmth. It swims on my frame, almost reaching to my knees. The guy isn’t fat; he’s barely even solid. No, it’s me that’s shrinking to the size of a fucking twelve-year-old from lack of food.
“Of course you don’t,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows and looks around the room. “This place fucking stinks,” he says.
“Yeah,” I agree. “It does. Wanna let me out?”
He gives me a stare so withering I physically shrink back. Jesus, I’m going soft. I never used to shrink back from anyone. “Yeah,” he says, smirking. “How about I let you out and see how far you get before one of my bullets hits you, eh?”
I tug the shirt down, covering my ass as I stand on shaky legs. I’m not as able as I think I am, and I stumble straight away. Instinctively, I put my arm out to grab hold of something, and he catches me.
I look at him warily. “What’s your name?” I ask softly. “If you’re going to hunt me, I might as well know who you are.”
He gestures for me to walk in front of him, and I can’t quite believe my luck when he points at the open door.
“Go.”
“That’s a weird name.”
My sarcasm is lost on him. He gestures to the door. “I don’t have all fuckin’ day.”
He releases my arm and I walk in front of him, glancing back every few seconds.
“Don’t try anything,” he warns.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I answer. I wonder if I could pull the door closed quickly enough to trap him in here and then run, but as I’m studying the doorframe the urge to run is suddenly quashed by something hard in my back.
“Happy to see me?” I say, irritated as fuck that he’s got a gun pressed into my back.
“Something like that,” he replies, ushering me out of the room where I’ve just spent my last month and probably more.
It is daytime, and as I make my way down the hallway, my eyes burn. I squint, letting myself be guided by this guy to God knows where. When we get to a closed door at the other end of the hallway, he gestures for me to open it.
“What’s in here?” I ask
“Not getting shot,” he replies. “As opposed to staying out here, which is getting shot.”
I roll my eyes and turn the doorknob, pushing the door open. A bathroom. Holy Jesus, is he actually letting me have a shower? I look at him incredulously and he gestures with the gun. “Get in and clean up. There are clothes there. If you try anything, you’re fucking dead. Got it?”
“Sure,” I say. “Mr.…?”
“Mr. have a fucking shower before I change my mind.” He gestures with the gun again, more aggressively this time, and I move toward the shower. It’s nothing special, but I’ve got a month of old blood on my skin, and I’m eager to wash at least some of it away.
“Wait,” I say. “Where’s Dornan?”
His face goes tight and he steps forward, jabbing me in the chest. He gets the spot right where Dornan sank his knife, the soft bit of skin above my heart, and I wince as the fragile skin breaks open again, sending fresh blood blossoming through the thin white fabric of the guy’s shirt.
“Shit,” he says. “What the fuck happened to you?”
I stare at him in disdain, the pain of my wound opening making me pissed. “I killed too many Gypsy Brothers,” I say sharply. “You better keep your eye on me.”
He laughs. “Girl,” he says as he closes the door and steps past me, turning on the hot water, “You ain’t got enough strength to pull the trigger if I hand you this gun myself. Get in the fuckin’ shower and wash that blood and shit off you.”
I turn away from him and shrug out of the shirt, balling it up and throwing it in the
corner. Covering my breasts with my arms, I step under the hot water.
It feels so amazing that I completely lose the will to argue or talk snark to this guy. I just pray he doesn’t try anything on me. I really don’t have the energy to fight anyone off right now.
I feel a slight breeze and look up to see the exhaust fan switch on, and suddenly the guy has launched himself at me. I gasp as he wraps a meaty hand around my throat, the other on my mouth, and backs me into the corner of the shower.
“Do you recognize me?” he hisses in my ear, before returning his crazy blue eyes to mine. I stop fighting for a moment, thinking about that possibility.
“Nod if you do.”
I nod, because I did recognize him the moment I saw him, but I can’t for the life of me remember where.
“Do you remember who I am?”
I shake my head emphatically, because I don’t. I have no clue. I remember being shocked, and afraid, and I remember it was from before, but I can’t remember what context it was in.
“That’s good,” he hisses. “Let’s keep it that way.”
I go limp against his grip, his words ringing painfully in my ears. “Take your fucking shower,” he says, louder now. He steps back and pulls his gun out again, standing rigidly between me and the door, his gun a warning that he taps against his leg.
I massage my throat as I step back under the spray, no longer caring what he sees. In my peripheral vision I see rivulets of my blood washing off me and streaming down the drain, but I don’t take my eyes from his.
“Time’s up,” he barks. “Get out and get dressed.”
I nod slowly, shutting the water off and taking the towel he’s handing me like an obedient little lamb. I towel most of the water from me before hanging the towel back on its hook and dressing in the clothes he hands me. A black oversized T-shirt and a pair of grey sweat pants that swim on my radically shrinking frame. There is no underwear, but I don’t care. I bunch the loose material up on one side of the sweatpants and tie a crude knot in the material to stop them from sliding off me.
Gypsy Brothers: The Complete Series Page 36