by Cole McCade
As if he saw himself, and despised his own truth.
As if he saw her, and said:
I know your secrets. I know your weakness.
And I know you’re pretending to be something you’re not.
She tore her gaze from that haunting stare, shivering. She was already starting to imagine things, locked in here. Already letting her mind run in circles that would make her go crazy, staring at the same walls and sparse collection of things that made up the life of a killer.
How long had he been gone? She’d stopped counting after the first five minutes, but for all she knew he’d leave her here for hours, days—or he might be back in seconds. He might be watching her on hidden camera right now, waiting to see how long it took her to start screaming from the nothingness of being trapped immobile with her own thoughts.
But if she wanted to find out if this chair would break, she’d better take the opportunity while she had it.
She tensed her body, treating every muscle like it was a hand trying to grip and hold the ropes, the chair, making herself as big as she could so the ropes would draw tight, create tension when she stood. But what drew tight against the chair drew tight against her flesh, as well—and she hissed as the ropes dragged against her nipples, pulling and bunching at her shirt, crushing at her breasts like digging hands and sinking in until she felt every band of woven fiber and the contrasting softness of her own flesh. She cursed as sparks of painful-hot friction, sweet and terrible, made the tips of her nipples tingle hot and wild—rousing hard, pushing against the ropes only for the choking constriction to press them back into the yielding, overflowing flesh of her breasts.
She sucked in a gasp and tried to ignore it. Sometimes she hated her body. Her skin, this electrified thing like ten thousand volts of sensation tearing through her nerve endings at the slightest touch. She didn’t think other people were like her, or no one would get anything done. Sometimes she could get distracted by the simplest things: the bite of her jeans into the crease of her inner thigh when she bent, the slide of the soft flesh of her inner thighs, the press of a stranger’s back against her chest on the rolling and rollicking subway, hard shoulder blades and flexing muscles for a moment taunting her skin before they pulled away, unaware her knees were buckling and she was fighting to hold the reaction in where no one could see.
And the tight, pulling press of the ropes against her panties as she stood again, nylon pushing up against her inner folds and making her flush with heat, with frustration, with shame. She didn’t want this. These burning-dark twinges deep inside, this clutching pull that sparked off with an aching draw as she tried to shift her legs to brace and ended up pressing her thighs together. The ropes dragged against her hard, kindling a prickling thrill that raced up her body with lightning quickness, and she choked on a whimper as that warm wet slickness she hated burst forth.
One drop at a time, it slid and licked over her flesh, teasing at sensitive skin, absorbing into her panties, making sticky coolness against her thighs. Not now. Not now. This wasn’t the time or the place. It was never the time or the place; she never wanted it, never wanted to feel this way when it made her dirty and sick, but right now when she was tied up with a fucking murderer playing games with her life, she didn’t need to be getting wet because he’d tied her up and left her to rub herself off on the ropes.
Stop it, she told herself, told her traitorous body, and strained again to try to force some slack in the ropes—only to cry out sharply as the rope slid just right, slipped between her folds, cradled tight and intimate where she’d never even let anyone touch, where nothing should touch when she was afraid to even touch herself.
But the ropes were inside her, rubbing along the sliding-silk wetness of her slit like rough raspy fingers, like licking textured tongues, and no matter which way she twisted to relieve the pressure she only made that twisting fibrous texture turn and press and drag and drag and drag until she was whimpering, panting, her skin laced with chill fire like being dipped in alcohol, her heart sick and sore.
Dirty, whispered in the back of her mind. Dirty, dirty thing.
She had to stop. She wanted to get out, but she had to stop. There had to be a better way to do this. Anything was better than this spark that promised if she fanned it any more, it would stir into a burning wildness that would take her over, a thing she couldn’t control. She needed control. She had to have control.
If over nothing else in her life but herself, and this body she called her own.
With a gasping inhalation, struggling not to sob or scream with sheer frustration, she dropped the legs of the chair back down. They struck hard, slid, skewed, and suddenly the chair was falling and she was falling with it, yelping out a shocked cry as she toppled over. The room shifted a sharp ninety degrees. She thudded down with a crack of bony elbows and hard cement and her shoulder bouncing in a bright burst of pain and the side of her skull snapping against the concrete. For a moment everything was black with her eyes wide open; black as if she’d closed her eyes in a lightless room. Then it went bright and clear again, full of sparking white flashes and throbbing pain.
She winced, grimacing as she lifted her head from the floor, turned it, stared at the gray concrete right in front of her nose. She willed her eyes to uncross, until they stopped wavering in and out and agreed to focus. No blood on the concrete. Nothing hot or wet trickling on her scalp, or matting her hair. She hadn’t split her skull open, though she’d probably given herself a concussion.
Great. Just…fucking great.
At least she wasn’t on the verge of losing control anymore. Not when she hurt all over, and the concrete soaked its chill into her like ice water. She lay there for long moments, catching her breath, waiting for the ringing throb in her skull to subside or at least be a little quieter, gathering herself and taking slow, deep, calming breaths.
Maybe she could roll herself back upright. She rocked—flopping her weight forward until the chain on the chair pulled her back, then forward again, trying to build momentum to either get her knees under her and struggle to her feet, or flip the chair back into a better position. But rocking only twisted her up more in the ropes until they cut the breath from her lungs; nausea punched up through her with every dizzy movement. After thrashing for a few moments, juddering her knees against the concrete, she slumped with a tired scream that tried to be raw fury but came out as impotent frustration.
Chair, one. Willow, zero.
Those damned tears were back. She hated tears. Her own, anyone else’s, though she’d been able to handle them from the children she’d nannied. Children didn’t have control of their emotions or the language to express themselves, so sometimes tears were the only way they could communicate the chaos building to a boil inside them. Willow had words. She had emotional control.
Except she didn’t, when she cried at the drop of a hat and every tear made her weak and small.
She was weak and small now, as she closed her eyes and wept herself out, choking on the salt taste and swallowing back the sounds until all that remained was her gasping breaths and the rattle of the chain every time her body jerked with another heaving gulp. She hurt. She hurt, she was tired, she was frightened, and she wanted to go home. Back to a life of being nothing, of forgetting who she’d wanted to be before the blackboard of her life, her future, her self had been erased.
At least being nothing meant being alive.
She wasn’t sure how long she cried. How long before she could breathe without it rattling in her throat, but by the time she blinked her eyes clear she was wrung out, the world a blur of exhaustion through the clear diamond prisms spiking her lashes. God, she wanted to sleep. Sleep and hope this would go away. But as hard as she’d hit her head, as much as it hurt, she might have a concussion. She shouldn’t sleep with a concussion, but right now—with those knives gleaming razor-bright on the walls and the room so echoingly empty, desolate and bleak and hopeless and alone—she couldn’t think of a reason t
o stay awake.
Sleep was better than being here.
And if she slipped into a coma, she’d save Priest the trouble of killing her.
* * *
SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW LONG she slept. But she woke when the steel door began to grind upward again, the mechanical whirr and scrape dragging her from the dark.
Her leg was asleep, she thought dully. Pins and needles working through the frozen concrete chill that had almost fully numbed her right side, and her head still hurt like hell. Her eyes were gritty and crusted, and she squinted drowsily at that sliver of light rising up to show that tall, terrible nightstalker silhouette.
Even her fear was numb. Like the cold had frozen her head to toe, and left her too heavy and dull for anything to slip past the wall of ice. Show no fear, she reminded herself again. Show no fear. Even if she doubted it would make much difference, when she could feel the sticky tightness of tears dried on her skin and the position she was in said exactly how much she feared dying—that she’d fight and struggle like a captured wild thing who couldn’t understand the cage bars weren’t going away, even if it rattled and raged until the cage itself tipped over.
Color fell over Priest as he stepped out of the shadows and crossed the warehouse floor. She watched him for a few moments, then dropped her gaze as he drew closer; she pressed her knees together as close as she could, when the ropes had skewed her panties and left her half-exposed and uncomfortably close to fully naked. She didn’t want to see the contempt, mockery, or amusement that must certainly be in his gaze when he saw the position she’d worked herself into. He’d laugh at her, watch her with those cold, pitiless eyes, ask Have an accident, little one?
Then he’d lift her up by the ropes, set her upright, and cut her throat.
His shadow fell over her. She hunched forward, shoulders tightening up, but then that dark ominous presence was gone. He moved past her, a glimpse of his boots in her peripheral vision and not one word. Not one sound. She tilted her head back, straining her neck to follow him. He carried a heaviness with him, in this moment. A heaviness that hadn’t been there, informing the way his hands hung at his sides and the powerful movements of his shoulders and the slow deliberation in every stride. Something had changed, but she didn’t know what. Or why he’d walked past her as if she wasn’t even there, striding toward the far wall nearly a dozen feet from the bed, to a place shrouded in blackness.
Until he flicked another light on. Until another cone of amber fell down over a crucifix mounted on the wall: exquisitely detailed, beautifully carved, lacquered wood that painted Jesus as a divine beauty in the tradition of Greek artists, with red parted lips and his body stretched upon the cross with a sort of indolent languor that made his crucifixion seem as much sin as torment. His crown of thorns ran blood, tracing lines down to his ruby lips, and he seemed to watch Willow from beneath his lowered lashes as if to say I, too, could not escape my bonds.
The crucifix was nearly as tall as Priest himself, and towered higher, mounted above his head. To either side were wall-mounted racks, and Willow stared, apprehension a thing caught in her throat like a swallowed butterfly. Whips gleamed deadly-slick against the carved wood; bullwhips and horsewhips and riding crops, cat-o ’-nine tails and floggers and things she didn’t even have names for.
What was it all for? Did he whip his victims, too? Punish them in the eyes of God?
Priest looked up at the crucifix in silence, then tangled his fingers in his rosary and lifted it over his head. The zipper down the right side of his Kevlar vest slid open with a sighing rasp that nearly tore a gasp from Willow’s throat; his silence had become so constant, so absolute, that anything breaking it was a sacrilege. The vest fell to the floor. He caught his shirt in both hands and peeled it off like peeling off a second skin, the snake in the garden of Eden shedding its skin to show the devil underneath.
Said devil was made of cords of tanned sinew gleaming the color of deep savannah deserts under the golden lamplight, bunching and flowing with every movement as if restless, desperate to escape their rough-silk cage of tight, heated skin. For a moment his shirt snared his hair, bundled it up, lifted it off his back, and she caught full view of the sharply-angled taper plunging from imposingly broad shoulders to the gracefully slim line of his waist. His back was a map of scars overlaid on ink. A cross in detailed, intricately shaded black ink spread from nape to tailbone in delicate scrollwork lines: decayed, degraded, as if the faintly highlighted metal had corroded and degraded in acid. The entire cross was draped in tattered loops and tangles of what looked like twine or wire, and from behind it sprouted a pair of strange wings made up of metal struts and corroded blades. The wings of a machine of sharp edges and bolts and angles; the wings of an ironwork angel.
In Nomine Patris; In Nomine Machina.
It arced across the small of his back along a ragged banner so detailed she could see the texture of the parchment paper inked into his skin; she didn’t know what the Latin meant, but she recognized the first part as a prayer. But the entire canvas of his back had been slashed apart—repeatedly, it looked like, and often, as if someone had taken a knife to the art painted on his skin and cut it apart in crisscrossing lines. Scars overlapped in hatchmarks, white against taut-chiseled dusk. Some were so faded they’d melted back into his skin, while others stood out stark and blindingly pale in knotted ridges against his flesh.
She couldn’t take her eyes away, though she told herself she shouldn’t stare. Not at him. Not when it might draw his attention, and that could be her last—and most fatal—mistake. But she couldn’t help but wonder:
Who had done that to him?
He pulled the shirt completely over his head, ripped it down his arms, let it fall. His hair tumbled down his back, half obscuring the tattoo and scars as if they were sacred things, not meant to be seen. The rosary slipped over his head once more. There was a strange sense of ritual to this, and she held her breath as he stepped forward and ran his fingertips across the wood of the racks, the handles of the whips, tracing over them with a delicate and worshipful touch. He stopped on the cat-o ’-nine tails; she couldn’t see much of his face, but what she caught of his profile seemed…haunted. Something pensive and withdrawn in his concentration; something fixed, as if he was compelled to this act. Compelled to curl his hand around the handle of the cat-o ’-nine and lift it gently from its slot. He trailed the ends through his fingers, caressing them lovingly.
And even hypnotized by the strange procession of this, the odd sense of sacrament, in the back of her mind Willow begged:
Please…please don’t use that on me.
But she might as well not have been in the room. He stepped back from the wall and tilted his head back to look up at the crucifix again. He crossed himself with quick, practiced movements; forehead, sternum, left, right, as if circling where a heart should burn in the center of that cruel, terrible chest.
Then he sank to his knees with his thighs spread wide, dropping in a graceful flow of muscle. His hair drew forward over his shoulder, baring the marked lines of his back. His head bowed reverently; his fingers tightened in a white-knuckled grip on the cat-o ’-nine; she caught a whisper of his voice, speaking something that might be a prayer in a language she couldn’t quite place, but she thought could be Italian.
Then he snapped his wrist and a crack echoed over the room, and Willow bit back a scream.
The cat-o’-nine arced in a trail of black lines tipped in gleaming silver, and lashed against his back with an unforgiving snap of leather and metal on flesh. Fresh lines bloomed across his back, red against the mosaic of white and ink. Willow’s heart raced, hard and hot and strange, as he drew back and did it again, over the other shoulder. Crack. Again. Crack. Again. Slow. Precise. Methodical. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t move, save for the rise and fall of that punishing arm. And still that soft murmur rolled forth, rhythmic and lyrical and falling into the cadence of the lashes. Again and again, his back inflaming in one angry X a
fter another, and she stared with a sort of awful fascination as he hurt himself over and over and she didn’t understand why.
She couldn’t stand it. Each crack made a phantom echo of pain across her own flesh, her back burning, haunted by the ghosts of acid fire swelling in line after terrible line. There was a sick artistry to this, a strange and mesmerizing beauty, but her screams were building up and she couldn’t let them out. This man—this alien man, her bizarre and barely human captor with his soft words and careful touch and quick, killing hands—was…he was punishing himself for something.
And she was terrified to know what.
Terrified to know why.
And if she watched any longer, she would break and…and…she didn’t know.
Nor did she want to find out—and so she closed her eyes. She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see, while in the darkness of the place where she tried to escape, the world was nothing but the sound of leather on flesh, counting out the seconds and the minutes with its crack-crack-crack.
Stop, she begged, her fingers clenching until her nails dug into her palms, as if the communal pain would somehow bring his to an end.
But the endless lash of the whip only continued, its cry chasing her into the dark.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TRY AS SHE MIGHT, SHE couldn’t stop herself from listening.
And try as she might, she saw it against the backs of her eyelids anyway: the lash coming down, the fresh marks of red that glared and accused, the subtle flex and twitch of dusky hide. The only hint that a man existed, underneath the beast. A man who could feel pain; a man who must feel pain, must feel more than physical agony, to do this to himself.