8 Days For Salvation

by Yolanda Olson

  He leaned down and pulled me violently off the floor to ensure that I remembered my place in this situation. Daniel was the deliverer and I was the wayward soul that needed him.

  He pushed me into his opulent leather chair then leaned down inches from my face. I gripped the armrests terrified of what was going to happen next, when he did something I never would have expected from this version of Daniel. He gently put his hands on either side of my face and kissed me like I actually meant something to him. Maybe I did in his fucked-up mind, but I couldn’t let myself fall for it. Even though it was the softest, most agonizingly overwhelming kiss I’d ever received, I had to remember that he was pure evil and nothing good could come of this.

  “Are you ready to see again?” he whispered when he pulled away.

  “What?” I breathed in confusion.

  “Shh,” he said softly, brushing his lips against mine. I felt his hands move slowly from my cheeks toward the back of my head and I sucked in a sharp breath. I understood now what he was going to do and it terrified me.

  It took Daniel some prying in the front to get it off my face, causing me to wince in sheer pain. When I felt it fall lazily onto my leg, I wondered how I looked, how he looked, if it was him that night I saw with Trace, and if it was possible to learn to see again.

  “Ah, shit,” he said with a sigh. “Looks like I’m going to have to take that one out.”

  He placed his hands on the right side of my face and used his thumbs to attempt to open my eye.

  “Ow!” I cried out, instinctively slapping his hands away.

  Daniel let out a loud sigh. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep your fucking hands off of me?”

  “I’m sorry, but that hurt and it wasn’t something I had exactly plotted out,” I snapped at him.

  “Open your eyes and look at me, and maybe it won’t hurt so much,” he barked.

  Was that something I really wanted to do, though? Know the face of the devil that had caused me so much pain and surrounded me with so much death?

  “Give me a minute, please,” I finally said.

  Daniel didn’t say anything but he didn’t move from where he stood in front of me either. I lowered my head toward my lap and attempted to blink. It stung at first—almost like I was trying to rip a scab off—but after more persistent trying, I was able to pry the left one open.

  The room was dimly lit, so it helped the pain as I tried to focus, but I was still becoming nauseous from it.

  “I need you to look up at me so I can see how badly damaged that eye is,” Daniel said impatiently.

  I held up a hand which was greeted by another grunt. That seemed to be his way of telling me he was relenting to what I wanted without having to lay hands on me. As slowly as I could while fighting the bought of nausea I was starting to feel, I raised my head slightly.

  Despite everything I was going through, I couldn’t help but smile at his clothes. It was only lunch time, but he was wearing a pair of black slacks and shiny black shoes. I should have assumed as much; that the devil would always dress to kill.

  I put a hand to my forehead and blinked a few more times. It was odd to me not to be in the darkness anymore, but even more odd that I could only really see from one eye.

  “Would you mind coming down to me? I’m afraid that if I lift my head I’ll throw up,” I said quietly.

  “Fair enough, but I’ll need to lift your face to get a better look at that eye,” he warned.

  “Okay.”

  I watched as his knees started to bend and smiled again at the large hand that was so carefully manicured resting on my leg. I wasn’t sure yet that I wanted to look him in the face, or if I could, but I wasn’t going to have a choice. In the next ten or so seconds, I was going to be face-to-face with him whether I wanted to be or not.

  “Faith, turn your face and look at me.”

  And that was when I saw him. The devil with the beautiful brown eyes, the devastatingly handsome face, and the lips that I had felt so often on my body. Daniel didn’t look like the personification of evil. Now I knew why he was able to get away with stealing as many as he did. I also knew why Trace and I had allowed him to join us at our table that night.

  I had seen Daniel before.

  Things were now becoming clearer than they ever had before.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Somehow I managed to keep my face void of any emotion. I didn’t want him to know that I was so damn sure I had seen him before so instead I just let him place his hands on the sides of my face again and examine my damaged eye.

  “Fuck. I guess I left that on longer than I should have,” he said after a few tense moments. “There’s no way to save it.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” I offered quietly. “Only when you tried to open it.”

  “That’s a fucking problem, Faith,” he replied. “If it’s sensitive to touch, it has to come out.”

  I put the left side of my face into my hand. I had a feeling that he wasn’t exactly what you would call surgically trained, but I also had a feeling that wasn’t going to stop him either. The only question was would he gain some sort of sick pleasure in the extraction?

  Probably, I thought with a sigh.

  “Just sit there until I come back. Blink as much as you can to ease the sight back into your working eye,” Daniel instructed as he turned to leave the room.

  What Daniel didn’t seem to know was that my eyes, or rather eye, had already adjusted to the dim light in the room. Granted if it got any brighter, it would take some more adjustment, but I could see the objects that surrounded me. And I could see those double doors that sat at the back of the den. I could see the world beyond them and I couldn’t help but think of how easily it would be to just run away.

  But I wouldn’t dare attempt it just yet. Once I got outside the bright shining sun would blind me once again and Daniel would know I had tried to leave. Each time he had put me through his trials, it was never in anger. That fact alone was enough to terrify me and keep me seated right where I had been placed.

  Would I come to regret the decision to not at least try for freedom? Wholeheartedly. I just didn’t know how much until he finally came back into the den and I tore my working eye away from the doors to freedom.

  “I don’t have any pain medication or anything to sedate you with, so the best I can do is beat you until you pass out,” he said with a heavy sigh as he placed a bowl filled with supplies on the pretty long table next to the chair I was sitting in.

  I raised my face toward him, a single tear rolling down the side of my face and he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Would you prefer I strangle you until you lose consciousness? It’ll hurt a hell of a lot less.”

  “Whatever is quickest,” I replied wiping the tear away. I knew that if he chose strangulation that I wouldn’t die. It wasn’t time for me to go yet; not according to his sick schedule anyway.

  “On your feet, Faith,” he commanded softly.

  I put my hands on the armrest and pushed myself up. Daniel slid an arm around me, pulling me close to him, but I didn’t look him in the face. I couldn’t. Someone who had just offered to strangle me instead of beat me wasn’t worth looking at.

  Or is he?

  I couldn’t remember the last time I was this close to him with my vision partially restored. His fingers gently spread open on my side as he gripped me a little tighter and pulled me a little closer.

  “Promise not to hate me after this?” he asked, in almost a timid tone.

  I turned my face slightly to the right. I couldn’t see him that well but it was enough of a gesture to let him know that I would agree to his request.

  “What time is it?” I asked, finally looking up into his face. I could feel his breath on me and watched as his lips parted slightly, his tongue quickly rubbing against them.

  “Almost two,” he replied in a shaky breath. “Why?”

  “I wanted to know in case you can’t wake me up. I always wond
ered what my time of death would be,” I replied with a shrug. “I’m ready when you are.”

  Daniel’s hand left my side, snaking its way up my body, and met his other hand around my throat. I closed my eyes, not wanting to look at his face because, in this moment, he could be Death masquerading as a man whose mind swam in a terrible depravity. A man whose touch did things to me that no others had and made me question my own sanity in those tender moments.

  “Deep breath, Faith,” he said quietly.

  As soon as I sucked in my breath, he began the complicated task of strangling me to the point of unconsciousness. I say complicated because I knew that Daniel would most likely revel in killing me and fucking my corpse, but he had to find the strength inside of himself to stop at the right moment.

  Bright lights exploded around my eye, and my lungs burned. My hands started clawing at his in a basic human instinct to survive, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t move my hands away, and he didn’t apply any more pressure than necessary. I knew better than to try to pull away because it could result in a broken neck.

  So I stood there, praying for the darkness I had loathed for so long to take me again. Hoping it would all be over soon when the world started to spin around me.

  A guttural grunt, a pained gasp, and one last firm blink was all there was before I had been longing for starting to close in all around me.

  Please just let me die.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The pain in my head was pounding and glaring. I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on, but I was starting to slowly wake up—which meant that Daniel had kept his word and stopped when he needed to.

  It felt like the floor was moving underneath me and I felt something like something was almost smacking against my chin, but I assumed it was most likely due to me waking up from what had just happened.

  I heard a grunt almost directly above me as he freed one of my wrists to use a hand tightly grip my hair. I winced from the sudden pain and reached to try and pry the hand away, when another hand grabbed my wrist and held it against the carpet.

  “I’m almost done,” a low, rapturous voice said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked suddenly feeling a steady, constant pressure against my head.

  The hand that was burrowed into a fist of my hair tightened. A few more thrusts followed, then the sound of a relieved, loud moan, punctuated by something warm starting to run down the side of my face. His hands released my hair and wrist, and I quickly started to wipe at my face.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed that, Faith,” Daniel said with an almost empty laugh as he lay down on the carpet next to me.

  “Enjoyed what?” I asked in a throaty voice, using the back of my hand to wipe away whatever was left of the stream on my face.

  “I don’t know exactly if that was the safest thing to do though. For you, I mean. However since we’re on a schedule, I don’t think it’ll matter really. You’ll have to let me try that again before this is over,” he said, rolling onto his side and wrapping an arm around my waist.

  “Daniel?” I figured saying his name would give me an opening to ask him what the hell he was talking about without getting slapped around.

  “Yes?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your eye, Faith. I managed to take it out while you slept, and I cleaned the socket out. I did my best to resist, but I can’t. Not with you. Every orifice on your body belongs to me, and I didn’t want to leave any stone unturned—especially since I did such an exceptional job of clearing everything out. I didn’t get to go all the way in, not for lack of trying. I don’t think I’ve ever been that hard before. Also, I’d like to apologize about my balls banging against your chin as much as they did. I guess it’s a good thing I keep them shaved otherwise you would have been exfoliated,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t worry, I didn’t go in dry. Of course, that was more for my comfort than yours, but if you managed to wake up before I was done, which you did, I didn’t want you to feel any added pain. Though I think the nerves are dead, honestly,” he said with a chuckle.

  I lay there completely numb trying to believe what he had just said to me. If I had been following along with him correctly, he basically just told me that he had fucked my empty eye socket while I was unconscious.

  “Oh my God. You have to let me get up. I have to clean this shit out of my eye,” I said, suddenly frantic that I would contract an infection because he had decided to finish inside of the actual hole itself.

  “You’ll be fine,” he protested, rubbing his chin on my shoulder. “Just lie here with me for a while then we’ll worry about it later.”

  My lower lip started to quiver but I didn’t dare cry. The last thing I needed was to add to whatever had stayed behind and make some kind of creamy concoction of what was left in my skull.

  A cumsicle. In my fucking skull. Maybe I’m just as fucked-up as he is after all, I thought, putting a hand tiredly to my forehead.

  “Daniel?”

  “Yes, Faith.”

  “What time is it?”

  He lifted his chin from where it was resting on my shoulder and turned his body slightly.

  “It’s nine thirty -two. Why?”

  “I just wanted to know the exact time that I lost my mind,” I replied with a heavy sigh.

  Daniel chuckled and turned me onto the right side of my body. As the rest of him slid down the side of my face, he wrapped an arm securely around me, pressing his body against mine and molding me into his.

  I was in a state of darkened innocence for over seven hours. A place where the monsters couldn’t hurt me, where evil didn’t exist, and where, for once, I finally felt safe. The same darkness that had spent the last ten years tormenting me was the only place I could go that Daniel wouldn’t be able to hurt me. It was the place where my body could shut down and not be able to feel anything.

  Over seven hours lost in a dreamless sleep while hoping for death to come and take me. Instead, I had awoken back to Hell on Earth with the prince of darkness himself holding me so tightly against him. Almost as if he wanted to make sure that I would never go back to that dark place where he couldn’t follow.

  Six more days and I’ll have my sweet darkness returned to me forever.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I woke with a start the next morning. I expected Daniel to still have us molded together, but he was nowhere to be found. My hand went up to my face and I realized that he had placed some kind of gauze bandage over my eye while I slept.

  “Ugh.”

  I rolled onto my back and pushed myself up onto my elbows. The sun was trying desperately to fight its way into the room, but Daniel seemed to have drawn the curtains before he left. With a quick shake of my head, I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. I wondered where he was and what he was doing, but honestly I liked that I was able to wake up alone without some kind of deprave sexual act being forced onto me.

  It was the morning of day four. My time was quickly coming to an end here and yet I couldn’t help but feel relieved. Most people fear death because it’s the great unknown. I welcomed it because it was a darkness I was so familiar with. Even if there was no life after death, I would feel some sort of small victory knowing that I had survived to the end without succumbing to the horrors I had been put through to get there.

  I would greet Death with a smile, take its hand, and drag it into the darkest, abysmal Hell I could find for making me wait so fucking long. We would dance to a chaotic melody, and we would hold each other tightly as we endured the torment of the unknown. Until I was ready to let it go back to its own hell, and maybe someday soon after, it would claim Daniel and bring him to share the darkness with me.

  That was the fairy tale that I decided to live in for the rest of my time with him. To know that Death would eventually avenge me when I couldn’t avenge myself would have to be enough of a solace to be able to continue.

  I rose to my feet and stretched my arms over my
head, ready to face whatever the day would bring me. I was halfway to being delivered into salvation and I was going to do my best to keep my spirits up.

  I turned and walked toward the den door. I figured I’d go out and find Daniel, and commence whatever the day held for me, but when I wrapped my hand around the doorknob, I couldn’t pull it open. I turned the knob to the left, then to the right. I put my hand on the door and turned it again trying to pull the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. It seemed that he had locked me inside the room.

  I let out a frustrated yell and slapped the door as hard as I could before I went back to his chair and dropped down into it. I squinted across the room to the clock mounted on the wall and saw that it was almost ten in the morning.

  I had slept for over twelve hours. How was that even possible in this house? And where the hell was Daniel?

  The more I watched the hands click forward and there was still no sign of him, the more frustrated I became. Even though only ten minutes had passed, the constant staring at it made it feel like it was ten hours, and that’s when I decided to stop watching the clock.

  I pulled my legs up underneath me on the chair and glanced at the double doors— the ones I knew could provide me a chance at freedom—and wondered if he might be outside.

  He’ll show up eventually, I reasoned to myself. And when he does we can get this freakshow started again.

  The sound of the door unlocking quickly drew my attention and answered my silent prayers. I turned my face toward the door and waited for him to greet me upon entering, but what happened was only half of what I was expecting.

  Daniel looked disheveled today. He was wearing gray sweatpants, had no shirt on, was barefoot, and his hair sat wildly on top of his head. He looked tired which made me wonder how much sleep he had been able to get.

  I sat straight up and slid my hands between my thighs waiting for him to say something to me; to notice that I was still in the room. Instead, of leaving through the den entrance he had just come through, he just walked straight to and out the double doors, letting them slam loudly behind him.