Thrill Me (Teased and Broken Book 2)

by Ashley Black

  He dropped me, but my arms wouldn’t work to brace my fall, fuck why? My head slammed against the deck, hard. Reality tilted and whirled.

  I was on my feet running.

  I was dazed and confused. Stars exploded before my eyes.

  Then I heard his voice booming in panic around me. Thorn. Thorn was here.

  I looked up.

  Holy shit! There he was. Masked as I had saw seen him the very first time. Standing there at the very tip of the bow of the Black Eagle. His sleek, luxurious black boat was gliding keenly toward me.

  “No, Elena what are you doing! Stop!” He protested. Panic, twisted the delicious timber of his voice.

  I was running on air.

  It was a strange feeling of weightlessness. Gravity being the bitch it was sucked me back down. I screamed in shock as my body hit the cold span of the grey now choppy waves of the bay.

  What an ass clown. What an idiot! I had run straight off the pier and I was about to pass out. The hit to the head had me fucked.

  No.

  I screamed underwater at the sight of him hurtling toward me like some tragic superhero.

  That mask first, a blur under the water, black gloved hands outstretched and closing around my waist.

  Darkness splattered across my vision, black shimmering dots bled together, and then I was out.

  I awoke to soft dark classical music and candlelight.

  I could not place where I was exactly, at first.

  I was lying in a grotesquely huge bed.

  I no longer wore my inappropriate hens party Raven dress, but a white lace negligee.

  Mr. Darko himself had slipped me into it.

  I smelt my skin.

  Shit. What a vile presumptuous intrusion on my privacy! The gall of this man. He had washed me too. The scent of perfumed soap on my skin assaulted my nostrils.

  I ran a hand through my wet hair. I didn’t notice the luxury of the room. I saw only escape - doors!

  I tried them.

  Locked.

  Fuck him.

  No I would not be his prisoner again.

  I flexed my fingers along the handle, stroking it, willing it, with everything I had inside of me to turn. It didn’t.

  I wasn’t turning anything on.

  So I gave it a frustrated kick instead, and it clicked open.

  Oh yesssssss!

  I padded carefully, warily outside the room. I was in a large dramatic grey stone chamber. It had arched widows that offered a view of a starlit night.

  I was in a castle.

  Thornton Darko.

  His home.

  Of course.

  My foot stubbed against something stiff lying on the blood red strip of carpet below. Looking down, I slammed a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream.

  The man who had attacked me on the pier was lying there on the floor.

  His chest was torn open as if a wild animal had got to him. His rib cage cracked apart, and empty. He had … no heart.

  I shivered violently. I felt sick.

  Thorn had told me he wanted to find this warlock who had gifted a curse on the raven necklace and snap open his chest and eat of his heart. I presumed the man who had denied eating hearts to me, had been joking.

  No.No. No.No! Not another lie by Thornton Darko. It was more than I could bear.

  ‘Come here my dear. Come see the monster you think you love,’ I recognized his voice at once. The cult leader, but I couldn’t see him for all the shadows. Where was a fucking light switch when you need one?

  My heart was having a right fit in my chest. I continued carefully, and paused at a burgundy curtain that was parted slightly covering what I assumed was some kind of alcove or room.

  I heard the most awful sounds beyond it.

  A gurgling. A sucking. Chewing, loud swallowing, a desperate moan, a grunt, and then the procession of sounds assaulted my ears and mind again.

  Gurgling.

  Sucking,

  Chewing.

  Swallowing.

  Something warm tickled my toe.

  I started seeing it, jumping back a little and restraining a girly yelp.

  Blood. Speeding beneath the curtain, a tiny little glistening fucked up river of it.

  No.

  My heart and hand shaking with equal force, I drew the curtain aside.

  Thorn’s powerful back was to me, naked, and I winced seeing it was full of angry red welts. More than I thought possible. He had been whipping himself again clearly. This man left me senseless, tears pricked my eyes.

  “No,” he choked out on a broken cry. “Get out! I cannot stop once I’ve started. You don’t need to see this.”

  Then it was back to the gurgling, sucking sounds again.

  “Thorn,” I reached for his trembling sweaty shoulder, I spun him around and screamed.

  His huge hand was gripping a half-eaten heart.

  He kept his gaze lowered from mine, as he chomped furiously on his meal. “Get out” he snarled. “Leave me alone. Does it please you to see me like this?”

  Then he brought the heart up to his mouth again and roughly tore off a piece with those sharp perfect white teeth of his, and began to demolish it, jaw working furiously. Blood was dribbling senselessly down his strong chin, splattering all over that magnificent inked chest.

  He swallowed, spitting blood and bits of heart at me. “Well, does it?”

  Lies again.

  He does eat hearts, after all!

  He rose to his feet, towering over me, and attacked the heart with even greater hunger and fervor.

  The horror!

  Red tears were squeezed from his glassy dark green eyes and leaked down his blood splattered face.

  His head flipped back and forth, flicking bits of heart all over the room. Glistening entrails from it were now hanging from his shining parted lips. A low dark, feral growl rumbled deep in his throat.

  Aaron had been right in that hysterical phone call to me on the way to Mexico.

  The man was a fucking animal. Congratulations Elena, you just fucked with the wrong freak, bitch.

  He stared at me with a question in his eyes. A challenge.

  I answered with a scream and ran.

  Twenty Six

  Two days after I again, realized I had been fooled by Thornton Darko and his demented lies and mind fuckery, I was about to walk down the aisle and marry Brett Argosy.

  Except, I didn’t want to.

  I was terrified of the outcome if I did.

  Thorn was still bound to me, because impossibly, I felt it even still, after that hideously grotesque scene I had walked in on with him eating that Warlocks heart. After all his lies. Some part of me, wanted him. As long as I wanted Thornton Darko. Brett and I? Well our lives would never be free of him.

  How in the hell could I marry Brett in the face of all that?

  How was that even remotely fair?

  Just as I was about to descend the stairs of my family’s humble two storey lodgings in Ashby to the awaiting limo and a stressed out looking Aaron, Brett called me.

  “Thorn was here,” Brett reported coldly over the line.

  “Oh.”

  I sounded so flat.

  “Yeah, he was pretty drunk and messed up Elena. He asked me if I know yet about the Raven necklace, why it can’t be removed?”

  I said nothing, heart pounding.

  “After I punched his stupid face, he told me that it was because you still want him. As long as you want him, not even he can remove the thing. Is that true Elena? Do you still want him?”

  I blinked, horrified, Thorn had managed to singlehandedly fuck up my wedding day with this cruel and pointless speculation. I hated that man so much right now.

  I would kill him on sight.

  “I want you Brett. I love you. I am marrying you today.”

  “But do you want him?” he went on icily. “I need to know El. Come on.”

  “Not anymore,” I reassured him. “He is a cruel, lying, mani
pulative, twisted little circus freak. I am a game for him Brett. He is a brat. He gets homicidal lunatic asylum level crazy when he doesn’t get what he wants. Besides all that, the other day I just saw him eat someone’s heart. Do you realize how fucking gross that was? The man is a disgusting animal. I don’t need his shit in my life anymore.”

  “Love you too,” he breathed in response to my rant. He sounded happy and warm again. “I can’t wait to marry the fuck out of you woman.”

  “Yes! Let’s do that. Marry the fuck out of each other. Let’s do this thing now baby!”

  The call ended. I threw my phone. Unable to look at myself in the mirror. Not because I couldn’t bear to look at myself, which I couldn’t, it was because I didn’t want to accept the tall dark figure that filled it, standing behind me.

  Thorn.

  No!

  Dressed in head to toe black, the infamous black and white mask on, his dark green eyes shone with unshed tears.

  “You have the audacity to call me a liar Elena! You should listen to yourself some time!”

  I pointed at the door. “Get out. Get the fuck out. You don’t get to be here on my special day. I don’t want to see you Thorn.”

  He advanced on me.

  “Don’t touch me!” I screamed.

  His large hands, that were raised, to do God knows what, strangle me perhaps? dropped and came to rest, trembling by his sides as he stood, towering over me. The intoxicating darkness and power of him slamming into me, carved up my soul.

  “Elena,” he began softly, pleadingly. “I need to explain something. It is important. I think you would want to know this.”

  I pushed him hard in the chest. He remained an unmovable wall of sinister bad ass. “What does it matter? It’s all lies any way. There is nothing to explain because all it will be is just another fucking lie.”

  “I love you,” he said brokenly, “I want you –

  “Well I don’t want you!” I exploded in his masked face.

  He shook his head and his dark green eyes went wide behind the mask in panic. “Please don’t say that,” he begged.

  “I don’t want you,” I repeated.

  His head fell.

  “No,” he whispered. “I can’t accept it.”

  “I don’t want you,” I slammed my chest to his knocking him back a step. “Get the fuck out of my life.”

  Then I heard an odd screeching sound.

  I felt my mouth gape unattractively when thud after thud of ravens no less crashed into the window of my parent’s two storey home. I ran to the window, whereas Thorn remained with his head still bowed, and arms folded. He was shaking so hard I thought the big man would fall over, but he remained resolute, stubbornly rooted to the square of carpet I had barely moved him from.

  The ravens kept stupidly pelting themselves at my window smashing their little skulls in dropping dead, falling in a dark disgrace to the freshly mown grass below.

  Distantly I heard my Mother scream.

  “What the actual fuck?” I uttered. “Thorn?,” naturally I looked to him for explanation. He had moved and was now standing with his back to me, facing an open window. His arms were open as if to accept a hug. There was something terrifyingly surreal about the way he just stood there. He shot a look over his shoulder, his dark green eyes glittered maniacally, and he waved his middle finger at me. “This isn’t over,” he said, and then turned and kicked out the window. I screamed, watching him move with inhuman grace and speed. He ran along the roof, and then leapt off the freaking thing, his dark coat fluttering, awkwardly landing in a tree. He tumbled through it, and preventing a fall, his large white hands curled around a branch. He simply swung there, still looking up at me. He dropped to the ground and stalked toward a sleek black motorbike. He mounted it, and roared out of my front yard like the crazy mother fucker he was.

  “Oh it is most definitely over, you crazy fuck!” I screamed after him.

  “Elena,” I heard my Mother’s panicked voice drifted up the stairs. “Honey, who was that man who nearly broke his neck jumping off the roof? He looked a bit like Cellrager?”

  After I relayed the chaos that went down at my folks place, Aaron almost turned our driver to the wedding around in his profound and acute alarm.

  “What was Thorn thinking?” my friend despaired. “Elena, he keeps getting scarier. What are we going to do?”

  “Well,” I said calmly as I pulled at the gathered folds of the silk of my ivory wedding gown, and looked down at the the skin tight lace long sleeved gold encrusted bodice with a quick admiring glance to ensure my assets remained demurely in place. Sort of the look I was going for. The girls could come out and play with Brett later. “I plan on marrying Brett today, what about you?”

  “You’re not scared of what Thornton might do?” Aaron sounded doubtful.

  “Naturally I’m fucking terrified,” I fired back at my friend.

  “We’re here,” our driver quietly interrupted.

  Once out of the car, I held out my arms to Aaron. “Give me a hug.”

  “Of course, you look fucking gorgeous by the way. Brett is a very lucky man in more ways than one. Oh El,” Aaron’s eyes wet with tears. “I’m just so scared for you babe.”

  “Do not dare make me cry fucker!” I ordered him, and he laughed and we embraced fiercely.

  I stared down the stunning gothic inspired blue stone cathedral before me. My gaze said it all.

  Don’t fuck with me.

  My beautiful Brett eagerly lifted my veil. How very smashingly sexy he looked in his crisp black suit with his gold vest and tie. We were about to commence our vows, when I heard something odd and strange.

  Everyone else heard it too. A rustling, and then the church slowly darkened.

  “Something is covering the church!” Someone reported.

  The rustling continued and everything grew considerably darker.

  The doors flung open to reveal the church was now housed inside what looked like some kind of … tent.

  Oh my god it looked like one of those termite tents that were put around houses.

  Some fucker had had the audacity to do that to this exquisite cathedral on the day of my wedding.

  What?

  Hell no!

  A sweet smelling gas poured in. To my horror, one after the other the military muscle and other security we had flanking this event were thrown unceremoniously into the aisle. Rendered completely useless. Thorn’s army of minions streamed in. They wore gas masks in lieu of their normal gimp get up and were all pointing fire power at us.

  “Fuck this,” our minister muttered, and made a dash for the back exit, but was forced to leap out of the way, when a motorcycle crashed through it, with the dark demonic messiah astride of it of course.

  Thornton Darko.

  More of his demented minions spilled into the church.

  There were so many of them.

  Everyone screamed and began a panicked run for the door. Some tried smashing out the arched stain glass windows in their desperation to escape. This was a nightmare.

  Brett and I didn’t deserve this.

  After everything we had been through.

  Our wedding had been turned into a fucking circus.

  “Run little termites run!” Thorn’s dark voice boomed around us. “You won’t get very far.”

  Brett’s brown eyes were tear-filled as he pulled me securely against him. His hand curling around my arm tight, and his other shaking hand fetched a gun from the back of his pants. Holy shit. That was a huge gun. How in the hell had he hid that? “I will fucking kill him Elena,” he said seriously. “I will blow that fucker away if he so much as tries to!”

  “To what?” Thorn dressed in his Cellrager gear rushed Brett. My man swung the gun around and smashed it up into Thorns temples. Right between the demented fools eyes. Stopping him dead in his tracks.

  Brett coughed against the pink smoke writhing around us

  “What is that stuff?” he freaked. “What
are you doing to us?”

  “It kills termites,” Thorn said simply. “Rather effectively, I might add,” his wild dark green eyes burning bright in those mask eye holes, caught my wide terrified gaze. “Oh Elena, Elena, please, I am insulted. You know how I feel about mass murder!”

  Then he inclined his head a little at Brett. “How are you feeling … solider man?”

  “Like blowing your fucked up brains out,” he choked out in reply.

  Thud. Thud. Thud.

  Bodies were falling all around us. Didn’t believe in mass murder? Wasn’t the latest that he fucking poisoned his family and town folk himself? How could I believe anything that devastating mouth uttered anymore?

  Fuck him.

  I couldn’t.

  Brett’s finger trembled on the trigger. Sweat was pouring off his brow. Hesitation dripped off his beautiful, tortured face right now.

  Thorn took advantage of it, lightening quick, his hand flashed out, seized around Brett’s wrist and twisted his hand sharply. The gun now pointed into Brett’s flushed terrified face. His brown eyes bulged.

  Thorn’s long artistic fingers played over Brett’s. The slightest pressure applied to them would have him squeeze off a devastating shot.

  “No!” I screamed. “Please don’t do this. What do you want?”

  “You,” Thorn reached, gripping my arm, pulling me against him. He kept a careful hold on Brett. “Always. Come. And I will spare this termite.”

  I nodded. “Take me away.”

  I would not lose Brett.

  I lost him once.

  I could not go through that again.

  If this lunatic wanted me, he could have me. If it meant sparing the man I loved, I could deal with that. Clearly some fucked up part of me still wanted Thorn. He kept fucking coming back. That is how it worked didn’t it? He would come to my side whenever I wanted him. I had to figure out how to stop him from coming back. I had to free myself. How could I hope to be anything real for Brett when I may as well be wearing a slave choker around my neck?

  I was as good as enslaved to Thornton Darko.

  “Elena no!” Brett exploded, tears shining in his brown eyes. “Don’t do this, please hell no! You don’t have to go anywhere with this crazy fuck.”