Reign of Ruin

by Bene, Jennifer

  Reign of Ruin

  Jennifer Bene

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  End Note

  The Day the Sky Burned

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Jennifer Bene

  Jennifer Bene

  Text copyright © 2019 Jennifer Bene

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN (e-book): 978-1-946722-40-9

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-946722-41-6

  Cover design by Laura Hidalgo, Beyond DEF Lit. https://www.beyonddeflit.com/

  Created with Vellum

  About this Book

  'The priests want me to thank God, but the only thing I pray for is death.'

  There is nothing before Eden. Just flashes of a time before Danielle woke up in chains, in hell, to be violated, abused, broken.

  Over, and over, and over.

  They say that God honors those who serve, that each baptism is a gift, but all Danielle wants is to die.

  But Eden has other plans.

  * * *

  Foreword

  “I no longer had a taste for anything, a wish for anything, a love for anybody, a desire for anything whatever, any ambition, or any hope.”

  ― Guy de Maupassant

  This book originally appeared as ‘Baptized in Eden’ in the Twisted Sacrament anthology where various sacraments were run through a dark romance / horror filter. I got to do that anthology with some of my favorite wicked-minded ladies, and the stories that came from it were all much closer to the horror end of the pool than dark romance! (insert evil laugh here)

  So, here is your warning, lovelies. While ‘Reign of Ruin’ has over 20,000 words added to it through an extended epilogue, and a bonus short story at the end… it’s still dark af. This is not one of those happy ending, everything-turns-out-okay kind of books. Similar to Breaking Beth, this is a walk deeper and deeper into a dark cave where all that lies at the end is an empty darkness. I will say that this time there is a certain element of righteous vengeance, but I’ll leave you to decide if you think Danielle should be happy or not.

  Still, even with all the deep dark insanity inside these pages, I do hope that you’ll give it a chance. It’s wicked, dirty, and (hopefully) the beginning of more books in this fucked up world my mind created.

  Be sure to read all the way to the end, because there’s a fantastic short story titled ‘The Day the Sky Burned’ that I wrote to help readers understand (a bit) how the world ended up so spectacularly fucked up.

  Enjoy the journey, lovelies!

  Chapter 1

  “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

  ― Terry Pratchett

  Waking was a painful thing. Joints creaking, headache like an ice pick through her temple, but Danielle still lifted herself upright if only to ease the ache in her shoulders. Something held her arms above her head, elbows near her hairline… and there were others around her.

  People breathing.

  Someone crying quietly.

  Another whispering in a language she didn’t recognize, but she would have sworn on a Bible it was a prayer.

  “You awake?” a voice asked from her right, and she twisted to look through hazy eyes… or maybe it was the room that was hazy. The air thick, gray.

  “What?” It came out raspy, weak. Mouth sticky, throat struggling to scratch out the word.

  “Finally. I was wondering if you were gone for good.” There was a soft huff, and Danielle blinked hard to clear the murk from her gaze, focusing hard on the shape beside her even though she felt half-asleep.

  “Wha—” She scraped her feet over the grit on the floor, feeling more of it shift under her thighs, her ass. Naked? “Where am I? What happened?”

  “Don’t remember?” It was a woman, a tired but feminine voice, and slowly her features were framed in the meager light. Long, pale hair hanging around a sharp face.

  “No, I—” Swallowing against her dry throat, she tried to form thoughts that didn’t want to align, like pressing together the wrong puzzle pieces… nothing fit. “Where am I? I’m not supposed to be here. I need to go. Please.”

  “You must have come from somewhere nice.”

  “Huh?” Head still fogged, Danielle shook it, and the sound of chain shook with her. “What do you mean?”

  “You still think you’ll be saved, you still have hope. Most don’t even think getting out is an option anymore. That’s… unique. They’ll like that because it’s something else they can take.”

  “Who? What are you talking about? Where are we?” Questions tumbled from her faster than her mind could process, and the woman beside her just stared with dead eyes. Empty. Her skin sallow and cheeks hollowed.

  “No memories yet?” she asked, ignoring all of Danielle’s questions.

  Raking through the distorted fog of her mind she saw clips and slices of a life that didn’t involve this dingy room, or the soft whimpers of women, or the dull clanking of chains in the dim. “I don’t understand.”

  “They woke you up because they wanted to… because they wanted you.” An answer that was not an answer. Not helpful.

  “What do you mean? What is this?”

  “They call it Eden, but I call it Hell.”

  “What? No…” Danielle jerked at the chains again, feeling the ache in her wrists that warned her against it, but panic was rising from the confusion, a bright strike of fear in the murk. “I don’t know how I got here, but this has to be a mistake. It’s a mistake, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be—”

  Where was she supposed to be?

  The information slipped from her like water through fingers. Almost there, almost caught, but lost before she could get it to her lips. To swallow it, to know it, to think it, to speak it.

  “Home?” the woman offered, a slight flick of her eyebrow and a quirk of her lip clearly making a mockery of the word that should have held comfort.

  “Yes.”

  “I had a home, a husband before all this. I had a child, a daughter. She was young, although I still can’t remember how old she was, but… I think they died, which is for the best. I wouldn’t want them here. There is no home for any of us anymore.”

  Danielle swallowed, turning her eyes up to the thick ring buried in the wall, following the chains down to the thick manacles on her wrists. Old fashioned, the kinds of things you’d see in a museum exhibit on torture.

  No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

  The phrase erupted from her mind, almost made her smile, mouth quirking at the edges like she should laugh, but it all festered into confusion, a muddling fear that the woman beside her would wish her child dead rather than here.

  Here, where Danielle was.

  “Did I have a family?” she asked, worried about the answer, but still desperate for the knowledge.

  “How would I know?” Another mocking glance as the woman shuffled he
rself back against the wall, swinging her bound arms to one side to lean closer, whispering like a confidant. “You’ll remember almost everything eventually.”

  “I don’t remember,” Danielle insisted. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “I know. I know you don’t. You should enjoy the quiet.” The woman nodded, head lolling back against the wall where her face was obscured by her arms, but her voice whispered out into the gloom, promising damnation. “Once you remember you won’t be able to think of anything else.”

  Chapter 2

  “Name?” the man asked, but she was frozen just inside the door.

  Well, frozen except for the shudders making her muscles twitch.

  Fear. Pure and refined by this hell was moving through her veins. The woman had been right. She’d been right about everything… but Danielle hadn’t seen her for weeks. Or had it been a month? More?

  Maybe she’d died. Escaped to join her family in the peace that would come after the last beat of her heart. Enough of them begged for it that death didn’t even seem bad anymore, but this man sitting in the chair, one arm draped over the side like a throne — he was bad.

  Evil.

  Hungry.

  A laugh rolled out of him, so low and sinister that she expected it to be followed by black smoke. Expected his eyes to turn red, glowing like a devil, but he was human.

  They were all just people.

  Somehow that made it worse.

  “Your name doesn’t really matter.” Snapping his fingers, he pointed at the floor. “Come here.”

  Danielle walked forward in slow, padding steps. Obeying, barely, stretching out the time before the pain, the screaming. When she ran out of room, she stared down at his boots. Mud-speckled and thick-soled.

  “Knees.”

  Her body folded like a marionette with its strings cut. Graceless, she didn’t even flinch when the impact of the kneel echoed up her bones.

  “So pretty. So fresh.” Grabbing her face with a calloused hand, he squeezed her jaw, brushing the dry pad of his thumb over her mouth. He plucked at her lower lip, traced her teeth, lifted her chin so she was looking at him. “I think I do want your name.”

  “Danielle,” she whispered and then his thumb was in her mouth, bent over her teeth to press into the soft place under her tongue, digging in. Hard. His fingers under her chin did the same, nails threatening to pierce flesh as if he wanted them to meet. To rip her open. A guttural sound escaped her and he groaned, hauling her forward by the painful hold until she knelt between his legs.

  “Danielle,” he repeated, but from his lips it sounded like a threat. Emphasized by the torment of his thumb burrowing deeper into pooling saliva, thumbnail adding copper to the tang of fear. Her tongue curled away from the pain, seeking refuge against the roof of her mouth. A coward.

  Drool dripped. Fists clenched. Pain faded as she grew used to it, but his eyes were on hers. A dull blue, like old paint. Sun-bleached and rotting. His face was tanned, weather worn, wild. The brown of his close-cropped beard run through with strands of amber when he tilted his face and it caught the light.

  He was older than her, by twenty years or so, but the body under his clothes was all strength. Battle-hardened and brutal, and the bulge behind the buttons of his pants matched his size.

  Tall, powerful, male.

  This was going to hurt. A lot.

  He leaned forward, the bulk of his shoulders blocking some of the light until he was a dark shadow framed in a yellow haze. “I’m going to fuck this pretty mouth of yours”—his fingers dug in just a little harder and she couldn’t stifle the whimper, a garbled, incomplete plea—“and then I’m going to make you scream before I fuck you into a bloody puddle.”

  Those words burrowed deeper than the fingers bruising her.

  Those words were promises.

  Tears burned the edges of her eyes as he eased off the pressure with his thumb, only to trace the drool over her top lip and then smear it across her cheek. In another life she would have begged, called out for help, run for the door — but she’d tried all those things on other nights.

  Begging made them happy.

  Calling out made them hurt her worse.

  And the door was always, always, locked the moment she was pushed inside.

  So, Danielle stayed on her throbbing knees as he sat up in the chair. Swallowed the drool left in her mouth. Traced the sore place he’d left behind with the tip of her tongue, unable to stop prodding even when it stung. Even when she tasted the blood he’d drawn.

  Looking up at him, he seemed taller, larger from the perspective, and then a new flash of memory hit her.

  The warmth of a fire. A soothing voice reading a book aloud. Her fingers working at a braid. Her sister’s braid, her father’s voice, the smell of real food cooking.

  As quickly as it had come, it was gone, and it left her colder than before. The loss of people she couldn’t even name hollowing out a place inside her chest as if the scraps of her heart were trying to escape with sharpened spoons.

  How fucked was it to remember something good while she was naked and kneeling before a goddamned monster? A monster that was going to fuck her. That was a promise made by his presence in this room, in this place. Hell.

  His fingers wound around her throat, squeezing, as the other hand popped the buttons on his pants one at a time. When his cock came free, pants adjusted to let it stand tall, Danielle tried to coat her lips and tongue with the drool he’d summoned.

  Anything to make it easier.

  “Hands behind your back. If you move them, you know what’ll happen.” It was a casual command, so little effort behind it because he knew it would be obeyed — and she did obey. Clasping one hand around the opposite wrist, she waited as his fingers wormed their way into her hair, gathering it on either side of her head to keep it out of the way as he pulled her forward.

  Drawing the head of his cock between her lips didn’t require a command.

  Refusing the urge to bite didn’t require a threat.

  Danielle dipped her head down voluntarily, and laved the underside of his shaft with her tongue before she sealed her lips to his flesh. His guttural groan was a triumph, and she ignored the tender space in her mouth so that she could focus on pleasing him.

  When they were happy, they weren’t so violent.

  Usually.

  But something about this man, something in the dull glint of his blue eyes, or the calm tone of his powerful voice, told her that he was going to hurt her no matter how well she sucked his cock. It wouldn’t matter if he came down her throat, wouldn’t matter if she hummed a moan when her lips were pressed to the base of him. There would be pain. But, for a single moment, she tried to determine if she was still concerned about dying, wondered if her self-preservation had dissolved enough to join the other wraiths that walked these halls waiting for their chance to be free.

  It was just a moment though.

  His fingers tightened in her hair, the sting of strands ripping free of her scalp preceding his first harsh thrust into her throat. Yanked forward, nose buried into the fabric of his shirt, she pressed ragged nails into her skin to keep her hands still. Swallowing around the girth forced past the point where air could slip by, Danielle tried to accept it. To wait for the moment when his own needs would force him to move, to seek more friction — the moment when she’d be able to breathe.

  Throat convulsing, stomach heaving, she finally got a sip of air before she choked on the next thrust. The hot tears in her eyes were a biological response to the gagging, the lack of air, not an emotional one. She’d cried all the tears she could before now. Used all the words she knew to beg and plead, and not a single person had cared.

  She was an object. A warm body to be used.

  And she still couldn’t remember how the fuck she’d ended up here.

  He was bruising her throat, making flashes of light beat behind clenched eyelids to the pounding of her pulse as he deprived her of air. Wet, desperat
e gasps were all she could catch on the few thrusts that pulled him out of her throat. Just enough to keep her conscious, to keep her mouth and tongue working on him, even if most of it now was automatic convulsions.

  The only conscious effort was keeping her lips folded over her teeth as best she could. Another fruitless attempt to ease the pain she knew was coming. This? This relentless fucking of her throat, the pounding of his cock between her lips, the harsh grunts above her buzzing ears? It was nothing. It was easy. If this was all he wanted from her, she’d lick his fucking boots clean in appreciation.

  “Take it,” he growled and forced her down once again. Nose buried against fabric she couldn’t smell because she couldn’t breathe. The urge to pull back, to brace her hands against his knees and push, to bite down and force her way to air… it was all-consuming. Every neuron in her brain fired at once demanding oxygen.

  ‘BREATHE,’ her body shouted, commanded, and the death grip of her nails on her wrist eased, violence rising in her head like a red haze from a lizard-brain that only knew death or survival.

  But then he moved again, a fraction of air making its way to her lungs, just enough to return sanity and allow her to switch the grip behind her back. Opposite hand now, pressing jagged nails into skin to remind her of the things they’d done to teach her not to bite. Not to fight.

  Male skin slicked over her tongue, drool pooling to ease his path, welcoming him into her throat before his next long withdrawal spilled it down her chin and graced her with oxygen in the same movement.

  His thrusts grew shorter, quicker, and she tried to focus and suck him, moving her tongue with purpose, stroking, urging him to completion as she made herself drunk on the air whistling in and out of her nose.