Chapter 31
Orion
The dude begins to groan as the meds are slowly wearing off, but the sounds turn into shrieks the second Sunny puts the saw against his leg and begins cutting away.
Blood squirts everywhere, painting the walls as she starts her onslaught of revenge, and I’m merely a morbidly curious spectator penning down notes as quickly as she slices through his flesh.
I don’t know who this man is, or what he’s done to her, but he definitely deserves her wrath. Mike has done something despicable to Sunny, and this is her payback. An eye for an eye, a leg for a leg, pain for pain. She returns it all to sender, and I am in awe.
When Mike threatens to break through his restraints, Sunny barks at Xavier, “Hold him down.”
Xavier grabs Mike’s left arm and knocks it down the stretcher so far that he breaks it. Mike screams and cries and then vomits all over himself as she begins to cut his hand, chopping off his fingers one by one.
“You won’t need those to anesthetize anymore,” she says.
And I have never been more inspired by the sight of a slow, rancid death than I am now.
My pen is going in overdrive, jotting down the words.
Fifteen strokes
Red blotches peak
The sharpness of her eyes
Cutting deeper and deeper and deeper
Until there’s no way back.
Crimson stain enveloping my heart
The sound of violence taking hold
But her eyes are gentle as the night
Rage against the screaming lights
Hacking away at my wish for this to ever end
I pause to stare at the bloodied scene in front of me and the visceral violence she exudes.
“How do you like it when someone cuts into your flesh, Mike?” Sunny growls. “Do the pain meds not work? Aw, pity.”
Mike is screaming his lungs out as she cuts off his limbs one by one, like a crazed woman, and it’s such a turn-on to watch her that I immediately get a boner.
Still, I keep on writing. The words flow out of me with ease.
Seeing this kind of death has made me feel more alive than ever despite the fact that I’ve never wanted anything other than to die by her hand. But then, I would never be able to witness her fire ever again, and the thought of that wounds me deeply.
She is the only one who can bring me to sweet nirvana, yet … the more time I spend in her vicinity, the more I’m beginning to realize that I don’t ever want this madness to end.
When she’s done cutting up Mike’s limbs, he’s already passed out from shock.
The saw clatters on the floor while she breathes violently, as if the rage is slowly leaving her body.
I tuck my notebook and my pen back into my bag. Both Xavier and I approach her, and I wrap my arm around her while Xavier grabs her face. She’s covered in blood, but that won’t chase us away.
“Are you frightened yet?” she asks, her voice soft as she peels away the doctor’s mask.
“No,” I reply, while Xavier shakes his head.
“You should be,” she says. “I’m not sane.”
“I don’t care,” he says, taking off his mask too.
“You are perfectly sane to me,” I mutter, doing the same.
Xavier places his hand on her cheek. “Are you okay?”
Suddenly, she smashes her lips onto his, claiming a bloodied kiss that makes even me feel jealous, and I place naughty kisses all over her shoulder and neck, hoping whatever she’s siphoning from him, she’ll also claim from me.
“Fuck,” she groans. “This was just what I needed.”
Xavier looks hungry for more of her delectable kisses, but then she suddenly turns around, grabs my face too, and kisses me so hard it makes me dizzy with need. I nearly melt into a puddle in her arms, craving more of that sweet, sweet poison in her bloody, violent kisses. The taste of murder.
We kiss one after the other until we’re all smeared with Mike’s blood, and my cock hardens against the cage she put it in.
Xavier groans in pain, grabbing his length as he keeps pressing more kisses against her shoulder while we’re both delirious with need.
She smiles. “You did well, and you both deserve a reward for being so obedient.”
“Fuck yes,” I groan as her tongue dips against my earlobe and runs a trail down my neck.
Suddenly, there’s a ruckus in the hallway beyond.
“Shit,” Xavier mutters, and he swiftly grabs the saw and tucks it back into his bag. “We gotta run, fast.”
“What about the body?” I ask.
She walks up to Mike’s butchered body as she pulls a familiar lipstick from her pocket and drags it over her lips, then pecks Mike’s cheek. “There. A perfect final gift.”
“How do we get rid of him? Do we just pretend he’s one of the corpses in the morgue?” I ask.
“No. We leave him,” she replies without even looking at me.
I frown. “What? Why? They’ll find him.”
Xavier’s nostrils flare. “That’s the point.”
She smiles viciously, and it finally dawns on me … She wants to be found.
That’s it.
That’s why she has no qualms about Atreus hunting her down.
She’s after him. She wants him too.
Holy shit.
Xavier passes me by with his backpack slung over his shoulder, and he opens the door again to waltz out. “Let’s go, before this place is swarmed and we go to jail for murder.”
We dumped all of our stolen doctor clothes, except the gloves, into one of the plastic bags in the hallway, and used the nurse’s badge to get out through the back door of the morgue. We headed up the stairs and out through the back entrance.
It was easy to escape the situation. Even though someone was rummaging through the supplies closet, no one spotted us.
We made our way back to campus without so much as a scratch on our bodies. Only time will tell whether law enforcement comes after us, but I’m pretty sure no one will ever suspect it was us.
It’s been two days since the murder, and we’ve all gone back to our classes like nothing ever happened.
The cops are still swarming the grounds of Spine Ridge University College, and they track anyone entering or leaving the campus.
But none of us is foolish enough to come back covered in blood and with weapons.
Oh no, we cleaned ourselves properly using bottles of water and soap in the car somewhere off a beaten path, then buried our weapons at The Shack inches beneath the ground in the same spot Sunny has left all of her other tools for the time being.
She’s well prepared, and her plan has obviously been set in stone from day one.
I’m just surprised she hasn’t once mentioned getting revenge on Atreus for tying her up in that warehouse and taking advantage of her.
Maybe she liked it. Maybe she wanted him to do it, who knows?
According to Xavier, she’s been stalking his house ever since they first met, and I wonder if he often gets as jealous as I do, thinking about it.
I watch him chat with his friends in the cafeteria, pretending everything is normal, but every once in a while, his eyes connect with mine in a moment of shared knowledge of the grave crimes we’ve committed and the lengths we go for this one woman.
Sunny sits with her friends, basking in her radiance as they take pictures together and sip their iced teas, while I sit back and languish in my seat by myself. I pull out the bottle of wine that I hid under my jacket and pour it out into my empty glass, where no one’s looking.
“Drinking all by yourself?” my half sister Cecilia puts her tray down on the shared table and sits down opposite me.
“Wow. Haven’t seen you in a while,” I say. “I didn’t think you still existed.”
I take another swig.
“Don’t be mean,” she replies. “You know I’ve been busy, trying to get my things in order.”
I stare at her. “Weren’t you supposed to go back to your old college right around this time?”
She laughs. “And you ask me that now? We’re already more than a month into the new year.”
“Right, sorry. I’m not really aware of time.”
She grabs my glass of wine. “Maybe drink a little less.”
I snatch it back. “Excuse you. That belongs to me. Thank you very much.” I swirl the wine around. “Besides, I need it to feel … something.” I groan to myself.
“Something bothering you?” she asks.
“The usual. Lack of stimulation.”
“What you need is a girlfriend.”
I nearly spit out my wine. “Preposterous.”
“Is it?”
“My heart can only handle one muse,” I say, rolling my eyes.
She leans onto the palm of her hand. “Ooooh … Who is it?”
Shit. I said too much.
“Death,” I reply, and she rolls her eyes.
Full-blown panic mode subverted.
“But tell me, what made you decide not to go back there? I thought Mom and Dad had shipped you off on purpose.”
She throws me a damning look while putting a bunch of grapes in her mouth. “Ha-ha, very funny. It was actually my own choice. But I didn’t really like it there, to be honest. The boys were insufferable.”
My brows rise. “And you think they’re better here?” I burst out into full-blown laughter.
“I know people here,” she adds, staring at Aspen’s little group of girls across the cafeteria, which is all women right now.
I take another sip. “Uh-huh. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with your new friend.”
“What?” Her eyes widen. “I wasn’t even looking at them.”
I narrow my eyes. “Sure, you weren’t.”
“There’s nothing happening. What do you even see?”
“Everything.” I wriggle my brows.
She chucks a grape at my face. “I’m trying to make friends after switching colleges. Is that so wrong?”
“Nothing wrong if you ask me,” I muse, smiling like an idiot.
“Grow up. It’s not like you’re so innocent either. You’ve been gawking at Sunny for months on end now. When are you going to make a move?”
“How do you know I haven’t already?”
Her jaw drops. “Oh my God, Orion. You did not.”
“I have a death wish. I thought you already knew about that.”
She leans forward with both hands on the table. “Did you ask her out?”
“Oh, it’s gone way beyond that already.”
She giggles all giddy and stuff. “I can’t believe it. Orion Navarro and Sunny Reed are dating?”
I smash my fingers onto her lips. “Don’t. Don’t say it out loud. Besides, we’re not official.”
“Or she’ll kill you?” she whispers.
“If only,” I lament, taking another sip.
“You are weird. You know that, right?”
“Wanting to die by the hands of a goddess is not weird. It’s devotion. Commitment. My life, my fortitude, my being, belongs to her entirely.”
She snorts. “All right, all right, I get it. You’re nearly drooling over your wine.”
I snatch one of her crackers and stuff it into my mouth. “I just don’t want to disappoint my only muse.”
I pull my notebook from my pocket as well as my pen and write down more words.
“Lemme read those.” Cecelia steals the paper right from underneath my nose, and I wince.
“Hey!”
She reads through them at a crazy speed. “Wow. Obsessive, but wow. These are good.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah,” she says. “But you need to start writing about something other than death.”
“Impossible.” My curly blond hair slowly forms a curtain around my face as I lower it to the table so I don’t have to look at her. “I yearn to be relinquished from the bond that ties me to this earth.”
“Melodramatics will not land you the girl, Orion.”
“Neither will sharing her, but here we are.”
She frowns. “Sharing?”
“You thought I was her only plaything?” I laugh. “The sun gets easily bored with games.”
Suddenly, several police officers swarm the cafeteria, and almost all students stop talking as they crash our lunch breaks.
“Everybody out. Head back to your dorms, quietly and orderly. Those who live off campus must report to our temporary station outside. You must all vacate the property now.”
“What?” I mutter, staring at the cops, whose voices blast through the cafeteria.
“Spine Ridge University is going on lockdown. No one gets in, no one goes out.”