Chapter 38
The Prey
D arkness suffocates me, pressing from all sides with the heavy stench of mold. My arms are chained, stretched painfully overhead, fingers numb and useless. I thought the pain would be sharper, more immediate, but it’s a dull, distant ache, like my body has already given up trying to tell me anything important. My eyes open to slits, then shut again. It doesn’t matter. The black is absolute.
I hear his breathing before I see him. Slow. Measured. Controlled. A man’s breathing, deep in the chest. Then a flicker of light, sickly and pale, that catches on the planes of his face, casting him as some skeletal specter.
John; Michael’s brother.
“Awake already?” His voice is velvet over ice, the kind of smooth that makes you slide when you want to stand. He holds something in his hand, and the light dances on it as it sways. My eyes track it, hypnotized. A whip. He uncoils it slowly, like a snake charmer, like he has all the time in the world.
“Why?” My voice is a croak, a frog in a desert. I clear my throat, and the motion sets off a chain reaction of hurt. I bite down on it. “Why am I still alive?” I expected John to kill me right away. Hell, I counted on it .
He steps closer. The flickering light casts his shadow large against the walls. “You thought I’d kill you?” He sounds amused. “Did Michael teach you nothing, Ruby? You haven’t earned death. My brother hiring the Hunter to kill you was meant to be a mercy, one you clearly didn’t want.”
I cry out as he runs a finger down my chest, through the mark burned into my skin. It’s cold, clinical. He has the hands of a mortician, the touch of someone who sees bodies as objects.
“Regardless of this mark, you’re mine now.”
My stomach knots. “W-what does that mean?” I stammer.
He shrugs. “Whatever I want it to mean. First, I’m going to have my fun, and then…” He smirks. “… then I’ll sell you at the auction in a couple of days.”
The auction? Oh shit, he means… swallowing suddenly becomes hard as the meaning sinks in.
“Ahh, there it is,” John coos. “God, you look beautiful when you’re terrified, Ruby.” He moves close enough he can lick the tears trailing down my cheeks.
I shudder as I do my best to pull away, but there’s nowhere for me to go. So all I end up doing is making the chains above me rattle. “Fuck you,” I hiss, trying to infuse bravado I don’t feel into my tone.
With a cruel smirk, he winks. “Tempting.” That’s all he says as he begins to circle me.
After circling me twice, he strikes. The first lash is a lightning bolt, white-hot and blinding. My body arches, then sags. I bite my lip until I taste metal, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a scream.
“Look at you trying so hard not to scream for me,” he chuckles coldly.
Another lash.
“But I’ll make you scream, Ruby. One way or another. I’m not my soft brother, so the faster you sing for me, the better it’ll be for you.”
“I said, fuck you.” My voice is ragged, broken from the effort of holding my screams and cries back.
I can feel the sting of the whip slicing through the air, landing against my ski n. I choke back a scream, fighting to stay still, to hold on to whatever strength I can gather. But his voice—calm, controlled, with that twisted edge of delight—picks up again, drilling into my mind as effectively as the pain.
“You really want my cock that badly?” he asks.
A sob lodges in my throat. “N-never.”
He laughs—a deep belly laugh as he comes back to stand in front of me. “I’m curious,” he says, tilting his head to the side. “What did you think would happen? You knew you’d become mine when Michael died. You signed the damn contract.”
Refusing to answer him, I clamp my mouth shut.
“Got nothing to say? That’s okay, I’ll talk and you can listen. I knew the moment you poisoned my brother—”
“How?” I whisper, unable to stop the question from slipping out.
Both Michael and John have stated this to me before, but they never told me the specifics.
“I knew you’d be wondering how I knew,” John murmurs, and there’s a sickening thrill in his words, a pride in his twisted game. “How I knew Michael was dead.”
My stomach knots. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of my fear. He can have my curiosity—but not anything else.
“Tech can be quite useful,” he says, almost conversationally. “Michael had a little something under his skin. A chip, an injectable nano-device that lets me track vital signs—heart rate, brain activity, breathing. If there’s a sudden drop, an interruption…” He shrugs as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I get an alert.”
He pauses, watching my face, savoring every flicker of reaction he can catch.
The chains bite into my wrists, and I shift my weight, trying to find a position that hurts less. There’s no point in struggling; I’m too weak to break free, and the exertion would only tear my skin more. I need to conserve what little strength I have.
“I was already waiting just outside, watching through the cameras Michael had installed and hidden all over the house. But you knew they were there. So I have to ask, did you put on a show for me?”
He ’s right, I did know about the cameras. But I didn’t know John had access, just like I didn’t know he was waiting outside. Not like knowing would have changed anything. I’d still have killed Michael since he knew about Valentine’s identity, which John apparently also knows.
“W-why didn’t you save him?” I ask, needing to know why John would let his brother die.
He just shrugs. “What was the point? I told him not to marry you, and I even told him to get rid of you years ago. But he never did listen. He liked playing with you more than he valued his own life. He deserved what he got.” John spits on the floor for good measure. “Good riddance.”
“But then—”
He cracks the whip in the air, silencing me. “There’s no point in asking what I know you were about to ask. He was my brother, so even if he was a fool, I’ll still avenge him.”
Before I can even fully register that he has moved, fire spreads across my back. This time, it splits my skin open, and I feel the warmth of my own blood, the cool rush of air on raw flesh.
I finally scream. The high pitched and guttural sound is so loud it hurts my ears. I keep screaming until my throat burns, until nothing more than pathetic and simpering sounds come out.
The whip sings, each strike a searing pain that blurs into a hazy fog in my mind. I lose track of how many times it bites. My mind floats, unmoored, drifting on a sea of hurt. I’m adrift, untethered from reality, lost in an ocean of agony.
In an instant, a rush of warmth spreads through my entire body, enveloping me in a cocoon of emotions. All I see, smell, and feel is Valentine. His presence is so vivid that it feels as if he is standing right in front of me, his tall frame towering over me. I can almost feel the heat radiating from his body and the softness of his lips against mine.
The deep timbre of his voice echoes through my mind, speaking his nickname for me. He tells me to be strong, that I’m not broken, and that this won’t be the end of me. A sob escapes me as warm tears trickle down my cheeks.
“You’re wrong,” I say, or at least I think I say it. Though I can’t be sure.
And he is because this is the end.
The curse has finally caught up with me.