Chapter 7
7
“ Y ou’re a fucking creep,” I yell at the man standing over me with folded arms. The stranger who doesn’t allow me to get back into bed.
This twisted, sick game he’s playing, of nursing me and watching my every move day and night, is pushing me beyond the limits of my sanity.
And still, he doesn’t say a single word.
“Are you some kind of psycho, or what?”
His dark eyebrows knit together. The strong jaw beneath his beard is set in a harsh line to match his lips. He’s giving me a look that could crush my windpipe, and right now, I feel reckless enough to push him and see how long it takes until this man finally snaps.
To do us all a favor and end this punishment once and for all.
“What are you gonna do, just sit there and stare at me forever?” My voice cracks with the force of how loud I’m hurling insults and snide remarks his way. “Gonna cut my skin off and put it over a doll, you sicko?”
A pulse thumps in his neck, right above the tattoos I catch a glimpse of lining his collarbone. Deep ink forms an intricate tooth-like pattern over brown skin.
Another jerk of his head in the direction of the door is all I get.
It’s all I ever fucking get from him.
This ogre of a man is my eternal prison guard, who seemingly hasn’t left my side and sits there looking straight at me every time I open my eyes. Whatever had been floating in my bloodstream has now finally vacated my veins, leaving behind a hollow, angst-laden burning sensation that spreads everywhere .
Everything inside me wants to scream, to thrash, to smash shit up, and at the top of that list stands the mountainous figure who is demanding I go outside.
He makes me go out into the fresh air and walk around, like I’m some sort of dog on a fucking leash.
Meanwhile, my skin crawls the entire time with the unnerving sensation that it’s not only him watching my every move.
A rabid case of paranoia eats away at me. I’m feeling savage enough that I’ve even considered trying to take a swing at this man’s thick fucking skull. Hollow anger, that’s what I’m left with in the wake of whatever the hell kind of come down this is.
Yet, even though I might be plagued with thoughts of how I can try to cause this asshole immense pain, I’m also equally weak and pathetic and struggling.
After being bed-ridden for god knows how long, these daily excursions outside are giving me a chance to rediscover muscles and movement in a way that I refuse to admit might be beneficial for me… because, if I dare acknowledge that this man is doing something to try and help me, it feels like I’m throwing myself into the deep end of the ocean.
I don’t know who he is, other than a masked stranger who I let myself spend one night bespelled by, and I still don’t know why I’m here. It stings like a bitch that the other two haven’t made an appearance. I feel gullible and pathetic that I ever thought they might have shown some sort of interest in me beyond what they readily took from my body.
Ultimately, none of it fucking makes sense. I’m flush with a special kind of bitterness that burns an acidic trail up the back of my throat. As I try to make sense of any little part of what’s happening here, my nape prickles, distrust scuttles across my skin, warning me that nothing is what it seems.
This man is part of a secret society.
There is absolutely no reason for me to think anything but the worst of what it means to be imprisoned here.
He shifts his weight in those combat boots he always wears and jerks his chin once more as if I’m an idiot who didn’t understand him the first time.
“Fine.” A snarl curls my upper lip. Clutching my arms around my waist, I make my way out of the bedroom. This house is modern, all glass and architectural lines. It’s spotless in a way you’d expect to see in a show home, or coffee table catalog, where there’s not a single piece of clutter to be found.
An open-plan modern kitchen and lounge sits at the end of the hallway. There are other doors off to the sides that I pass by, but I don’t bother trying to figure out what lies beyond any of them.
I trudge toward fresh air and natural light.
From the lounge, glass doors open out onto a sloping meadow of long grass and a darkened line running parallel to the house, where a forest begins. Those wooded thickets lie only a hundred feet or so from the glass frontage where I stand.
This building resembles a minimalist rectangle, single story, set into a slight natural rise in terrain at the back.
There’s nothing I’ve seen to give an idea of where the fuck this place is.
No other houses. No other vehicles. No other people .
It’s like I’ve fallen off the face of the map and sickeningly, I don’t have a clue if I’m even in the same country anymore.
All I know is that there’s a giant man stalking my every movement, who won’t speak to me and doesn’t leave me alone for a single second.
As we pass through the glass doors and exit onto the pebbled pathway wrapping around the front of the property, I hug my arms tighter around myself, grateful for the sweater to give me a little protection against the chill lingering in the air.
I mean, the temperature and weather seem to be the same as back home in Port Macabre, it’s not like we’re surrounded by extremes like desert or snow, but that’s almost nothing to go on.
I’m wearing an assortment of clothes they gave me that aren’t my own, but fit my size all the same. Black leggings and a matching jersey over the top of a tank.
Glaring at the man who looms behind me, I sulk my way through the routine we seemingly go through the motions of each time we come out here. He lurks there and watches me, as if I’m supposed to obediently cock a leg and take a piss on one of the shrubs.
“Just fucking leave me alone. When am I going to be allowed to go back to my life?”
His head tilts to one side, and his nostrils flare. It’s the first time I’ve seen him looking frustrated with me. As if I’ve possibly scratched beneath that implacable exterior.
Good.
Usually, his expression is too soulful, too concerned, and it unnerves me because I cannot fathom or reconcile the way he continues to coddle me as if he damn well cares . Yet, keeps me locked up here like a prisoner without explanation.
“This is fucked up.” My eyes roll as I tuck my thumbs into the sleeves. “I’m guessing you know exactly how sick this is. That’s why you don’t say anything, isn’t it? You don’t want to give me any clues as to who you are… you freak.”
Running a tongue over the front of his teeth, his eyes narrow. Unfolding one arm from across that barrel chest of his, a finger gestures a line back and forth, pointing in the direction of the grass.
Walk.
Ugh. This fucking creep.
“I’m not some sort of pet. Gonna put a chain on me or something?” My top lip curls. “Bet you get off on that sort of crap. Plan on wanking over the sight of me walking around? Is that the sort of pathetic thing that you fantasize about? Kidnapping girls and staring at them all day and all night?”
My stomach churns with all the disgusting blackness that has been coating my insides like tar. It feels like whatever those drugs were, they’ve left my blood poisoned forevermore with a toxic sludge. I’ve never been this type of person. I’ve never spoken like this to anyone.
Right now, I don’t give a shit.
Turning my back on the asshole who won’t even deem me worthy of a single word, my eyes trace the edge of the trees. They form a thick blanket stretching out into the distance. There’s no obvious point where the forest ends, and that scratches something in the recesses of my mind.
I scuff my thin-soled slip-on sneakers against the pebbles, feeling every lump and granule through the flimsy rubber. At the same time, as my weight bears down against the path beneath my feet, I feel a flutter of something inside my chest.
All that land, stretching out for miles toward the horizon, it must go somewhere.
Darting my gaze around, I see the way the trees thicken, and the darkness swallows up any fingerlings of daylight. Only a few meters back from the edges, gnarled trunks and branches disappear beneath heavy shadows .
My breathing quickens and grows hummingbird wings.
These thighs and stomach I’ve been graced with might be curvy and squishy, but in stature, I’m much, much smaller than that man.
He could easily rip me apart with those big hands that look more like baseball mitts than palms.
Even though he might be impossibly strong—enough so the mere act of smashing my skull in with a single blow would come brutal and efficient if he truly wanted it to—I bet he doesn’t move fast.
Strength is no match for speed over a short distance. I am certainly not a runner, but there’s nothing quite like the element of surprise.
Could I make it to those trees and disappear amongst those thick, entwined branches, given enough of a head start?
Curling my toes against the inside of my shoes, there’s a surge of heat flowing through my extremities. This is madness, yet it calls my name with an irresistible siren song, as if there are witches in those woods who sense my plight.
Or maybe that’s just the fucking drugs I’ve been doped up on.
Either way, I’m not going to let myself be trapped in that bedroom while a stranger with dark eyes and biceps the size of my head spoon feeds me soup and plots how to make a life-sized puppet out of my skin.
I hastily dart my tongue out, feeling like my heart is in my throat.
And that’s when the magnetic pull of this insanity gets an unexpected green light. As if somewhere, somehow, an unknown presence wants me to try to make a run for it.
The man behind me gets a text.
His phone chimes, and as he withdraws it from his pocket and swipes the notification open, I watch from the corner of my eye for the exact moment his attention drops to whatever awaits him on screen.
All it takes is for his awareness to drift from me for a split second, and I bolt.
I’m racing. Sprinting. Feeling wobbly and carried by the wind as my heartbeat surges in my ears so loud I can’t hear anything.
I don’t know if he’s two paces behind me, or if he’s already close enough to tackle me to the ground and break my ribs in the act of doing so.
Faster.
Get to the trees.
The bark and leaves and scents as grass crushes beneath my flying feet all come into sharpened focus as the treeline draws nearer.
Oh god.
I might make it.
The gnarled branches swoop low, but not too much for me to break through their tangled web.
My mouth hangs open on desperate, struggling breaths. I’ve been stuck in a bed, virtually immobile for so long, my body is surviving on pure adrenaline and fear.
Terror is a powerful fuel, and right now, every fiber in my body is humming with the surge of potent determination to get myself the fuck to safety.
While I don’t know what lies ahead of me, it can’t be worse than everything I’ve endured since that night.
Pumping my legs and blindly racing for the gap between the intertwined bark, I can only pray that one of those massive hands isn’t going to grab me from behind.
I can’t look back.
My palms slam into bark, scraping the skin raw, as I swing myself beneath the branch. As I do, all the blood drains from my face. He looms large, charging after me with a savage mask, turning his features into something terrifying.
A hunter.
Ducking, flailing, almost slipping on the loose leaf litter beneath my rubber soles, I plunge deeper into the twisted maze of trees.
It’s frantic. I’m blinded by the pounding desperation to escape this mess.
Each step crunches over twigs and dried leaves and the forest folds in overhead.
Thick, inky air swirls around me, and I don’t know whether that’s my own vision blurring because of how desperate I am for oxygen, or whether it’s truly so much darker the further I descend into the tangle of wood and bark.
And still, thundering footsteps nip at my heels, sounding closer than before.
I feel my muscles failing me.
Panting, whimpering, my throat seizes at the same time as my fuel evaporates. One moment, it was there, hot and thick and driving my escape; the next, it’s nothing more than a wheezing cough of dust.
An anguished cry leaves my lungs as my ankle twists. With the next stride, my knees buckle, and at the same time, a lead weight collides with my midriff.
I’m encased in a steely grip, part crushed, part cradled, as our bodies hit the dirt so hard I let out a scream.
Am I terrified, or simply a whirlwind of rage, a tempest of exhaustion?
Thrashing beneath him, I simply cannot get free. Every muscled, tombstone-like inch of his enormous frame pins me to the ground, and I can’t fucking breathe. His brawn traps me as easily as a wilted rose inside a cage of bone and breath.
Curses burst out of me. Utter nonsense and partial words. There’s nothing I can do, and it drives me into a frenzy of feral noise. I’m a hellcat clawing at his face, his beard, his neck, and yet he stays there.
Wild eyes bore into my own.
He’s trying to communicate something to me and I’m entirely uninterested in anything this goddamn silent freak has to say.
My captor could start spouting poetry and monologues worthy of the stage, and I’d still gladly stab him in the throat, given half a chance.
Our chests heave as the sheer breadth and weight of his cavernous torso moves up and down in time with my own shaky inhales.
“Fuck you. Get the fuck off me. Let me go .”
His eyes drill deep. With brows knitted together, every plane of his face is lined with anger and ferocity.
“Get. The. Fuck. Off. Me.” I scream in his face. Hot tears stream down my cheeks, ones I didn’t even know were there, or at what stage they started pouring out.
Teeth flash as he bares them, clenched with rage and something even deeper, more nuanced than that, but I don’t fucking care to pay attention. Who or what this asshole is, and why he won’t let me go, none of it matters.
I hate that he’s handsome. I hate that he knows my body already from a stupid goddamn decision I made. I hate that he took care of me when all I want is for him to be cruel and unkind because then maybe some tiny part of this would make sense.
Those words, or at least the part of it I can bring myself to utter, burst out.
“I hate you.” My sob splits the air.
His dark eyes flash, and one of those giant palms moves suddenly. He slams his fist into the ground so hard it would surely break a knuckle if he were a normal person.
Except nothing about this is normal .
It’s ten-thousand ways to fucked up.
“Did you hear me? Are you deaf?” My sobs choke out. “ I hate you .”
For the first time, a noise erupts from his chest. I don’t know if it’s a sound or a rumble or a stirring of the earth itself, but he slams his fist into the dirt again.
“Go on. Just fucking do it.” Balling my fists, I thump against his shoulders in the most goddamn futile, weak effort. It feels like hitting solid stone. “They were going to. I bet you will, too.”
His expression contorts. Just like the night when he pointed at me to ask if they’d assaulted me with that look of concern written indelibly all over his face. The kind that I should know not to trust at all by now.
“You’re just as much of a sick bastard as them, but it’s worse. It’s worse, because you’ve already fucked me, right?”
A muscle in the side of his jaw tics frantically with the strain running across his features.
“Yeah. Go on, then. Play your stupid little secretive game and do whatever the hell you want in silence. Because you’ve already had me, so I bet you’re just waiting for your moment when you’ll do it again.”
This time, he’s had enough of my mouthing off. His frame leaves mine, and with frightening speed, he peels himself up off the ground and virtually plucks me out of the dirt in the same movement.
I’m slung over his shoulder as if I weigh nothing more than an empty sack, left to flop around with every long stride. The whole way back to the house, I curse him and yell myself hoarse while hanging upside down.
Every second I exhaust myself further simply reinforces my helplessness.
I can feel mud coating my spine. This sweater and top cling in a heavy glob of sodden dirt against my skin, and there must be splatters on my face, too. Leaves stick in my hair and are ground into the material of my elbows and sleeves.
The whole way, I keep struggling and detest the fact that he feels so warm. It’s impossible to ignore the branding heat of his palms through the thin fabric of my leggings.
What’s worse is that each stride, each step where he carries me back to the prison of glass where he’s keeping me in his silent enclosure, is that I remember.
I remember everything about that night.
How he felt.
The way his palms grazed my naked skin.
Being tucked against his broad chest.
Every inch of his cock, and those piercings lining the underside of his length.
It should be making me sick to my stomach, but in some dark and depraved recess of my brain, there is enough of a lingering question there.
Why is he keeping me like this?
To what end?
Does he want me still?
So I shove all that aside and continue to struggle, because if I don’t, if I give up and give in and maybe show a hint of weakness… then what?
We retrace our steps from earlier, and when we get to the third door along the hall where the bedroom I’ve been kept in appears to be located, he flips me back upright.
Setting me on my feet, he looks me over with a critical eye, as if checking for blood.
“Get out.” I wrench myself free of his hold.
His chin jerks toward the bathroom.
“Oh no.” My teeth clamp together. “Like hell. You got to perve on me while I was weak and out of my goddamn head. No way are you following me in there now.”
Those big paws fist together, readying to crack his knuckles .
“This your kind of sick game you get off on? How do I know you’re not part of it? One of them . How can I know you weren’t responsible for whatever messed up hell I was stuck in, huh?” My hands tremble as I stare up at him.
Silence. Always fucking silence.
I roll my eyes, unable to stand a second longer of having this muddy fucking sweater clinging to my back. So I strip it off and then throw it at his face as hard as I can.
He bats it away.
The material thuds to the floor.
A shudder roams through me.
“No, actually… I get it now.” I laugh outright in his face as he stands there, filling the room with a crackling, predatory energy. “You wouldn’t. You’re the guy they send to look after girls like me because you won’t do anything. Just the meek little mouse who’ll stand over me day and night and can’t even find the courage to say a goddamn word.”
Heat singes my nerve endings. I don’t know what this is bubbling up and threatening to overflow. Maybe it’s madness, a sickness I’ve been infected with, but I’m done giving any more effort to understanding any of it.
I tried to escape, and I failed, so that’s the rub of it for me.
There’s no escaping this, so now I’m going down swinging.
“Yeah. I see now. You’re just someone else’s good little soldier to control. Fucked me once and had your fill, so that’s all I am. A hole to stick your dick in, and now you’ve achieved that, all you’re gonna do is sit there and watch over me in silence forever. Some sort of creep with a fetish for defenseless sleeping girls? Got it.”
As I speak, I strip the soaked tank off and throw the wad of material at him.
This time he catches it, and gives me a look that should make my insides turn cold.
It should do a lot of things .
Warning. Cautioning. Alerting to danger.
However, none of that seems to register.
“What are you gonna do, huh? Drug me? Force me when I’m unconscious? Is fucking a corpse the only thing that gets you off? Because I can tell you now, I’ll never agree to let you touch me again.”
If there was anything holding this man back, it shatters upon me uttering those words.
He catches me around the waist as I try to turn on my heel and race to the bathroom.
With sheer ease, proving once more how impossibly strong he is, I’m thrown onto the bed, bouncing against the mattress on my back. My knees hang over the side and I try to brace myself on my elbows, left only in my bra and leggings.
A frantic, drumming beat rushes along my pulse point as his figure looms large and imposing above me.
That’s when I see the prominent evidence right there on display, that this man is not unaffected by any of this at all.
He’s hard.
Each breath comes out frantic now, my chest rising and falling. I watch on partly in terror and certainly far more turned on than I have any right to be, all things considered. Because this man is dangerous and unpredictable and has repeatedly demonstrated that he could easily force himself on me, and there is nothing I could do to prevent him from taking exactly what he wants.
Yet, I know what it’s like when he’s bringing me pleasure.
My body remembers.
I can’t drag my eyes away as he lifts the front of his black long-sleeve t-shirt, revealing smooth dark skin and a trail of hair leading below his waistband. Silence deafens me as he flicks the button on his jeans, followed by the rasp of his zipper. Each movement is accompanied by the thousand-pound weight of his stare, which I can feel but don’t dare connect my own gaze with.
All I can do is lie here, stuck, unmoving, as I’m entranced by the way his thumbs hook the waistband of his briefs.
He shoves the material down, and every illicit memory of that night comes flooding back in with a wild, rushing flow of heat coating me from head to toe.
Is it desire? Do I want this? I don’t fucking understand my own thoughts. But I do know that my mouth is watering as the long, thick length of him bobs free and allows me a perfect view of the underside of his cock.
Those veins and rows of silver barbells are revealed. All five of them.
All that heat and torment and anger has contorted into something different and even more reckless within me. Right now, I don’t care. All I want is to feel something different to how it was to be stuck in the place I’ve been for god knows how long recently. My most vivid remembering from before all of this began was of something with this man.
There was a moment that night when he stared silently into my eyes as we connected in the most primal way. A moment after all the depravity—after he’d used me, where things shifted between us. I remember it felt as if he could open my chest and easily remove my heart with how carefully he watched me in that moment.
Now, it’s entirely different. He gives me those deep brown eyes that match his rich skin tone, and the way he stares down at me is like he doesn’t know whether to snap my neck or walk out the door.
We’re both trapped in a place where emotions have churned and billowed into a raging tempest, and I’m the stupid fucking fool who pushed him too far.
I can’t look away as he coarsely spits into the palm of his hand. A shiver takes hold of my body in time with the way he uses that slickened grip to start roughly stroking his length. Over and over, he works himself, and if I thought he was going to savagely attack me, I was so wrong.
His cock thickens as those silver piercings taunt me with the imprinted remembrance of the way they felt so fucking good sliding inside me. The whirlwind of this thing between us takes over. I’m too caught up in how powerful and formidable he looks standing between my spread knees.
His fist shuttles up and down, up and down, and time seems to evaporate with each desperate thud of my blood rushing through my body. My core clenches as I watch and realize that he’s not going to do anything .
He’ll deny me words and communication… now this, too.
Bracing himself on the edge of the mattress, it all happens fast and frantic. He aims the swollen, slick head at my stomach and unloads with another of those noises that seem to come from somewhere within the recesses of his massive chest.
I’m left gasping, writhing, completely upended by it all as cum paints stripes across my stomach, and his length kicks in time with each spurt. It’s filthy, and the wetness clings not just my overheated skin, but I see it covering his hand, too.
There’s a pulsating roar in my ears to accompany the fire igniting in my veins.
He just did that, just treated me like nothing, and I allowed him to.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
As I lie there, unable to blink or move or wrap my head around the fact he just jerked himself off onto my stomach, the asshole really drives home the point.
Reinforcing exactly how infuriated he is with me for what I just attempted to do.
His lip curls, and leaning forward, he spits on the same patch of skin. It’s vile, a crude gesture that is absolutely meant to be demeaning when it leaves his mouth. Saliva slides over the curve of my lower stomach and that’s when thick shame really coats my awareness.
Stepping back, he tucks himself away, all without a word. Then leaves.
For the first time since I arrived here, my guard has gone.
Leaving behind a mess of his cum and spit just to prove how pathetic I truly am.