Chapter 7 Bastian #3
“No, I didn’t.” I use the tip of my pinky finger to move a chunk of hair out of her face. “You climbed in of your own free will. You let me drive you to my home, let me give you alcohol…you would have let me fuck you too, if I’d wanted.”
Her gaze flicker back to mine. “I’d still let you,” she rasps, before clearing her throat.
When I just stare at her, hope flickers in her eyes. Pathetic, desperate.
“Kudos for trying to seduce me in your current state. But I’d rather fuck a corpse.”
All emotion bleeds out of her features. “I take it you’re speaking from experience,” she says in an uneven voice, one eyelid trembling. Her lips twitch into a rictus grin. “Of all the kinks I thought you’d be into, necrophilia was nowhere near—“
I slam her head back against the cabinet. Not hard enough to knock her out, but hard enough to stop the words.
She whimpers, dazed, as I drag her out of the kitchen, down the hall, toward the study. As soon as she realizes where I’m headed, she starts fighting. Flailing, grabbing at the wall, digging in her heels—but she’s exhausted and weak, and I’m done being gentle.
I open the concealed door beside Warhol’s Electric Chair piece, punch the code into the keypad that looks like it’s part of the AC unit mounted inside. A hidden door swings open.
When she sees the stairs descending into the darkness, she breaks.
“No!” she whines like a child. “No, no, no, please, not there, please, please, you can do anything to me, please, I have money!”
She’s grabbing at my shirt, my arms, anything she can reach. “Just say how much you want! Five million? Ten? I can get you whatever you want, just please don’t put me back in there with them, please—“ The last is a hair-raising shriek.
“Move,” I say.
She doesn’t.
I shove her forward.
She falls down the first few steps, catches herself on the railing, and I follow her down into the cold, into the dark, into a space that doesn’t—shouldn’t—exist.
Like me.
Melissa shies away from the chair bolted to the floor, even though she knows that’s her place now. Her head is down, eyes squeezed shut.
“Please,” she whimpers. “Please, please, please…”
I grab her shoulder, shoving her roughly into the chair. It takes effort to focus on the leather restraints as I secure them over her wrists. I’m not sure how she got loose. I tug on the leather just to make sure she’s fastened, then step back to stare at her.
This is my fault.
I should have given her a larger dose before I left for my meeting with the dean. Why have I been playing it safe?
She knows what I am. What I plan to do with her when this is all over.
Melissa’s head falls forward, letting out a low keen as she starts sobbing.
This should have been over days ago.
The soundproof door slices through her misery as I pull it closed behind me, but her words play on repeat as I head for my bedroom.
…don’t put me back in there with them, with them, with them—
“No!”
I spin around to pinpoint where the voice came from, heart thumping.
…no one’s there, Bash…
Christ.
I grab my leather pouch from my nightstand, upending it on the bed. Syringes and baggies full of drugs and pills fall onto the mussed sheets.
No more half-measures. No more postponing.
I snatch up a bag of off-white powder and hurry into the kitchen, emptying it into a glass of milk, stirring with a spoon until it dissolves.
Melissa must have heard me coming, but she’s all out of fight. Her head hangs limply, eyes glassy when I grab her chin and tilt it up. Snot and spittle make her lower face glisten in the light of the bare bulb above our heads.
“Drink.”
Her eyes slowly shift to the glass in my hand. “What is it?”
“Strawberry milk, same as always.”
“It’s…it’s not pink.”
I lick my lips. I’ve been keeping her pliant with tiny doses of the same pink cocaine I drugged her with on Sunday.
“Ran out of syrup.”
“I don’t…it wasn’t sweet…was it?” she whispers, a tear racing down her cheek as she shakes her head as if she were desperately trying to remember. That would be the ketamine. Her short-term memory is as unreliable as a dissociative episode.
“You want out?” I crouch a little, bringing my head down to hers. “Drink.”
Her lips quiver, before she lets out a strangled sob. “Someone’s gonna catch you one day, you sick—“
Her furious words cut off when I grab her hair and yank back her head. When her mouth opens for a gasp of pain, I tip the glass.
Milk splashes as she splutters, but when I press the rim of the glass to her lips she drinks, glaring up at me with malevolent, bloodshot eyes.
More milk spills down her chin, over her throat, soaking into the collar of the dress she’s been wearing for days, but not enough to make this dose any less lethal.
I watch the white runnels pour down her skin.
And I think of Sybil.
How she’d sometimes fumble with her glass when she was reading at the dinner table, too interested in her book to look at what she was doing. How her milk would spill, invisible against the white tablecloth, and how all Evelyn would do is ‘tsk.’
Christ. To this day, I can still hear that sound—the promise of a disproportionate amount of suffering. Not right away. But later, when we least expected it.
Evelyn loved delaying our punishments until we thought she’d forgotten.
She never forgot.
Just like I’ll never forget.
Melissa is still heaving in air as I climb the stairs, close the door. I hear a faint scream through the soundproofing, but it must be my imagination.
If it weren’t for the glass in my hand, the spilled milk soaking through my sleeve, I’d have convinced myself this was all just my imagination.
Agony Hollow, Haven, Kai…all just figments of my disturbed mind.
If fucking only.
I tip the glass against my lips, smiling when a bitter drop paints my mouth. I have more. I could make another glass.
For me.
The glass falls from my hand, bouncing on the carpet at my feet.
I slam my fist into the wall.
Sharp pain lances through my knuckles, but it’s not enough—not nearly fucking enough—so I do it again. Again. Again. Until there’s a smear of blood on the wall and my arm is shaking violently.
“Fuck!”
This isn’t how it was meant to be.
None of this was supposed to happen.
I have a dying girl in my basement, a dean who thinks she can threaten me, and a mother I’m somehow still tempted to mourn when I should be dancing on her grave.
And where I expected sanctuary in Haven and Kai’s arms, they’ve instead turned their backs…and found sanctuary in each other.
My phone buzzes.
I want to ignore it, but on rote, I take my phone out of my pocket and check it.
It’s a VibeFeed notification
My heart stops beating. I can’t breathe. My entire body goes numb as I fumble to unlock my phone and open the app and go to messages—
@bssweetgirl
You were right.
About everything.
I read it twice.
Three times.
…you were right…
Haven.
My sweet girl, Haven.
She’s testing the water. Seeing if I’ll drown her.
Warmth floods back into my body along with a long, stuttered breath. My lips pull into a smile as I lean back against the wall I’d just been assaulting.
I knew she’d come back to me. I knew if I was patient, if I gave her space to realize that I could offer her exactly what she wanted, what she needed, that she’d find her way to me.
…you were right. About—
I’m about to type a response, but I stop before my fingers touch the screen.
Haven said I was right about everything.
And for the first time in my miserable existence, I don’t want to be right.
Not about what’s happening to the girl in my basement while I stand here smiling at my phone like a lovesick fucking imbecile.
I spin around, eyes wide as I punch in the key code. Too fast—it beeps and flashes red. Again, slower, trying to breathe when all I want to do is pant. My feet thump down the stairs, the impact jarring my phone out of my hand before I reach the bottom.
Melissa’s head lolls forward. I grab her chin and wrench her head up. Heavy-lidded eyes roll in their sockets, mouth gaping.
“Christ!” I drop to my knees in front of her, grabbing her face, forcing her to look at me. “No, no, fuck! Wake up. Wake the fuck up!”
Her eyelids flutter, then drift closed all the way.
Fuck! The fentanyl’s already in her system.
I jam my fingers into her mouth.
She gags, but I don’t stop, shoving deeper until I hit the back of her throat. She’s so far gone that for a moment I think her gag reflex has been affected, then her body convulses violently.
Milk and bile splashes onto my hand, my arm, the floor.
“Good girl,” I whisper, shoving my fingers back inside her mouth. “But I need all of it. All of it, Melissa.”
She pukes again. Again. And I keep shoving my fingers back, until she’s retching on nothing, until she stops retching.
Her head rolls back on her neck, eyes lidded, mouth slack. I peel back a lid, staring at the pinpoint of her pupil with a sickening weight growing heavier in my stomach.
“Christ!”
I wasn’t fast enough. I gave her too much. It’s fucking over.
“Not yet,” Good Wolf says.
Fuck, of course! I shove away from the chair, racing up the stairs, skidding down the hall, rushing into my bedroom and wrenching open the nightstand drawer again.
Not the leather pouch this time, but deeper.
Past the gun I don’t remember putting back in there, past lube and a crumpled pack of cigarettes.
There’s a box back there. I grab it, tear it open, shake the nasal spray free. I rip it out of its blister pack as I rush back down the hall, taking the stairs three at a time with my teeth clacking painfully with each lunge.
Her limp body is incapable of resisting when I wrench back her head and shove the Narcan in her nose. I give her a double dose because fuck knows if she’s even breathing anymore.
I sink down on my knees in front of her, watching her lolled-forward head as my heart tries to pound its way out of my chest. As I’m about to administer another dose, her chest slowly stutters up, then down.
I grab her face, shoving her head up so I can look into her eyes. They flutter before falling shut again.
“Why?” she mumbles and starts crying again.
I laugh as I go to fetch my phone, still laughing as I drop down cross-legged a foot away from Melissa’s chair, still laughing as I type a reply with sick-stained fingers as the doped-up girl across me watches with glassy eyes.
@inherentvice
Took you long enou—
I delete it. Too bitter. Too petty. She’ll bolt.
@inherentvice
Are you oka—
Christ, that’s even worse.
It’s a question a concerned friend asks, and I’m not her friend. More importantly, it gives her the opportunity to back out, say she’s fine, then the conversation is over and she never messages again.
Haven didn’t message because she’s happy. She messaged because the boy failed her, like I knew he would, and she hates him for proving me right.
I can’t gloat. Can’t interrogate her, because I know my girl’s no snitch and she’ll clam up the moment I ask for specifics.
He hurt her. She wants revenge.
And she’s asking me to exact that vengeance.
Me.
Something tickles my cheek. I wipe at it with the back of my wrist.
@inherentvice
There’s my sweet girl.
No concern. No inquisition. Just the quiet certainty that I was never surprised. That I’ve been patiently waiting, that I’m not going anywhere.
I watch the screen. No delivery receipt.
Because she panicked and turned her phone off.
It doesn’t matter.
She reached out for me, I grabbed her. She can thrash all she wants, I’m not fucking letting go.
@inherentvice
You don’t have to tell me who hurt you.
I already know.
I glance up at Melissa. Even in her state, she recoils at whatever she sees on my face.
“The boy hurt what’s mine,” I say through a chuckle. “And he’ll pay for that. Dearly.”
Melissa’s bloodshot eyes stare back at me with undisguised horror.
I look back down at the screen. Still no reply. No delivery receipts.
I type one more message, the one I want sitting at the bottom of the message thread like a goodnight kiss.
@inherentvice
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream
Sleep well, sweet girl.