Chapter 23
Twenty-Two
Penny
The first inkling of awareness came with how numb my ass was. The second, the fact that my shoulders were squashed tight.
I wriggled, took some breaths in, but everything was too close, constricted, the air I pushed from my lungs coming back on me. No space, no room to move.
My mind whirled to place what the hell was happening. I’d been in a car… we were escaping. Flashes of fogginess, of light flickering and dimming.
Adrian. CO Darling.
When I opened my eyes, he was looking down at me. Cold, heartless Adrian with a dark gaze and hatred emanating off him like heat waves.
Ah shit.
His brother.
I’d killed him. Adrian’s brother had died at my hand in the early hours of the morning many years ago.
It was his murder that led to my capture, to my demise.
And now. I remembered it all in a flash.
The drugged water, the confession that spilled from his sexy lips as the world went foggy around me.
He was… whatshisname’s brother. The detective I’d heard talking about my case that night, when I’d lured… Jack? outside and into the warehouse.
Small damn world.
Or not. Because I think this was all planned.
I should have been wracked with fear, horror, the utmost dread and despair at what was happening to me.
The look in Adrian’s eyes promised death and retribution of the worst kind, but that fear didn’t strike me down.
Maybe an after-effect of the drugs. Adrian slipped away from my view, and I had to wonder if I’d imagined him altogether.
Or maybe it stemmed from our closeness. Kindredness. Even in this. Revenge for our siblings, destruction for our loved ones. A weird mix of curiosity, lust, and a desire to push harder washed through me. Destructive, stupid. Uncontrollable.
What was his plan here? What did he want to do to me? Had he spent years planning and plotting, jerking his own cock with his fist as he thought of me and my death? Shivers rushed me, numbness battling the pins and needles.
I tried to move, scratch the itch on my nose, but I was completely trapped. It was almost like a coffin, hard wood beneath my ass, surrounding my body, but open at the top. Dark wood, varnished and cold, no free space whatsoever. Whatever fit inside this box was much smaller than me.
From my very limited view of the rest of the room, I could see a nondescript ceiling and just some low, artificial yellow light. Maybe ropes hanging across my vision, but it was hard to tell; everything was all shadowy. Dusty.
I blinked, tried to pull my eyes back into focus, to push away whatever the fuck was going on. It was all so dreamlike. No, not dreamy, that was the wrong damn word for waking up tied into a fucking box. Nightmarish, but in a hazy sort of way.
My mind wavered, might have still been in my cell, head-bashingly mad.
“Hello?” I asked out into the world, sensing movement after what felt an age of complete nothingness.
Must be Adrian, I decided. I hadn’t imagined him, come to gloat some more, come to tell me why he’d done this in some long villain speech.
When he’d glared down at me earlier, his jaw had twitched like it was all about to spill out. But only silence did. Maybe now.
I wasn’t… as scared as I should be. Something weird worked itself through my body. All wrong. But it heated me in a way I’d stopped trying to fight a long time ago.
“Adrian,” I called, my tone teasing even though uncertainty washed through me, battled with my bravado. Maybe the drugs, all those bumps on the head really had knocked something loose for good. Adrian would probably tell me something had always been loose.
His footsteps sounded louder, some kind of Pavlov response rippling through my belly, because it tightened.
All those times he’d come to me in the night, it wasn’t fear I battled, even though I was supposed to.
This was a more extreme version of what we knew.
Me, locked away, confined. Him, unable to resist getting close. Climbing behind those bars with me.
Curiosity filled me. Not fear. He wanted to be in this hell with me; I was sure of it. He craved it as much as I craved him. Together, we would burn and bury each other.
I think.
“Miss Karner,” Adrian said as he came into view, looking down at me all smug and pretty.
The hatred in his eyes was stunning, captivating, only darker than before.
Maybe that glimpse of him before had been a mirage, a conjuring of my mind’s desires…
and now, this was the real Adrian, with none of the fire between us, only deep-rooted disgust. But…
no, that just wasn’t true. We had a glimmer.
“Mr Darling,” I replied, wiggling around as much as possible. Not much. “You gonna let me out of here?”
He shook his head, a twitch in his jaw that had no business being sexy right now. “Nah, I’ve got plans for you, little killer.”
I smirked. Bravado. “Ooh, like what?” I had no upper hand here.
He had me tied up, trapped, and under his thumb, but it didn’t matter.
He was looking at me, obsessing over me.
I should be so fucking scared. Terrified of what my life would now be.
He had the look of someone who intended to cause immeasurable harm.
His nostrils flared a tiny bit, showing me I’d rooted under his skin. His hatred wouldn’t hold for long; he never could manage that. We’d messed each other up too good already. Kindred spirits could never stick this loathing out.
I suppressed the smile I wanted to share. I had him. The very worst thing he could do now was ignore me, and this was the exact opposite. He was rapt. There was still a way through this. Just a curve in the path to our ending.
Leaning down, his forearms resting on the lip of the wooden box, his warm breath fanning my cheeks, he only had eyes for his brother’s murderer.
“I’m going to leave it for a surprise,” he said, letting one of his hands drop, his fingers skating along my chest. Goosebumps followed his touch, and our gazes heated. There was burning there. He wasn’t as unaffected as he tried to appear. Burning, fiery, hellish something cooked between us.
Something weird that he would never admit to. Something I don’t think either of us could predict. No good plans go unfettered.
“I’m excited,” I told him, and he stood and slammed the lid over my box. Abrupt, like he realized he’d got a little too close. A little too open.
Darkness surrounded me, leaked into my mind, but it was already pitch black in there. So all I did was wait.
He wouldn’t be able to resist coming to fuck with me some more. He would be back soon, ready to carry on.
The glares he gave me, hatred in his eyes, I was sure it was fake, or rather, that it lived with lust, with a deep craving for me too.
I had won.
A curve in the path. That was all this was.
Hm.
The next time Adrian opened the box, he proceeded to poke a needle into my neck.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t cast a glance at me.
I think less than an hour had passed, but it was impossible to know in here.
I’d let my mind wander to wherever it wanted, no guidance.
His demeanor had shifted; walls built high.
I kept my mouth shut. Not least because whatever the hell he’d injected me with made it hard to move any muscles, including my face.
It was the isolation cells, only worse. But I was prepared, well-versed in sitting in my own head, living a whole life in my skull. Memories, fantasies, I let it all wash over me, and before I knew it; the light came back. His eyes came back.
I grunted at the sting from the needle, expecting to fall into unconsciousness again, but I didn’t. Instead, my limbs stopped working. I couldn’t twitch my toes or wiggle my fingers. And that itch on my nose had gone nowhere. Even more now that my face hung numb and loose.
“Wha…” I tried to say, but as he started undoing the ropes that restrained me, all function left. I think I pissed myself, too, but I lacked the ability to check. Everything just went lax. Not my mind, though. She was on fire.
Adrian lifted me from the box once I was loose, floppy and wide awake, taking no care not to bash my body into the sharp edges.
He carried me across the room, and from my position hanging upside down over his shoulder, while I could only really see his ass, there was an occasional glimpse of more, of what looked to be a workshop.
I couldn’t work out what kind of workshop though, only that there were tools, piles of wood, benches, dust and dirt. It was dark, a low ceilinged, sweeping sort of space that appeared decades untouched. But Adrian moved through, knowing it well.
“When I was planning this,” he said, placing me on a splinter-filled table, not delicately, “I couldn’t decide what to do. What would feel satisfactory.”
He turned my head to the side, tipped just a little, so I had no choice but to look at him. I couldn’t even blink; my eyeballs already drying out and stinging. My brain screamed at them to shut, to moisten, but nothing. It was infuriating. Interesting.
Adrian pulled a large leather bag onto his lap and started rummaging through, while still talking to me.
“I thought about Jake, about what he would want.” Adrian laughed, bitter and icy.
“And it for sure wasn’t this. He would hate me for this, despise my actions.
But that’s why I decided to do it. It’s what he wouldn’t have the balls to want. ”
My heart pounded as Adrian started laying instruments out beside me, lining them up along my body. Some parts were cold, like metal; others rough, wood maybe. I failed to figure it out. I was so locked in on what Adrian was trying to say.
“I read the police report, you know? And his autopsy. I know exactly what you did to him. Every single little step of your sickness and how it leached out into my baby brother.” Adrian’s voice sounded thick with emotion, but rough with anger too.
“I was familiar with your crimes beforehand, adjacent to your case. Had helped work through some of the evidence with the lead detective.”
Adrian leaned forward, almost nose to nose with me, like he was studying my reaction as he brought what looked like a long, thin screwdriver to my eye. “The idea of you laying a finger on any of my loved ones used to give me nightmares,” he growled.
He froze, as still as me, the metal of the tool in his hand stinging my cornea. His breathing picked up, and for a second, I was sure this was it. The moment he did it. Killed me, took me from the world like he so craved.
But almost as fast as he came in with the tool, he sighed and leaned back, returning it to my side.
When I’d killed Jake, I’d been buried in my psychosis.
Every man I saw became a demon; all of them needed to die.
I believed that deep in the pit of me, that it was best for the world.
Any man that wanted me, or any woman, in any capacity, must have been willing to snatch from her. Steal and rape and plunder.
So when I’d overheard a guy in a bar discussing how proud he was of his big brother for working on my case, gossiping about how close they reached to catching me, I saw red. And when I turned to him, spoke to him, and realized he would follow me anywhere, it sang like fate.
Revenge for something that hadn’t even happened yet. This detective would be the one to capture me, and for that, he needed to suffer.
And Jake came along with such na?ve ease. A shy drag of my fingers down his arm, a wicked smile and a suggestive line or two about what I wanted to do to him, and he followed me like a little lamb.
To think Adrian was in that bar too, all those years ago, and that it was the last time he saw his brother alive… I didn’t know how to feel. Jake was still a man who wandered into a dark alley with a woman he’d just met to do evil things to her, he had to be.
“You cut him.” Adrian laid a knife on my stomach, showing it to me first and holding it there long enough that I had no choice but to take it in, to study the way the metal glinted in the dull yellow light.
“You hit him.” This time, it was a hammer Adrian presented to me.
“You sliced his throat.” A razor. “And you killed him, took his life away.” A syringe, a see-through liquid inside.
Adrian sighed and sat back, surveying me, and all I could do was stare. Not even twitch a fucking muscle.
“And now you’re going to feel every single thing he did.”