Chapter 24 Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Adrian
While she lay there, just staring at me all blank, unable to even glare, I pulled her clothes off.
Her soiled leggings, the shirt off her back.
It all came away with precision, without a glance at the body beneath the fabric.
I had no desire to see her in that way, as the sexual being she’d tried to be for me.
But whenever I caught her vacant eyes, I swore I could see the emotion behind them.
It wasn’t possible. The muscle relaxant was strong enough to knock down a man twice her size, but there was something there.
I didn’t even think it was anger or hatred.
It was like she was being fucking nosy. I resisted the urge to shut her eyes so I could work without her silent judgment.
She needed to see everything.
I had to move the tools back onto her body after I was done, hoping each one made her wince in her twisted mind, made her curious about what might happen to her next. I hoped she was sick with it.
But her dead eyes told me otherwise.
Too many years of planning had gone into this to rush things. I was going to take my time. Over the course of days or weeks, I was going to ruin this bitch. The drug running through her body made her my doll, my marionette. Something I could play with, string along, manipulate and twist up.
All the ideas I had planned moved through my mind like a disgusting slide show, heating up my veins.
When my eyes snagged on hers again, I was sure she knew.
I brought her here, to this theater I’d purchased months ago, given up my dog for, because it just seemed so fitting.
Old, abandoned, a place of good memories, tarnished and wrecked.
Forgotten. I glanced around the room, the dusty workshop where old puppeteers created their masterpieces once upon a time.
I was going to create mine in the same place. For him. For Jake. For all the lives she’d ruined with her insanity.
“I don’t know why you’re smirking,” I said to Penny’s blank face. “You used to think you had some kind of fucking upper hand on me, but now you know you never did. So wipe that smugness away.”
When her face didn’t shift, I grabbed her chin and squeezed, making her cheeks smush together, her teeth clack. Her expression remained unchanged. Anger pouring through me, I backhanded her across the cheek and turned away, steadying my breathing before I did anything stupid, anything rushed.
My heart pounded as I let my gaze linger over the old equipment.
Most of it was still here, which was a nice surprise, and my mind wandered to all the ways I could use it all to fulfill the burning need inside me.
When I’d discovered this venue was on the market, everything snapped right into place. How I would heal the hell up.
When I figured out what I needed to do, what path to take, it started making more sense. I handed the keys back to my old apartment, left Boba with my mother and began working here. Building, plotting, digging myself deeper and deeper into this deranged vengeance hole.
And it was sick. Disgusting. Jake would disown me. But I had to. She had me broken, diseased. She needed to die for it. Suffer for it.
“You’re so pathetic,” I heard Penny say from behind me, but when I turned back to her with a scowl, nothing. Her cheeks were red from my fingers and knuckles, but her face was slack. I ran my hands through my hair and growled, trying to push the damned frustration out.
Shit. I was losing my fucking mind already.
I marched across the dark room and shoved a thick poker into the furnace I’d lit earlier, enjoying the way the flames leaped and licked. For a moment, I focused on them, wild but contained.
She had no idea how pathetic I was. How obsessed I’d become with her, with her death.
I huffed a laugh. We weren’t even that far from the prison, only twenty minutes away, in the same town.
My old apartment was a few blocks in the other direction.
It was why I’d seen the for sale sign on the theater, stumbling home from a dank bar after yet another night drinking my pain to numbness.
Ignoring the lingering whispers in the back of my mind that she was teasing me, taunting, getting under my skin, I pulled out my phone. It had only been hours since we’d left the prison, and the riot was still in full swing, all over the news whenever I glanced at my phone.
Still, they’d figure out soon she was missing.
Maybe even tie it to me.
But they would never find us in here. And I wasn’t sure I had planned for either of us to get out of here alive. I had food, water, everything. No one would even know this place wasn’t still abandoned for many more years.
Heat raced through me.
Jake wouldn’t forgive me for the revenge I was enacting, which hurt. Maybe I didn’t deserve to live after she was gone. Maybe rotting away here right with her would be my penance for not being the bigger, better person.
“Okay,” I said, bracing myself, walking around the table Penny laid on, digging my nail into her skin just to frighten her.
I grabbed a blindfold and slid it over her eyes, removing the last of her awareness.
She’d still be able to hear me, to feel what I did, but that would only be heightened.
And I wouldn’t have to look into her teasing eyes.
I picked up one of the carving tools from a workbench, lying next to an unfinished marionette, and brought it to Penny’s prone body. The cool metal dragging across her face must have frightened her, but she was still. I smirked this time, relishing that power she couldn’t deny me now.
“I think I’ll carve you up. Take chunks from you with this wood carver.
Shave your body down to your bones step by step.
Inch by inch until you’re only a skeleton.
Then I’ll string you up and use you.” I paused and slammed the tip of the tool into her arm.
It was old, with a soft wooden handle and a curved metal plate, almost like a spoon with a sharp edge. It didn’t slide in easy.
Her skin came out in goosebumps as I scooped a mound of flesh free, and her jaw tensed, only a fraction, but she was stuck in her own private hell. Unable to see. To react. To cry out or beg. She was in so much pain that it was overriding the sedation. Christ.
Like it was a fucking melon baller, I worked, scooping little chunks of her flesh from her arm, hitting the bone and scraping along it, until from wrist to elbow, she was covered in these small, messy, gushing holes, red muscle and white bone exposed, drowning in blood.
I snorted when I took her in; her arm swiss cheese. I had the urge to grab some crackers from my kitchen and have a sick feast of creamy skin, scarlet blood and pink, bruising flesh. Despicable.
The holes bled profusely, so when it looked like she was losing too much, I used a sterile rag to clean her up. I wanted her alive for as long as possible, to suffer as long as possible.
What a boon that she thought I wanted to free her to love her.
That she followed me from the relative safety of that prison.
All those shifts I spent debating how I could kill her, torture her, and make it look like an accident within the confides of that building.
And all the time she’d been trying to get me to set her free, was falling right into my trap while she decided she was weaving her own. Stupid bitch.
Everything had fallen into place, and itchy kind of perfection I struggled to trust. But I needed to.
Her finger twitched, an indication that the drugs were wearing off, and fuck, I wanted her to scream. To cry. This silence from her was what I was supposed to need, but shit, her reactions, her screams, her fight. I craved it.
“It would mean so much to me if you would cry,” I told her, stroking her cheek with my blood-stained fingers. But I sighed and settled back into the chair, pulling out the iron poker I’d had resting in the furnace all this time. It was ready, red hot and angry.
Her entire hand jolted with every press of the iron rod onto her ravaged flesh, searing it closed and unable to fester with bacteria.
Nine times I did it, needing to reheat the iron twice to complete the job.
Her muscles twitched and shook, but her head remained stationary.
Still stuck in her own private hell. I couldn’t keep the wicked smile off my face.
Her screams would be sweet, but it was easy enough to imagine what was going on inside her sick mind.
By the time I was finished, the stink of cooking flesh heavy in the air, her breathing was more erratic, her head able to tip to the side, her mouth dropping open half an inch. I smirked.
Yes, I was going to drag this out for as long as possible. Let it be the death of both of us.
I left her to continue waking as I packed everything away, saving the tools I’d rested on her stomach for later. They were meant to frighten her, to let her know what was coming.
As she moved her arm, the uninjured one, across her body, I heaved her up and dragged her to her next home. The box was fun, but too enclosed. I couldn’t see her all tucked up in there.
She was a heap of limbs on the floor as I gathered the ropes I needed. This had been learned in a late-night video on the internet, and I had all the tools ready. While she came to in tiny increments, I set everything up.
First, I wrapped the rope over her wrists. Then new ones around her shoulders, wrapping them tightly under her armpits. The next set of ropes went around her knees, and the last was around her head.
That one had taken some thinking, how to pull it off, making it so I could move her head however I wanted, take away every single inch of her autonomy. I couldn’t drill into her skull and have her live. Not yet, anyway.
I’d come up with a head brace. It wasn’t elegant, was fuck ugly, but her eyes were blinking and her jaw working as I tugged it over her head and squeezed it shut, a thick silver bar around her forehead, metal prongs digging into her skull. I attached it to the last of the rope.
“Adrian…” she groaned my name as I walked away to the pulley and yanked.
As I pulled, wrapping the loose rope around a cog, her body contorted and lifted.
This was the main rope, the one for her head that would keep her suspended.
For a few minutes, while I sorted out the rest of them, she would be held only by her head, and it would fucking hurt, those prongs digging right into her cranium.
And like a dying pig on a carousel, she thrashed. She swung and flailed, coming back to life just in time. I grinned wide and satisfied, my cock heavy behind my zipper. She was such a sight, naked, contained, blood-coated. Angry.
“Fuck you!” she screeched when I moved to the next ropes, giving her some weight bearing under her arms too, relieving some of the pressure. “This hurts.”
She glared at me as I fixed her arms and knees, leaving her in a sitting position, suspended in the air. But there was a glint, always was, an edge of insouciance.
She was still naked, and it exposed her pussy to me, her bruised thighs and round ass as she swung in a circle caused by her fidgeting and flailing.
God, smugness fought with self-preservation, watching her on this stage, the one Jake and I used to find such innocent joy in, suffering so damn much. This was his beautiful show.
I walked up to Penny, stopped her swinging by gripping her legs, and looked her in the eye. She wasn’t suspended high above the ground, but she could go all the way to the rafters if I wanted. Probably not up to code, but I didn’t really give a fuck if the rope snapped and she smashed to the stage.
“Fuck you,” she repeated. “My arm fucking hurts.” She attempted to gesture to her right arm, the one full of weeping holes, but only managed to move a fraction, rope resisting her strength.
My little puppet, ripe for manipulating, for bending to my will. I stepped between her legs and grabbed her pussy, rough and probing, enjoying the way her eyes widened and her nostrils flared.
She’d sliced Jake’s dick off in her attack, and for a moment, I imagined grabbing a knife, slicing through her pussy, right through the labia, slipping the blade through her clit.
Making her eat it. Stare at it. Die with her mangled flesh beside her head. My nostrils flared.
“Don’t think I want to put my cock inside your filthy body again, little killer.
” I squeezed her whole pussy in my fist, tugging and digging my fingers into the soft flesh until she finally relented and cried out, angry and shrieking.
I had no way of keeping her from bleeding out if I cut her so deeply, so this vicious pain would have to do.
I squeezed harder.
“Stop!” she screamed, trying to swing herself away. I only held tighter, dismissing the erection behind my zipper as I twisted my hand, wanting to feel it rip, for her skin to shred from her body in one violent, bloody tear. “Adrian, please!”
I let go, stepped away, ignoring the disgust wracking me because I was hard, noting the way her eyes dropped. She was breathless, sweat dripping between her tits, running through blood splatter down her stomach.
“Fuck you,” she said with an unwanted sob, still prone for me. Blood dripped onto the floor from between her legs, so I checked my hand.
Some of my fingers were coated in red, having breached her skin. With my eyes on hers, I brought each one up to my lips and licked them clean. The metallic taste of her pain making my balls throb.
“Once again, little killer, you will never feel pleasure again.”
Penny only stared.