Chapter 27 Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
Penny
He left me hanging there. Twisted up like a pretzel, my body open to the theater, my eye throbbing and my limbs screaming for relief from the pain. He said nothing as he strode away, right down the middle aisle of the audience, and left.
Fuck, it felt good. I may have been strung up at his command, but I’d won. He couldn’t d o it.
When I’d nodded off for a moment and that knife had fallen from my mouth, a frisson of panic had rocketed through me, startling me back awake. I didn’t want to lose my eyes; I wanted to see everything he had planned. It would be a shame not to witness his masterpiece in all its glory.
I did not want to miss the expression on Adrian’s face as his internal battle raged. I didn’t want to never learn the way his muscles contracted and strained when he was holding himself right on that blade’s edge, about to tip all the way over into depravity.
Smiling, weak, I watched him go. The way his legs strode, fast and determined. He wasn’t leaving from the same direction he came, and it had me curious.
What was next for us? In this wicked little game?
I swung for hours there, alone, my thoughts eating my skull and burning my eyelids.
I was asleep; I knew that, hanging from the contraption Adrian had built, but stepping back into my memories felt so damn real. It was an easy thing to do, and the further away my mind got from being healthy and whole, the easier it was.
I saw the man who’d hurt my sister. It was just before I lured him into that alley, seconds before I dragged his heavy, drugged body across the broken glass on the floor and into the trunk of my car.
I grunted, cursing out his fat ass as I folded him inside the small space, wincing when the trunk wouldn’t shut the first time.
I had to wedge his arms under his body and bend his shoulder down to get the job done.
Sweat poured from my skin as I worked, and it was in that moment, one of the first times I truly realized that I was going to commit to this, that I was going to kill.
My DNA was all over the asshole - he had to die, had to be hidden.
Driving along the road, the excitement I felt is something I still chased all these years later.
He deserved nothing but pain from me, a deep understanding of why he was suffering.
He wasn’t the first man I’d killed, but he was the first where it was calm, where I was settled in my decision.
And it was, a decision I mean, it was something I chose and planned and plotted.
And it was so fucking worth it. Even when I vomited all over him, it never stopped being vital.
When I woke him up, having tied him to a metal pole in a disused warehouse downtown, one I knew would be empty from a tiny bit of research, he called me every name under the sun.
“Do you know why you’re here?” I asked, taking care to keep my voice steady, keep that excitement to a minimum.
I’d always craved the darker, been curious about blood and guts and murder.
Movies did it for now, dark novels filled with depraved people doing depraved things.
True crime, the worst of the worst, but this…
I always knew I wanted this. Those men, those first ones, they’d opened my heart to it.
This man, he set it into stone, branded me.
“Fuck you,” was all he said to me in return, spitting blood and phlegm my way.
“That’s sort of the problem,” I told him. “You think you can fuck whoever you want. You think you can touch whoever you want.”
He laughed. “Did I hurt you, poor little girl?”
That was the moment of realization for me. Lacey wasn’t his first rape, wasn’t the first time he’d attacked a woman. He couldn’t even recognize that I wasn’t one of his victims; there had been so many.
So, without another word, my mind went dark. Darker than I think it has ever been before or since.
I yanked down his jeans and his underwear, laughing when he shouted out in fear. When I showed him the iron bar I was going to use, he vomited.
He fought and squirmed, but it was no good. I shoved that iron bar up his ass, ramming it in and out until blood poured and my breakfast lurched from me and splattered over him.
Then I pushed it harder, through his bowels, his intestines, all of it. I pushed the iron bar inside him until he gargled and died.
And it was still my favorite of all my deaths. Randal had been close, the opposite, I guess, their deaths could have kissed in the middle, but this man was special. The best kind of vengeance.
He was even harder to move when he was a dead weight, that dead man, but I left him out in the desert for the coyotes to eat a few hours later, and his body wasn’t discovered for weeks.
It made me brave.
Made my appetite for more insatiable.
So I started searching for more.
It was obvious I’d been drugged again, because I wasn’t in the same position as when I fell asleep. I was on a table, a workbench, strapped down looser this time, just one leather belt around my chest, pinning my arms down at my sides.
Adrian was turned away, his head bowed, his hands at work. I was surprised to find myself grateful to not be up on those ropes anymore. It was a unique experience, that’s for sure, but it fucking chafed.
“I figured out what I need to do to break you,” he told me. His tone was stony, cold and demanding of my attention. I gave him a minute to elaborate, but of course, he didn’t.
“Please tell me,” I teased, testing the restraints, unable to keep that note out of my voice even when tied down.
He was working on something, and still didn’t turn as he spoke again.
“They know you’re missing from the prison.
I spoke to a few people today, that’s why I had to leave.
They’re building a task force to find you.
As I am an ex-detective and worked with you so often, they wanted my insights.
” He paused, grunted and jolted with whatever he was doing.
“I spoke to your family. Your mother, father and sister. Lovely people, they are, the Karners. Impossible to believe something like you could come from such a sweet woman.”
At last, he turned, and in his hand was a marionette.
A small one. Black hair, simple features, crude, really.
He wiggled it at me. My heart leaped strange and stuttery, like it was beating out of time, trying to catch up with the dread building in my gut.
That doll… I squinted at it, tried to put it and his words together, mesh them into what he was trying to tell me.
“The internet is good for a lot of things,” he commented, almost sheepish as he glared at the creation, shook it again so the loose limbs rattled. “But some take more skill, and puppetry clearly isn’t my forte.”
My nostrils flared, heaviness swirling in my stomach. He looked smug, something you didn’t want from your captor. Our dynamic switched and flipped in a constant loop, like it had in the prison, but whenever he was like this, my fun ran out.
“But I made this for you. She’s going to hang here.” He placed the puppet’s head through a noose he’d crafted near my face and sighed, stepping back, letting its small wooden body swing.
“Is she me?” I asked, trying to focus my eyes. My left one still throbbed, scratched up and raw.
“No, little killer, she isn’t.” Adrian came close to me, his nose brushing mine.
For a second, I thought he might kiss me.
His eyes dropped down, like he might be looking at my lips.
But they were chapped, bloodied, my body dehydrated.
I was a little delirious. He swung in and out of focus as he moved back away.
“Who is she?” I whispered.
“Lacey.”
My sister.
Rage whitened my vision. I think I screamed, shouted something at him, fought against my bindings with the little strength I had remaining in my beat-up body.
But all I was left with was his laughter as he backed away even further, leaving me with that swinging marionette, his glee at my despair. No. He couldn’t—
“Don’t you dare touch her!” I cried. “Adrian, don’t.”
He continued laughing, pacing the dark room. “I realized, when I met her at the prison, that she is my way to you. A sibling for a sibling, I suppose.” He spared me a glance. “Ah, I have your full attention now.”
“No.”
“I debated taking your mother instead, so frail as she is. But then Lacey showed up, wide-eyed, so young and pretty. She cares so deeply for you, Penny. She just wants you safe. Back in the prison where you can’t harm yourself or others.”
“Adrian!” I screamed, my throat raw with the pain his words were causing, the visions that flashed across my mind. I knew what he could do, how far he could take things.
Adrian walked to the door, opened it, stepped through.
“I’m taking Lacey Karner out tonight so I can learn more about you, try to track you down.
The police want me on the case, you see, and she’s our best bet.
” He paused. “She’s a pretty little thing, right?
Maybe I’ll fall into bed with her, maybe I’ll tell her what you did to my brother with my hands rather than my words. ”
“No!” I shrieked again, rabid, feral, broken. He got to lay eyes on her in the light, in the outside, away from prison bars and stifling guards. It wasn’t fucking fair. Real despair rippled through me, anger and pain and jealousy.
I just wanted to see her, warn her. She needed to run from him.
As the door swung shut behind him with a bang, my eyes landed on the crude puppet he’d made.
For the first time, I noticed the hole in its stomach, the red paint dripping from a gaping wound.
No. I was stuck, trapped, desperate. No no no.