Chapter 30
Thirty
Adrian
Idragged her onto the stage, letting each sharp edge bash into her as I yanked her up. She wasn’t fully unconscious; gentle mutterings falling from her lips as her mind swam, as it so often did. But she was docile, not fighting me as I moved her.
After I’d fucked up and not killed her, gone back on my word to play the game through, I’d been a mess. She’d been laid out on my bed, sleeping, relaxed and comfortable, and I stumbled away, vomit in my throat, hatred in my bones.
The need to remind myself what this was all for, to reconnect with Jake and what it was like before we grew up, overwhelmed me.
Before we drifted and came back together, just a few short years before his death.
The guilt ate at me, the way I’d pressured him to hang out, to spend time with my friends, my colleagues.
He’d had a major crush on my partner and only came out through cajoling.
If I hadn’t pushed him…
Penelope grunted when I heaved her body up to the rope piled in the center of the stage. She was going back into the same setup; it was all I’d learned how to do and I itched with need to punish, to show the ghost of Jake that she was in pain, suffering, dying.
The Jake I knew when we were little kids here in the theater, the man I knew in those moments at the bar, before I slipped away for a piss and left him vulnerable. That was the person this was for. Not me, not my dick. Not my dirty desires.
This was for Jake.
I stared at myself in the dirty bathroom mirror, ignoring the chaos around me. This place was filthy, busy when men flitting in and out, using the urinals, not washing their hands or spending too long looking at themselves in the mirror before heading out to their dates.
Like me, I guess, but I wasn’t on a date.
I was just fucking exhausted, admiring the new depth of color under my eyes.
“Shit,” I grunted, stepping away. I’d left Jake out there for too long.
After waiting at the bar for ten minutes for the whiskey I downed in seconds, then coming here, he had to be wondering where I was.
Things were getting better with us each time we hung out, and he was here tonight at my behest. I splashed a bit more water on my face and left the bathroom.
He was there in our booth, grinning as a woman leaned over the barrier and chatted. He looked at ease, comfortable, not like he’d been missing my wonderful company at all, so I turned back to the bar, another whiskey calling my name.
I’d get him one, too.
But after I ordered and weaved back to the booth, he was gone. So was that woman.
“You good?” my colleague asked, finding me standing there looking perturbed. I nodded, pulling out my cell, a bad feeling in my gut.
Jake’s phone rang out. I chugged my drink and went on the search for him.
Something told me to; something told me he wasn’t off having a nice time somewhere. I didn’t realize that the image of him smiling in his booth would be the last time I saw him alive. That the next time I laid eyes on his face it would be mangled, twisted in anguish.
I didn’t realize that my colleagues trusted my gut and were already searching for him. Putting pieces together, trailing him and the woman on the CCTV the bar had.
“Adrian,” my partner said, her hand gentle on my arm as she directed me further away from the bar. We’d been looking for hours, had found Jake’s phone behind the bar in an alley, signs of struggle evident.
“He’s dead?” I asked, knowing her tone.
She nodded, her mouth turned down. From what we’d gathered, Jake had left with another woman, but that sounded wrong. He was so infatuated with Phoebe that he never even glanced at other women.
“You have to catch her. That woman. You have to,” Phoebe implored.
“We know where she went,” another officer said, not even in uniform. We’d all panicked, rushed into this, again, just trusting my gut and nothing else. “She’s leaving now.”
I was there when they caught up with Penelope Karner, when the excitement rippled through the uniformed cops as they realized who they had in their possession. I fought through the red tape and crime scene investigators to see Jake one more time. I needed it proven, what I was being told.
In quiet words and hands resting on my shoulder, with looks of pain on the messengers’ faces as they gave me the worst news I’d ever had, it wasn’t enough.
So I forced my way into that warehouse.
It wasn’t his wide smile at the bar that would stick with me from that night now; it was the sight of him laid out on the floor, the image of what Penny did to him.
That was why she needed to die.
Jake was good, the best of us. And she took that from me. From the world. All my goodness left with him.
Penny looked pathetic, strung up again, her limbs at my command, her body mine to bend.
I had her positioned how I wanted her, her front facing down, her legs spread wide, almost above her head, and her arms at her knees.
It was like she was flying, some fucked up version of a bird in flight, swooping down to catch its prey.
She said nothing apart from those dreamy mutterings, like she was somewhere else, falling back into that place where she could drift in and out. I could barely hear her from up here in the rafters, but the idea of her feeling any pleasure at all pissed me off.
Couldn’t have that. It made my movements jerkier, rougher as I moved her into position. I stretched her muscles further, her limbs tighter. Fuck her. Fuck her and everything she put out into the world. Fuck her for the sickness she injected me with when she killed my brother.
She needed to suffer here, like she promised she would.
I cranked the rope connected to her head until it was facing straight ahead, until I felt the tension in her tendons from all the way up here, then I climbed down.
“Adrian,” she said my name, bleary eyes and drooling. Her skin was red and pinched, her cheeks flushed, veins in her temples strained. I grinned and stroked her cheek, cataloging everywhere her skin stretched, her muscles pulled. She coughed, even her lungs, her chest, stretched out too tight.
“Little killer,” I cooed. “This is what you should look like. Forever.”
There was beauty in it.
“And ever?” she whined. Fuck, she looked high, gone on some drug that I didn’t have access to.
I needed her present.
Disappearing from the stage for a moment, I returned, a plank of wood in one hand, the marionette of her sister in the other. It was crude, and as I dropped it to the floor, I wasn’t unsure it wouldn’t break.
Penny’s eyes flashed at the sight of the marionette, but she said nothing, bit her bottom lip hard. She wanted to ask. If her sister was still alive, what I’d done with her.
I hated to have to tell her it was innocent, that we spoke for a few hours and I saw her off, walked her home, even, to make sure she was safe and delivered behind a locked door.
So I would say nothing, letting the thoughts fester in her mind.
Let her use her disgusting brain to guess what I might have done.
“How many times did you stab my brother?” I asked Penny, dragging the wooden plank along her body as I walked to her backside and stepped between her spread legs.
This plank had some old nails in it, rusty and sharp, protruding from where it had once been something else, a chest, a table, whatever. I pressed my thumb to the tip of one of the nails, grinning when it pinched.
“I… I don’t know,” she admitted. It wasn’t a surprise to me that she didn’t know. She didn’t care enough to.
“Seventeen times, little killer,” I informed her, my eyes flashing to him lying on that table in the morgue, how brutalized he’d been. “You stabbed him seventeen times before you stopped. What made you stop?”
She whined, her body squirming as much as it could in the confides. She’d stepped into this one willingly.
“What made you stop, Penelope?” I scraped the plank of wood down her spine, letting the nails snag her skin.
“I don’t know!” she cried, flinching. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know.” She breathed out, hard and heavy, almost wheezy. “I never know. It was just… done. The job was done.”
I nodded. “It was done when you slit his throat.” Images of slamming this nail covered board into her neck flashed through my mind, made my cock thicken. I could press it to her neck and fuck her throat until she died. That would be a helluva way to go.
“You’re going to count,” I told her instead.
“Count what?” she asked, voice all whiny and high. She tried to turn her head to look at me, but it wasn’t possible.
“This.” I slammed the plank between her legs, and she yelped. This first one hard, but not as much as it could be. Not enough to break skin. “Count,” I demanded, and when she didn’t, I screamed it. “Count!”
“One!”
Again. I smashed the plank between her legs, crashing right against her pussy, her spread out ass cheeks, making sure the sharp nails pointed out, drove into her exposed flesh.
“Two!” she shouted, almost angry.
I knew when the nails landed for the first time, when I ripped them back out of her soft body, because two things happened. She screamed, deep and visceral, and blood splattered onto my shoes.
Satisfaction heated my chest, and I did it again as she cried out and I beat her pussy to a meaty, disgusting pulp.
When she yelled fifteen, I paused, looked at the mess between her legs. I wanted to fuck it, to shove my cock between the blood and gore, to fuck her while she wailed and begged.
I pushed a finger inside her, rotating it while she cried and screamed, tried to swing away from me.
“So perfect like this, little killer,” I told her, scooping up the blood and leaning over to shove it into her mouth. Her tongue swirled around my fingers, and her teeth grazed, threatening to bite. “You bite and I don’t stop at two more.”
Her jaw loosened, and I slipped my hands free, going in for the final two blows.
“Say it,” I demanded, stroking the bloodstained plank along her pussy.