Chapter 35
Thirty-Four
Adrian
Ipulled her up from the edge, having caught her wherever I could, scrambling to stop her death coming too soon. She would not have such an easy end.
Though I did like the way my hand looked wrapped around her throat. I squeezed harder, lifting her, moving her onto the floor to lie on her back. Our skin was hot where it connected; my grip hard, commanding.
She glared at me, nostrils flared, red stained skin cracking where the blood had dried. My feral witch. My evil, murdering cunt, looking at me with the most intense hatred in her eyes.
“You don’t get to leave yet,” I said, promising more with my expression. Yeah, she’d slipped from my grasp, but that didn’t mean this was over.
She didn’t speak, looked barely alive, as I reached for the other tools in my arsenal. I often sat up here, carving the leftover wood, making little animals or piles of crap to turn into sawdust. I had everything we needed for a good fucking time.
Right where we lay, I’d left a bag of tools just weeks ago. The night before I took her, in fact, I’d been up here, slicing into a chunk of wood and daydreaming about this very moment.
Her head turned with the movement of my hand, but she still didn’t utter a word.
Her whole body had grown tense, and it was like she was holding something in, like a change had occurred in that second she slipped.
Maybe she realized she didn’t want to die, that all the pomp and promises she made were a joke.
“Were you actually afraid then?” I asked, pulling out a small carving knife, smiling when it glinted in a dull light from the stage. “Was that the moment you decided against your race to death?”
“No,” she muttered, not looking me in the eye. “No.”
I nodded, not sure whether to believe her or not, focusing back on my many tools. We were still in that game, toying with her death, with power. I remained unsure which one of us held it. Who belonged to whom.
She watched me move the knife to her stomach and press in. “You stabbed him how many times?” I asked, knowing she’d realize what I was referring to.
“Seven,” she lied. Or she didn’t remember. Damn troll, not even knowing the minutiae of her own murder.
“Seventeen.” I slashed the small blade across her stomach, a shallow cut that caused a thin line of blood to form. I wanted to lick it up and feed it to her.
“I won’t count again,” she said through a wince, still stony, distant, vacant, unlike before.
With a chuckle, I smirked. “I don’t expect you to.”
It only took a little bit to position her how I wanted again, and with an aching slowness, I pushed my cock back inside her body, my eyes rolling at how welcome I was, how warm and soft and tight she was. “Fuck,” I muttered. “You constantly drive me to distraction.”
She panted when I slammed into her, and kept watch again, studying me close as I drove myself in and out, slow and steady, not for any purpose but to fuck her. No end goal. The need to burrow myself into her body was too strong; the urge to wreck her was consuming.
“He was a good man,” I growled. “The best of us.” I swiped my fist over her wounds. “A damn saint.” My fist landed on her flesh, met with a grunt. “Fucking admit it!”
“No!” she cried, though she had almost done so before. “He was going to hurt me. He was.”
“No, he wasn’t, little killer,” I replied. “We have proof of that.”
“You have no idea what he said to me,” she spat back, wincing from the pain. She tried to move, to get up, maybe argue her case, but I pinned her down, slapped her face.
Grasping her cheeks, I squeezed hard, making her keep her attention on me. “I knew him, Penelope. I knew my brother.”
She shook her head, pained. “No.” For the first time, there was true fear in her eyes, pain and anguish that looked foreign on her. Gone was the smirking, the playfulness she used to hide her emotions. In its place, like I’d carved right into her messed up brain, despair.
“Tell me, Penelope,” I said, then shouted. “Tell me!”
She cried out, a shrieking, sobbing pain, and her whole body relaxed. “He didn’t touch me, okay? Never did anything to tell me he would. But he was a bad man, he was.”
“He wasn’t.”
“He was!” her voice broke. “He was because he was there. All of you—”
I clamped her mouth shut with my hand, didn’t want to fucking hear it anymore. She had nothing useful to say. “Shut up.”
She watched me rest the blade at her stomach again, and above the slash I’d made, I began to carve. Carve a word I needed to see on her flesh.
"No," she cried through my palm. "You're all rapists, killers, evil. You are." She was trying to convince herself. Even now.
It took fourteen slices to finish the word across her stomach. ‘KILLER’ in dripping red, over her belly button, the K slicing up high to her rib cage, the R sliding down, toward where our bodies met, where my cock still slid in and out of her, rough but steady.
She shifted from the weeping victim, turning, bore the pain, swallowed it up, used it, tears streaming from her eyes as if she was locked in her own internal battle.
She writhed, playing on what she thought I wanted, massaging her tits and running hands across her skin, and smiled through the motions.
A blank smile, empty. When I nicked her rib cage, when the blade sunk in too far, she laughed and gasped.
But it was fucking fake; that spark behind her eyes was gone. Dead.
Penelope wasn’t in there anymore. Something else was. Penny was playing.
“More,” she cried, her voice high and breathy. “I’m close.”
I fucked her through it, holding the blade in my fingers, using my thumb to rub her clit. The blade nicked my stomach as I drove into her, leaning over her to see her face better, to see what would happen when this fake as fuck Penelope tipped over the edge. Would that be false, too?
“Adrian,” she moaned as she came, spasming and flailing.
When she was mid-way through, I moved the knife, rested it against her throat. As she came down, she noticed, her eyes flashing.
“Do it,” she demanded, blanking even more. “Do it.” She looked gone. Vacant. Weird.
No.
I held the knife there, pushing in just enough to pierce the skin under her chin. This was how she killed Jake. These were the final moments of his life, laid out beneath her, slices and stabs across his body, her blade at his throat.
This is how I always imagined it.
I never thought I’d be balls deep inside her when it happened, but it was better that way. I was consuming her in every sense, taking everything I could.
But anger beat me round the head.
I didn’t want to look at her face. That smug fucking face, so full of deception and trickery. She ran her fingers through the blood on her stomach, feeling out the word I’d carved, pressing and prodding into the pain, groaning. Paying no mind to the blade at her neck.
She shrieked when I ripped my cock from her body and slammed her hands to her sides. But it was more in indignation than shock.
I couldn’t look at that face anymore, that vacant, drifting face that just wasn’t. Fucking. Her. I climbed up her body, pinning her arms with my legs, crushing them beneath my knees, and I grabbed her head, not giving her a second before I shoved my cock into her mouth.
I slammed home, fucking her skull like it was a toy, like she was a cheap flesh light. She bit me, gargling and squirming as I took, clawing into her hair, not giving her a chance to suck in any air.
She toyed with death, demanded it from me; maybe this would be the way she went.
I pinched her nostrils together without looking down, not wanting to see her eyes, to learn if she was enjoying this. That fake Penelope looked up at me, and I needed her to go away.
I didn’t stop slamming into her face, teeth, nasal bridge and all, until I came, flooding her mouth with my cum.
She didn’t swallow, didn’t move her tongue or lap at my softening cock. I gave myself two beats to breathe the moment in before pulling out and looking down, cradling her head in my hands. Nothing, no movement. A slack face and jaw, eyes empty.
Dead.
Or unconscious. Her expression was loose, her eyes closed, cum dribbled from between her lips. I slapped her cheek twice, and just when I thought it was all over, she took in a ragged breath.
I didn’t know whether to feel pleased or disappointed.
Still holding her head too tight, I ducked down and licked her lips, running my tongue over her slack mouth to catch all that cum and spit. She wasn’t wasting it. Fuck that.
As she remained unconscious, her breathing rough but there, I flipped her over, my mouth full of cum, and spat it onto her ass, pushing it all inside her with my fingers.
I wanted her to feel it, to notice it when she stood, have the taste of me on her tongue and a gush from her loose, ruined asshole.
She didn’t wake up when I shoved her onto her back again and slapped her cheek for the second time.
It pissed me off. Fifteen. We were at fifteen slices. Not counting the little nick on her neck.
Not fucking good enough.
I reached for the knife, and with fury churning me, stabbed her in the shoulder, right where it wouldn’t be fatal, would only be a flesh wound. Then I did it again, the snick of the blade as it drove into her loud, unyielding.
The second time woke her up with a scream. She gasped, sucking in deep, ragged breaths as her world caught up.
“I thought that was it,” she said after an age, her voice hoarse, sore, as she grasped at her bleeding wounds.
Still not fucking reacting like it hurt, like she was afraid, more like she was curious.
Anger rocketed through me, and I grabbed her throat, squeezed, even though it would be hoarse, even though I’d just fucked her unconscious.
Her eyes flashed.
Fear.
That was actual fear.
Fuck yes.
I crushed harder. “That’s it,” I whispered, leaning nose to broken nose with her, kissing her lips. “Feel that fear, you cunt.”
Her hands came up to claw at my arm, digging sharp nails into my flesh until I bled, but I didn’t stop, taking away her breath, welcoming in her fear.
Something changed, shifted in her rabid and dangerous; blankness gone. She was trying to speak, opening and closing her mouth, straining until the blood vessels in her face burst, as she went purple.
I loosened a fraction to hear what nonsense she might be about to spout, but she used it. She kicked me from behind, throwing me off balance.
And then it was like she was a new woman, a beast.
She screamed.