Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sasha had a gun.
Why the fuck did she have a gun?
And what in the ever-loving hell was she wearing?
Where was she?
“Vile!” she screamed uselessly down the…
alley of the decrepit city she was suddenly standing in.
There were sirens blaring in the distance of every make and model, and fires were burning in the road from overturned police cars and an ambulance that looked like it had been hit by a train.
Blood was smeared along the pavement and up the wall.
She thought she saw what might have been the remains of a person nearby, but she wasn’t honestly sure.
There wasn’t much remaining of their remains.
And seeing as the blood smear went across the ground and up the wall and then to the roof? Something had dragged the victim up there for a snack.
Great.
Monsters.
She had a pistol clutched tight in her right hand, securing the grip with her left.
But that wasn’t what struck her as odd about her “attire.” It was the thigh-length red dress with slits that ran up both sides almost to her hip.
She was wearing black heels, black thigh-high stockings with matching garters.
It was as low cut of a dress as it was revealing up the sides.
It was a ridiculous outfit to be stuck in what was clearly some sort of horror movie apocalypse. There was no reason anyone would be stomping around a hellscape in an outfit like the one she was wearing unless—
Something roared from a block away and around the corner. Something very large, and very angry sounding. A scream followed by the sound of metal shearing in half had her turning and raising her gun in the direction of the sound.
“Vile, this isn’t funny!”
“Counterargument,” his voice came from nowhere, narrating the situation. “This is absolutely hysterical.”
Growling in frustration, she slowly took a few steps back from the direction the noise had come from, trying desperately not to wobble on the heels he had put her in. “I’ve played this series of games. This doesn’t go how you think it goes.”
“Maybe in your versions. You haven’t been online much, have you? It’s astonishing what your kind comes up with, with enough time, investment, imagination…and desperation.”
Another crash. This time from her right. Closer than before. Her heart leapt into her throat. The idea of being pinned down and ripped limb-from-limb by a bunch of mangled lab experiments gone wrong wasn’t exactly her idea of a good time.
“Oh, I don’t plan on killing you…and neither do they.” The way he laughed sent something curling in her stomach, mixing with fear, intensifying both.
He didn’t…
He wasn’t going to…
He wasn’t planning on…
“You’re kidding me, right?” She took another slow step back. “Please tell me you’re kidding me.”
“We will only go so far as you want to lead the dance, Sasha. Just remember that. I think in this instance, you’re quite fine if I ‘cheat’ and read the pages, yes?” He chuckled again. “Can’t let this get too out of hand.”
What he was insinuating made her thoughts fly in a hundred thousand directions. All of them dangerous. All of them lascivious. All of them wondering exactly what he was capable of, in a place like this.
“Anything and everything your sick little mind desires…”
That time, his voice was a purr right next to her ear. She screamed and whirled, raising her gun to point it at him.
But he wasn’t there.
His laugh echoed off the walls around her. She might recognize the trappings of the game they were in, but this was still very much a world of his making and of his design.
Monsters howled and screamed. They were coming her way, now. And in large numbers.
So…she ran.
It was the only thing she could think of to do, standing in a monster-infested apocalypse in a cocktail dress and heels.
The gun felt heavy in her hand as she sprinted down the alley, the heels clicking against cracked asphalt in a rhythm that was embarrassingly loud even in the cacophony of the sirens.
Every click was a dinner bell.
“Poor thing,” his voice purred from the shadows, and the way the word rolled off his tongue made something treacherous twist low in her belly. “But if you’re going to run, you might want to take the next left. The right is a…dead end. Pun very much intended.”
She took the left. She hated that she took the left. She hated that she trusted his direction because she knew he didn’t want her dead—he wanted her cornered. There was a difference, and the difference was somehow worse.
The alley opened into a wider street. Burned-out cars lined the road, their owners long gone as meals. Neon signs that had once advertised bars and laundromats now flickered in death spasms of electric color, casting the scene in flashes of red and blue and sickly green.
Movement. To her right. High up.
Something was clinging to the side of a building three stories up. Its limbs were too long and its joints bent the wrong way, and it was watching her with a head that swiveled slowly, tracking her progress down the street like a cat watching a mouse cross an open field.
A long, slithering tongue lashed out of its mouth. Hungry. Waiting.
It didn’t attack. It just…watched.
Another materialized on the opposite building. This one was lower. Its body was humanoid, but wrong in every conceivable way—the torso too long, the skin a mottled gray-violet that glistened wetly in the neon light. Its mouth was open, and the teeth were—
She looked away. She didn’t want to catalog the teeth.
It, too, was watching. Motionless except for a slow, rhythmic rise and fall of its chest. They were not attacking.
They were herding her.
“They won’t hurt you, Sasha. They’re mine. And I’ve given them very specific instructions.”
“What instructions?” She kept walking, because stopping meant being still, and being still meant being surrounded.
“To…enjoy themselves. Within the boundaries you set.”
That had a noise escaping her that she was once more embarrassed about, and warmth flushing to her cheeks. No. No, she didn’t want anything to do with the monsters.
Or that’s what she told herself.
Shit. Damn it! No!
A sound from directly behind her made her spin.
One of them had dropped from a fire escape and landed in a crouch no more than ten feet away.
Up close, the creature was horrifying and mesmerizing in equal measure.
Its body was all lean, corded muscle beneath that slick skin, and its eyes—God, its eyes—were the same glowing purple she knew too well.
All of them were him. Facets of him. Extensions of him.
It was hideous. It was beautiful.
It promised pain. It promised pleasure. It promised to pin her down to the ground and ravage her in a way she could only imagine in her wildest fantasies.
Because that was what this was.
A fantasy…brought to life.
Her fantasy.
The creature tilted its head and a low sound came from deep in its chest. Not a growl. Something closer to a purr. It took a single, deliberate step toward her, and the movement was entirely too graceful for something that looked like it had crawled out of a nightmare.
Sasha stepped back. Her heel caught on a crack and she stumbled against the rusted hood of a car. The creature stopped when she stumbled, as if waiting for her to regain her footing before continuing.
Chivalrous monsters. Because this was Vile, and even his nightmares had standards.
“You’re trembling,” his voice observed from everywhere and nowhere. Soft. Almost concerned. Almost. “But not from fear. Do you want him? Here, on the hood of the car? He’ll have you gladly…bend you over, rut you, fill you, they’ll take turns. Or all at once, whatever you prefer.”
“Shut up.” Her voice cracked. The crack betrayed more than she’d care to to admit out loud. Desperately, she tried not to picture what he was describing. The feeling of its claws as it roughly threw her over the hood of the car, ripped her clothes off, and rammed himself—
Stop thinking about it!
“I told you I’m reading the page, darling. And the page is being very, very honest right now.”
Something brushed against the back of her calf. She gasped. A tendril—dark, smooth, warm—had slipped from beneath the car and traced a line up the back of her stocking from ankle to just behind her knee. The touch was impossibly light. A question, not a command.
The creatures were closing in. Not rushing. Prowling. Circling her with a patience that was almost reverent. One had descended to street level, and she could hear the wet scrape of its claws on concrete as it moved along the wall behind her, staying just out of her direct line of sight.
Another tendril found her wrist. The one holding the gun. It didn’t pull. It simply curled around her and rested there, warm and pulsing gently, waiting for her to make a decision.
“Let go,” Vile whispered. “Give in. You already have.”
She let go.
The gun clattered to the asphalt.
The moment it left her hand, the atmosphere shifted. The tendrils at her calf and wrist both tightened—not painfully, but possessively. The neon lights overhead steadied, bathing the street in a wash of deep red that turned the shadows violet at their edges.
His colors.
The tendrils pulled her wrist behind her back, whirling her around so her hips were pressed against the hood of the car. If she wanted to say no, stop, now was the time. If she wanted to fight back, this was her chance.
If she wanted to deny this wasn’t what she wanted…
But she didn’t cry out.
She moaned.
God, she wanted this.
“There she is,” Vile breathed, and now his voice was close. Behind her. She could feel the warmth of him at her back, though she hadn’t heard a single footstep. “There’s my brave, stupid, beautiful librarian.”
Fingers—actual fingers, not tendrils, not claws—brushed the hair from the side of her neck. His breath was warm against the exposed skin below her ear. She shivered hard enough that her teeth almost clicked together.
“You’re a bastard,” she managed, though her voice had gone thin and breathy in a way that made her want to die of embarrassment.
His laugh was low and dark and very, very close.
“Darling, you wouldn’t have me any other way.
And you know that.” His lips ghosted against the shell of her ear.
Not quite a kiss. The promise of one. “Now…the question is…will you walk into the trap I’ve set for you, one last time? Or will you be smart, and run away?”
His hand found her hip, his thumb tracing a slow circle against the slit of the dress where fabric met bare skin. The tendril at her wrist slid higher. Over her forearm. Along the inside of her elbow, where the skin was thin and sensitive. She bit down on her lower lip hard enough to taste copper.
“They want to touch you,” he murmured against her neck. “They want to take you apart. Slowly. Gently. With all the patience that only monsters are capable of.” His thumb slipped beneath the edge of the slit. “And you want them to. Don’t you?”
She should say no. She should scream. Fight. Run. Remember what he was.
But his mouth was warm against the curve of her neck, and his hand was firm at her hip, and the creatures were humming that low, reverberant purr that she felt in her breastbone—
And the worst part—the truly, irredeemably worst part—was that he was right. He was reading the page. And the page wasn’t lying.
“Just…inside,” she whispered, and didn’t recognize her own voice. “Not out here.”
The smile she felt curve against her throat was sharp and triumphant and impossibly warm. “As you wish.”
The world shifted. The neon bled away. The creatures dissolved into shadows that swirled around her legs like fog, warm and humming, as the street folded in on itself and became a corridor, and the corridor became a room, and the room was dark and it was his and she was exactly where he wanted her.
Where she wanted to be.
No. It was worse than that.
God help her.
Where she belonged.