Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A terrified scream jolts me awake. Gasping, I sit up quickly and rub my eyes to see Maxim pacing back and forth.
The chains of his shackles jangle with each movement.
His bare feet slap the floor. His soft cock swings, and his ass and pecs jiggle with every step.
The spot on his chest has two red, crusted-over dots from where I stabbed him.
Another scream erupts from next door, sharper than the last.
“Dee,” I whisper to myself. She’s up and already at work, yet she left me here. There’s no way she woke up this morning, with me gone, and didn’t look for me first.
“She’s killing her,” Maxim announces the obvious.
Fresh blood seeps through a small gap at the bottom of the wall.
Maxim threads his cuffed hands behind his head, his biceps flexing with the movement. “Fuck.”
“Do you need to say goodbye? I can ask her to stop so you can,” I offer.
“No. No.” He shakes his head. “I… I just don’t like hearing women in pain. Even her.”
“Maxim!” Penelope’s screech is like nails on a chalkboard.
“Fuck.”
I snap my fingers to take his mind off the noise, to do anything to help. “Hey, look at me.”
“No.”
“Maxim. I… I…”
“Oh, God!” Penelope wails.
“Jesus, fuckin’ Christ.” Maxim turns and slams his fist against the wall. “Do it quickly, for fuck’s sake! Just end it already. Kill her. Stop dragging it out!”
“No! Please! Help!”
“Hey! Hey!” He pounds harder, making the wall rattle. “I know you can hear me. Make it quick. End her now. Take it out on me. Come and hurt me! Stop torturing her!”
“Maxim,” I gasp. “Don’t say that. Dee will do it.”
“Good. I can’t listen to this. Let her torture me. I can take it. Penelope is a lot of things, but she’s still a woman. She doesn’t deserve to go out like that.”
“Maxim—”
“Stop fuckin’ callin’ me that.”
“Wha…”
“My name is Dark.” He slaps his chest. “My father’s name is Sunshine.”
The door to the room swings open, and Dee steps across the threshold, covered in blood.
“Dee.”
She doesn’t look at me when she steps into the room and goes for him, knife in hand. Not a scalpel. A standard pocketknife. Her slow, painful torture device.
Maxim, Dark, whatever the hell his name is, stands with his head held high and back against the wall, as Dee steps before him and swings her blade, carving a diagonal path across his tattooed abdomen. Nostrils flaring, the man with the gray eyes clenches his jaw and takes it. No begging. No crying.
Over and over, my sister slices and dices him.
Blood flows like a river down his body, pooling at his feet.
I don’t know when it starts, but I cry. Silent tears stream down my face as the man who called me beautiful, who told me his name and that he has kids, stares past my sister, directly at me, as if I’m the anchor keeping him upright.
“Who should I call?” I sob, needing to know who to tell about his death.
“Dark… Delicacies.” He chokes between Dee’s violence. “Look… look… look it up. My ex, Kali, will… will…” Squeezing his eyes shut, he snaps his head back. “Fuuck… know what to do. Give me to them. Please. For their peace.”
“Dark Delicacies? Did you say… Dark…”
Dee spins to face me, eyes wide, mouth agape as if she’s just putting two and two together, the same as me.
“Cell,” I mutter in horror.
Dee nods.
“She told us about Harold and Penelope.”
She nods again.
“Kali…He’s… He’s Dark.”
Dee nods.
“Oh. My. God.”
Dropping her knife, it clatters to the floor as Dee races from the room, and I rush to catch Dark before he collapses. His weight hits me like a ton of bricks as I help him down onto the floor and onto his back, where I rip off my T-shirt to stanch the deepest cuts.
There’s a small chunk of flesh missing from his inner thigh area. I shuck off my shorts, not caring that all I have on underneath is granny panties, and I shove the ball of cotton there to quell the bleeding.
Dark.
Cell’s sister’s ex-husband, Dark.
A Sacred Sinner biker.
How did this happen?
In a rush of you-damn-well-better-not-die, Dee returns out of breath, carrying the biggest first-aid kit we own.
Inside, she rips out a syringe of morphine and stabs it into his thigh.
Knowing I’m better with a needle and thread than she is, and since she’s shaking like a leaf, I squirt half a bottle of alcohol over my hands before I pick up our suture kit and get to stitching this man back together.
“How in the hell did this happen?” I growl, shaking my head at the passed-out mess on the floor.
“Don’t know.”
“He can’t die.”
Dee, knowing about as much as I do about his backstory, which is basically nothing, nods in agreement. All I know is he’s a Sacred Sinner, and the whos and whys he’s in deep with Penelope and her father might be a mystery, but one I’m gonna find out, as long as this stubborn fucker doesn’t die.
My stitches are a shaky mess in the half-assed lighting, and the fact that he’s still bleeding like a stuck pig as I attempt to put him back together is not a good sign.
“Why didn’t she tell us Kali’s ex was remarried?” I hiss.
Dee shrugs, looking pale as hell, as she stares at the carnage.
As I remove my shorts from his upper thigh and groin area, I nod toward the damage. “Why there?”
Rummaging around on the floor on her hands and knees, Dee finds what she’s looking for and holds up a flap of skin with a tattooed lip print.
“Dee,” I admonish.
She shrugs.
Alright. I can’t worry about that now.
All that matters is he’s alive and stays that way.
Fuck. This must be why he fascinated me and my gut kept pulling me toward him. It knew something I didn’t. Well, obviously that’s the case, but why?
Dammit.
Cell did this. She and I need to have a serious fucking chat after this. She knew what we planned, all the way down to the drugs, kidnapping, and killing. She knew he was gonna die. The question is, why was she okay with it? Why didn’t she tell me?
With every cut sutured shut and his bleeding under control, I do what I can to cover Dark’s injuries with gauze and bandages before collapsing on the floor beside him, emotionally and physically drained.
Dee unlocks his ankles and wrists, places two water bottles on the floor, and gets to her feet.
“I’ll be back,” she whispers.
“Bring blankets, painkillers…everything you can.”
At the door, Dee nods, and she goes, taking the last dregs of my energy with her.