12. Dahlia
The safehouse loomed ahead,a squat building scarred by years of neglect and secrets. The drive from Port-au-Prince had been silent, a tension coiling like serpents between us. Yet nothing, not the silence nor the dread that gnawed at my insides, could have prepared me for the macabre tableau that greeted us as we stepped through the threshold. Drake had stopped at an airport shop and bought another burner phone, and the entire taxi ride from the airport, he’d been trying and failing to make a call. He looked frustrated and worried.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, my anxiety begging to turn its ugly head.
“I’m not sure.” Drake shoved the phone back into his pocket, sitting back in silence.
The city was awful. Exactly how I’d pictured a third world country. Massive expanses of shanty type houses along hills and mountains, pastel-colored squares stacked one on top of another, shoved in so that every inch of land was used.
Watching it pass by through the window was strange, though. All those years I’d lived in just as much squalor and misery. Poor beyond reasoning, and happy to just have a roof over my head. Now? After only a few months living with Drake and the privilege that came with money, I already saw things with different eyes. I’d become inoculated with money and power and freedom. I was both surprised by and disheartened to know it only took a few months to go from living in hell to feeling sorry for those who did.
The taxi pulled up at a home that was in what looked like the only nice area of Port-au-Prince. A small villa, set high in the hills overlooking the city. Compared to the other buildings around it, this house looked a bit weather worn, but otherwise was well taken care of.
Drake paid the taxi driver, and the car pulled away, leaving us in the small courtyard. The nearest house was about two hundred yards away and surrounded by a twenty-foot steel fence with sharp points and barbed wire atop it. This house also had a fence, though not quite as tall, but still formidable looking. Drake had explained on the drive over that the more well-off areas were always worried about crime from the slums creeping in, and most homes here took precautions like this.
“Come on,” Drake said, taking my hand and leading me to the front door.
He glanced around at the windows and doors, obviously checking for some sort of forced entry. After seeing nothing, he punched in the code on the door to unlock it and stepped inside. Before I’d gone more than a few feet into the entryway, I realized something was wrong. A strong and putrid smell of fresh decay assaulted my nose. Greasy, fatty, and sour. The scent of a dead body rotting.
Drake noticed it too, freezing beside me. When I looked at him, I couldn’t even describe the expression on his face. A storm of confusion, horror, and fear. There was a strange twitch in his left eye, and I had the distinct feeling he was on the verge of breaking down in shock. Why, though? If there was death here, then it was nothing more than we’d seen before.
Leaving Drake, I took a few quick steps past the foyer and rounded the corner into the living room and jolted to a stop at what I found. I’d seen death before. I’d tasted its acrid stench on my tongue, felt its cold fingers trace my spine. I’d felt the fluids of life dripping down my fingers, but the scene before us was something else—something grotesquely intimate. A man and woman were nailed to the wall, their skin pallid in the dim light, naked and exposed, gray with death. A heretical crucifixion or torture and agony.
The woman’s breasts were gone, flayed off and lying on the floor in a lump of red ruin, her eyes and the man’s had been scooped out. The red ruinous holes stared out at nothing, gaping and blind. Hundreds of other wounds were scattered across their bodies. Gouges, cuts, slices, and stabs, like a map of some debauched hellscape. The final act of violence was clear and deliberately horrifying. The man’s cock had been cut off, leaving a red stub and sagging balls behind. His severed penis, used as a final symbol of power by their murderer was lodged inside the woman’s vagina, a mockery of their last embrace.
“Fuck,” I murmured, my voice hollow in the stillness. I looked over the carnage with almost clinical detachment—this wasn’t my first dance with the devil. I noted the precision of the cuts, some were fresh while others had healed over.
“This was prolonged suffering,” I murmured to myself. Whatever was done to these people was dragged out over a day or two. But the bodies were fresh, only hours old. The coppery scent of blood and the sour stench of piss and shit lingered, thickening the air. The blood only dried tacky, not yet the matte finish it would take on when fully dry.
A choked gasp tore me from my analysis. Drake stood rigid, his face drained of all color, his eyes wide with a horror that eclipsed my own. His mouth hanging open in shocked confusion and distress. For a moment, he was a statue, etched with incredulity. I’d never seen him look like that. Like a lost little boy.
“Drake?” My voice sounded alien even to me, but he didn’t respond. He took a halting step forward, and the fa?ade crumbled.
“Mom? Dad?” The words fell from his lips, fractured whispers of disbelief. His body shook with a visceral rage, his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles blanched.
His mother and father? I gaped at him and turned to the bodies again. Never had my assessment changed so fast. In the blink of an eye, the bodies had transformed from subjects of curiosity, into the gut wrenching and heartbreaking tableau that I now saw. No longer were they nameless bodies. These were the people who’d raised Drake. The people who, from his story, had given him a loving and comfortable home. People he loved.
“Drake!” This time my voice got through, sharp and commanding. I reached out, tentatively touching his arm. “We need to think?—”
“Think?” He wrenched away from me. Color surging back into his face, reddening his cheeks. “They’re dead. Fucking butchered!” He lifted his fists, shaking them maniacally in between the two of us. “He slaughtered my mother and father, Dahlia!”
Tears welled in his eyes, something that shocked me nearly as much as the realization about the bodies. I’d never seen this much emotion from him. Drake had always been so calm and collected. This was on the verge of breaking him, and I needed to talk him back from the edge.
His pain was a living thing, a specter that hovered between us. It clawed at my chest, unfamiliar and unwelcome. I was accustomed to the thrill that violence brought, the pulse of excitement that sang in my veins when blood pooled and screams echoed. But this—this was Drake’s agony, raw and unfiltered, and it sank its teeth into my soul.
“Fuck!” His roar echoed, a primal sound that ricocheted off the walls. His grief was a tempest, and it threatened to swallow him whole. He spun and slammed a fist into the wall, crushing the drywall beneath and leaving a gaping, fist-sized hole.
“Drake,” I said again, steadier now. I needed him focused, not lost to the abyss of his anguish. “We have to deal with this.”
“Deal with it?” He turned to me, his eyes blazing fury and torment. “How the fuck do we deal with this?”
He no longer looked at the wall where his parents had been nailed, he was making a conscious effort not to look at them, and I couldn’t blame him.
I swallowed the knot in my throat, my resolve hardening. “We survive. We make them pay.” I put my hands on his cheeks, forcing him to look into my eyes. “We do worse to them. We make them beg us for death, and even then we don’t let them go over. We drive them mad with agony, and we make damn fucking sure they know they screwed with the wrong person.”
The walls of the safehouse seemed to contract, pressing in with the weight of dread and death. Drake stood rigid, a portrait of anguish, his eyes reflecting a torment that went beyond the carnage before us.
I reached down to touch his arm, feeling the muscle beneath tense like coiled wire. “I’m so sorry. This is... it’s unforgivable.”
He didn’t seem to hear me, his gaze slid over, not to his parents but on the grotesque pile of flesh on the floor that had been his mother’s breasts. The same breasts that had nursed Drake as a baby, had nourished him and given him life. His chest heaved, every breath a shudder that threatened to break him apart.
“Whoever did this,” I said, my voice a low growl, “Owen and Bri and whoever else... we’ll make them pay. I swear it.”
Drake’s response was a choked sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob. “Pay?” he echoed, a bitter edge cutting through the grief. Tears slid down his cheeks. “How can he ever pay enough for this?”
A silence hung heavy, punctuated only by the soft drip of blood from the wall. Then, without warning, Drake’s sorrow metamorphosed into fury again. His hands clenched into fists, and he grabbed a nearby chair, slinging it across the room, sending it crashing against the opposite wall with a violence that made my heart leap.
“Fuck this place!” he roared, his voice breaking as he kicked at the debris, splinters flying. The room became a whirlwind of destruction, Drake its merciless eye.
I stood back, watching as he tore into the safehouse with sadistic abandon. He smashed a lamp against the floor, glass shattering, glittering like diamonds in the dim light. His boots crunched over the remains, each step an act of annihilation.
“Drake, let it out,” I encouraged, the chaos around us stoking the embers of my own dark thrill. “Destroy it all.”
He found a vase, hurling it against the wall where it exploded, glass cascading everywhere. A picture frame followed, the smiling faces of his family now just shards amidst the ruin.
“Everything!” Drake screamed, his voice ragged with pain and pleasure as well. The agony of it all still tickled that twisted part of his brain that I too shared. The hurt and pain was giving way to a small bit of sexual satisfaction. He ripped curtains from their rods, the fabric tearing with a satisfying rip that echoed my own twisted gratification.
Drake’s eyes met mine, and for a moment, there was a silent understanding—a shared darkness that bound us more tightly than any vow could, than any action we’d committed thus far could have. He gave a curt nod, breathing heavily, and then turned back to his rampage.
Tables overturned, cushions torn open, their stuffing spilling out like entrails. Every smash, every crash, was a note in a symphony of rage, and its music resonated within me. The sight of him, so lost in his vengeance, sent a shiver of anticipation down my spine.
“Make them regret,” I whispered, the words slipping from me like a caress. “Make them fear you as they never have before.”
Amidst the cacophony of destruction, I slinked away from Drake’s wrathful symphony, my senses sharp and predatory. The sounds of his explosive fury dulled as I ventured deeper into the house. My fingers danced over the surfaces, probing for secrets in the shadows of the ransacked safehouse. Drawers were yanked open with a force that matched the chaos around me; cabinets were scoured with a voracity that mirrored the hunger in my veins.
I was methodical amidst the madness, each movement deliberate and precise. Searching. For what? I had no idea. It wasn’t until I made my way into a bedroom and inspected an armoire on the wall facing the bed that I found something. The back panel had a half inch gap that caught my eye. Pulling it away revealed a false back in the otherwise nondescript furniture, my hand brushed against paper—the unmistakable texture of cash.
I yanked the armoire down, sending it crashing to the floor, and then dug my fingers under the panel that covered the back. Inside I found several manila envelopes. One hung open, the glue having given way, and a stack of American hundred-dollar bills stared out from the yellow sleeve.
“Drake?” I yelled.
The noise in the other rooms paused. He stalked down the hall and entered the bedroom panting like a beast, eyes wild and red-rimmed. I displayed the bundle of bills, the green of American currency stark against the bloodied backdrop.
“Look what I found,” I said. “Seems like a waste to leave it here, don’t you think?”
His gaze locked onto the cash and envelopes, a brief flicker of confusion crossing his features before being swallowed by the inferno of his emotions.
“Fuck the money,” he spat, venom lacing his words.
I stepped forward, the thrill of the hunt surging within me. “Let’s not just fuck the money. Let’s fuck this entire place. Burn it all down. Erase every trace. Set your parents free.”
His body stiffened, the suggestion igniting something dark within him. I stepped closer, lowering my voice to a sinful whisper.
“Imagine the flames, Drake. The heat consuming everything... every memory, every piece of evidence.” My breath was hot on his skin, my eyes glinting with sadistic delight. “Let’s give Owen a taste of his own medicine. Show him that we play by our own rules.”
The corner of Drake’s mouth twitched, a spark of shared malevolence flaring between us.
“Fire cleanses,” he murmured, the words torn from somewhere deep and primal.
“Then let’s cleanse the shit,” I urged. “Let’s watch it burn together. This is our baptism, Drake. Our rebirth from their ashes.”
Slowly, he nodded, the fury and pain warring within him morphing into a cold resolve. Anticipation coiling inside me as well, the excitement of destruction pulsating through my flesh. Together, we would scorch the earth of our sorrows and rise, phoenix-like, from the devastation we wrought.
An hour later, I doused the last corner with gasoline, the fumes clawing at my nostrils like a beast ravenous for destruction. My hands moved with a precision that betrayed their eagerness, my eyes reflecting the flickering light of the match Drake held trembling between his fingers.
“Ready?” he croaked, his voice hoarse with grief.
“Let it burn,” I whispered back, a surge of sadistic pleasure cresting within me as he struck the match. A faint hiss erupted as the tiny red head of the match burst into life and flickered as he dropped it.
The flame pirouetted from the small wooden stick to the soaked floor, a hungry orange serpent slithering through the room, consuming every morsel in its path. We watched, side by side, as the blaze took on a life of its own, crackling and roaring with ferocity, a living testament to our shared rage.
Drake’s face, illuminated by the inferno before us, was a mask of sorrow and satisfaction. He seemed to be both mourning them and exorcizing his demons in the fiery spectacle. His parents’ blood, splattered across the walls, evaporated into the heat—a grim poetry of retribution that we authored together. Drake didn’t look at his parents, but I did. I watched the flames slide up the walls and writhe around their bodies, like a lover exploring the curves and angles of a new erotic partner.
“Goodbye,” he murmured, almost too low for me to catch over the roar of the flames.
We left the safehouse as a cathedral of fire behind us, the screams of the structure’s demise a chorus to our departure. We had replenished our funds, and in the garage we found a Land Rover SUV. We’d gotten everything we’d come for except safety. This hidden place, that Drake had been so sure was a secret, had been destroyed, along with any of the life he’d once had.
The drive back into Port-au-Prince was a silent one, the only sound being the distant wail of sirens and the occasional rumble of thunder from a storm brewing on the horizon.
The car’s interior was a stark contrast to the chaos we had left behind, but even the sterile calm couldn’t cleanse the weight from the air. It pressed down on us, heavy with the reality of what we’d done—what we’d become. Every now and then, I glanced over at Drake, his jaw set, eyes fixed on the road ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white.
I wanted to reach out, to offer some form of solace in this abyss we’d plunged into, but words felt meaningless. Instead, I let the silence wrap around us, a cocoon that neither comforted nor judged. It was in this quiet that the enormity of our actions and where we found ourselves settled in my stomach like lead, yet the thrill of the night’s events still pulsed through my veins with an electric buzz.
The neon sign of the hotel buzzed a sordid welcome as we entered the lot, its flickering light casting eerie shadows on the cracked walls. The room we checked into was simple but not unpleasant—clean sheets, an untouched bed, and a silence that seemed too pure for the likes of us. The oppressive weight of the night’s horrors clung to my skin as I surveyed our temporary sanctuary.
“Looks nice,” Drake muttered, his voice hollow, as if he were talking about something from another world.
“Sure,” I replied, barely glancing at the amenities. The polished veneer of the room couldn’t erase the filth that felt ingrained in my soul, nor could the softness of the pillows promise any sort of reprieve from the torment that writhed in our minds.
I watched Drake closely, his movements sluggish, his eyes glassy and distant. He was a shell, the vibrant rage that had driven him to tear apart the safehouse now extinguished, leaving behind only ashes and grief.
He made his way to the bed, his feet dragging over the carpet as if the gravity in this room was stronger than anywhere else. Then, like a building condemned to demolition, he collapsed onto the mattress. His body convulsed with sobs that came from a place so deep, so raw, that it made my chest tighten in response. I hated seeing him like that. Tears streamed down his face, unrestrained, soaking into the pillowcase beneath him.
“Drake…” I started, my voice trailing off, unsure what comfort I could offer that wouldn’t sound like a cruel mockery.
“God, Dahlia... why them?” he choked out between his cries, his words muffled by the fabric.
I stood there, paralyzed by the sight of him breaking apart. My instincts screamed at me to take advantage of his vulnerability, to draw some twisted pleasure from his pain. Yet, seeing him like this—so human, so shattered—it did something to the cold, dark cavern inside me. It formed a crack through which something else seeped; empathy, perhaps, or a shadow of sorrow for the man who lay before me, drowning in loss.
“Drake, they’re gone, but we’re not. We’ll get through this bullshit. We’ll make Owen pay,” I said, my words feeling inadequate against the magnitude of his despair.
“Will we?” he gasped, lifting his head, his eyes red-rimmed and full of a silent plea for a truth I didn’t have.
I took a hesitant step towards him, my hand reaching out, then retracting, uncertain. I was no stranger to causing tears, but wiping them away? That was uncharted territory. My heart pounded in a rhythm that echoed the erratic cadence of our lives—fast, unpredictable, dangerous.
“Look at me,” I commanded softly, using the tone that had always brought others to their knees, yet now it was laced with something resembling tenderness.
He looked up, and our eyes locked—a collision of chaos and calm. I knelt beside the bed, allowing my fingers to brush his cheek, smearing the salt of his tears.
“Lie back,” I whispered.
Drake’s brows furrowed. “What?”
I reached forward, unbuckling his pants. “I said, lie back. Relax, I’m going to take care of you.”
“Dahlia, no,” Drake said, trying to push my hands away. “It’s fine. I don’t?—”
“Shut the fuck up and let me suck your cock,” I said, dropping my voice to a low and threatening range. “I want to do this for you. Get your mind off things. Even if it’s only for a few seconds.”
He stared at me for a long moment. I could see him wanting to tell me no, to say he didn’t want to, but in the end, he sighed and collapsed back on the bed, allowing me to work.
I dragged his pants down to his ankles along with his underwear. His dick lay against his thigh, slowly growing and hardening. I reached forward and grasped it in my hand. He released a contented sigh as I stroked the shaft, moving slowly while he grew rigid.
“Let it go,” I whispered. “It’s just you and me right now. Let everything else go.”
Soon, his cock sat upright, twitching in time with his heartbeat, throbbing and rock hard. The heat of him radiating into my cool fingers.
“Suck it,” Drake commanded, staring at the ceiling. “Suck me off. Make me come.”
His commands sent a shiver of excitement through me, and I obliged. Leaning forward and taking the huge cock into my mouth. The soft bulge of the head slipped over my lips and across my tongue, the rest of the shaft filling my mouth. Drake groaned as I let him go to the back of my throat.
Wrapping my hand around the base, I bobbed my head up and down on him, grinding my tongue against the bottom of his shaft with each stroke, fucking him with my mouth. Drake’s hips moved, almost imperceptibly at first, gently thrusting into my mouth in time with my strokes. I could still feel the tension in his body, and I wanted to ease that, to take his thoughts away from the horrors of the day and give him a few moments of bliss.
I sucked at the head, slipping my tongue back and forth across it, while stroking him with my hand. Drake made more and more guttural animal sounds as I urged him onward.
Pulling my mouth away, I looked up at him. “Fuck my throat, Drake. Give it to me. Give me all that you have.”
Finally lifting his head, he gazed down into my eyes. “Are you sure?”
I nodded and grinned. “Make it hurt.”
He bared his teeth in a combination of grimace and smile. Without further prompt he reached forward and took hold of my hair, pulling me roughly back down onto his cock. He rammed his hips up, shoving his full length to the back of my throat, triggering my gag reflex, but I was too turned on to care. I choked back the sensation, swallowing, and let him take me. The pain of him fucking me made my pussy wet. I wanted to finger myself, to fuck, but this was about him. I would give him my full attention.
“Dear god, that mouth is so good,” Drake hissed as he kept crashing into my mouth.
The thick head of his cock probing at the back of my palate, his hands tugging on my hair, and the slick feeling of my saliva as it dripped down his dick were some of the most erotic things I’d ever experienced. Tears sprang to my eyes as I continued to force myself from gagging on him. The pain and fear of suffocation somehow increased my sexual appetite. Digging my nails into his thighs, I bobbed my head in time with his thrusts.
“Fuck,” Drake growled. “I’m gonna fucking come.”
I groaned in pleasure and shoved my head down, pushing his cock all the way to the back of my throat, enveloping his full shaft. He cried out, pulling my hair down to hold me in place as his dick pulsed and twitched. Thick hot cum pulsed into my mouth at the very back of my throat, and I swallowed it down greedily.
Finally spent, Drake released my hair and collapsed back on the bed, gasping for breath. His cock slid free of my mouth; it and my chin both glistened with spit and residual cum. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and grinned down at him, caressing his thigh and stomach.
“Rest now,” I whispered. “Tomorrow, we hunt.”