Chapter 6 #2
She leaned in, her lips grazing the shell of my ear.
Again and again, she stroked and pushed, stroked and pushed.
My insides coiled, knotting around her strokes, painting ancient symbols on my core.
I detested myself for fisting the tub, for dropping my head and moaning, but something primal had been woken and now required satisfaction.
My centre tightened until it snapped—and then, a white-hot surge that made my toes curl against the enamel.
My back arched, and I let out a low, fractured whimper.
It was over in a heartbeat, leaving me vacant and shivering. Every sensation turned unbearable, even the water against my skin felt like too much.
Ophelia withdrew her hand and stood up, watching as the tremors settled around my thighs. A kiss landed on my temple.
"Wasn't it nice?"
When I returned to bed, the mattress was back on the frame and flipped. Beneath it, my scribbles were gone. A layer of wood had been planed away, leaving only the reminder of something that used to be there.
Every few days, they came with a razor.
Ophelia made two cuts, always in the same place, on my right thigh, opening the skin just above the scars that had nearly healed. One for her. One for him. Then they drank from me.
I didn’t fight. I lay still and stared at the ceiling while they fed.
Sometimes I thought I heard voices, like when Ophelia tried to drown me.
Soft whispers from beyond the walls, as if someone else were moving through the house.
I couldn't discern the language, nor whether they were human at all.
Whether they were a fever-induced bloom of the mind or a haunting of Whitmore, remained unclear.
But I found their soft murmurs soothing whenever Gunnar and Ophelia fed on me.
They never took too much. Just enough to leave me lightheaded.
Afterward, Gunnar sometimes left the room, leaving me alone with Ophelia. She never held back. She forced my hands and my mouth until she took her pleasure, then worked my body until I was sweating and shivering, pleading for release in every sense of the word.
Other nights, they both stayed.
And fucked.
A lot.
I didn’t look, yet even with my back turned, I felt them. The old bed creaked; the mattress dipped and rocked beneath their weight. The room filled with the sound of it. The smell of it. Ophelia would moan, working on him with a frenetic oscillation.
Sometimes, without meaning to, I caught her looking at me while she was on him.
Her mouth would fall open, panting and loose, pupils drawn tight and small, as someone lost deep inside a fever.
Now and then, her lidded sight would lock on mine, as if she wanted to see whether I was still there, still listening.
I thought about how rarely Sylvie and I had touched each other in the past year. Once a month, if I was lucky. In the final months, there had been nothing at all.
Ophelia gasped, pulling me out of my thoughts, and I knew he had entered her.
She lay on her back. At some point, her hand shot out and tangled in my hair, pulling hard.
Whether she meant to or not, she held on as she came.
I stayed rigid while her grip burned my roots, forcing me to brace against the shaking of her body.
But this wasn’t over. As soon as she opened her eyes again, she pressed a firm palm into Gunnar’s bare chest, stopping him from finding his own release.
“I want to watch you and her,” she purred.
Everything inside me locked. I hadn’t been with a man since college, and even then, it had felt empty and mechanical.
They shifted on the bed. Gunnar seized my legs and forced them apart.
The mattress dipped as he moved closer, his body pressing against mine.
Like Ophelia, he wore a small vial around his neck, and now it swung low, brushing my forehead with its sway.
I flinched, bracing for the tear. I had seen his size. I knew it would not be gentle.
With Ophelia, the violation had been different. She had turned it into something twisted and intimate, a slow invasion that coaxed pleasure out of my body whether I wanted it or not.
But this. . . This was meant to hurt.
Ophelia wanted to watch me break. She wanted the kind of pain she could not give me herself.
My jaw clenched so hard I thought my teeth might crack. I lay there rigid, hollow, trying to empty myself of feeling. I told myself I was already gone. Already dead.
But not dead enough.
He gathered himself in his palm. When he finally entered me, my body yielded without resistance, opening around him with a disgusting softness that reminded me of food shedding its shape.
Maybe I’d expended the last of my strength with Ophelia to resist now.
Maybe I secretly craved the idea of more, of release, of losing myself.
There was no fight left in me. I was simply open for him to take, take, take.
His body bore down on me and filled me, but it was his mind that pressed deeper, crowding the space inside my skull like a hand pushing through water to seize my soul.
I felt unmoored under his gaze. He peered deep, touching the insides of my mind.
Perhaps he possessed a power akin to a snake’s, stilling his prey so it wouldn't flee, turning my body into a pliable material for his own pleasure.
It was easier to blame this; to believe it wasn't me, but a force I never possessed the power to resist.
And in that knowledge, I found a small comfort. If my body were no longer mine, then what happened to it didn't have to be mine either.
He gripped my tresses and wrenched my head back, driving into me with more force. I searched for pain. For pleasure. For something I could cling to. There was nothing. Only the slick slap of flesh. The dull rhythm of his body working into mine. The pressure of being filled again and again.
My body moved with him while my mind slipped further away, sinking into an incarnadine tangle of blood, death, and stolen pleasure.
Perhaps I hadn’t been a good partner to Sylvie.
Perhaps she had been right to look for a way out.
I had seen it in her. I knew what she wanted.
And I would not let her go.
I would not.
Yet she still found a way to leave me.
By dying.
By the hands of the man forcing himself into me now, while my body opened for him without protest.
A cold hand hooked beneath my chin and tilted my head.
Ophelia.
Her nails sank into my cheek, forcing me to fall into the black oceans of her eyes. She began to trace my hair, her touch deceptively light until the fingers suddenly coiled and tightened. She gripped the strands with the same bruising force Gunnar used.
Her free hand drifted lower, disappearing between her thighs where she forged a circular motion—slow at first, then sharpening in pace as she adjusted to herself. She pressed into the sheet, her hips rolling in perfect reciprocity with Gunnar’s thrusts.
She kept a steady stare as her pleasure built, a faint pink rising in her cheeks—the same flush that had marked her skin when she was with him.
Gunnar drove deeper, relentless.
Ophelia rode herself faster, freer. A tremor ran across her face, a subtle twitch beneath the skin.
Her lashes fluttered, her eyes finally breaking contact with mine.
Gunnar growled low in his throat. The sound reverberated through the bedframe.
His body pressed tight against mine, thrusting hard before spilling hot inside me.
Beside us, Ophelia broke. Her hand pressed harder between her thighs, her hips jerking with each motion. A raw, ragged sound tore loose as her body convulsed, then relaxed, trembling uncontrollably next to mine.
I lay rigid beneath them, my hair tangled in their hands, the warmth they’d stolen from me now cooling across my skin.
I was empty and full all at once, every nerve raw and alight, my body no longer my own.
But I hadn’t finished. And there was a small relief in that.
It meant that even now, in their full possession, there was a part of my mind they couldn't touch.
And so it started. They drew me in regularly, pulling me from the edges of the bed into the heat of it. I was no longer a silent observer, no longer merely a tool in their fantasy of being watched.
Gunnar didn’t want me in any human sense.
To me, it seemed he simply indulged his companion’s whims. He was the strength of their murderous pair, yet he chose his battles, offering his power to her willingly.
And though there was no rational explanation, I knew in my mind that he drew no more pleasure from me than he did from her.
I was just meat—not even the piece he would have chosen.
An unspoken understanding settled between us: I didn’t resist him when he drank from me or took my body, and he did nothing extra to hurt me.
Sex with men had never offered me a sense of wholeness. It always reduced me to a vessel, a tool for a single purpose. As a woman, I was a space to be used, a place where they could lay their weight and find relief. Like a bathroom. I meant only to serve their desire, never my own.
And now, with him, the horror was no longer in the anticipation of pain, but in its absence.
My body accepted him, just as it accepted Ophelia’s touch, growing willing and ready the longer it endured.
I couldn’t tell if the heat in my skin was a response to their pleasure or some vitiated contamination, a parasite rooted deep in my gut, thriving against my will.
I felt obscene.
Ophelia always stayed close. Sometimes she perched on the edge of the bed, sometimes in the chair beside it, watching.
Other times, she guided my hand across her body, into her wetness, using me like any other object in the room, another instrument of her pleasure.
In every way that mattered, she and Gunnar were alike.
Their hunger for blood was expanding. They drained me almost every night. Ophelia always stepped in before Gunnar took too much. Her hand closed around his wrist and held him back. The act suggested she was saving me for something else. Even with that restraint, my body began to unravel.
Two weeks passed. Maybe three. I no longer trusted myself to know.
Days—or rather nights, for I no longer stirred while the sun was up—blurred together into one endless dark.
I clung to Sylvie in my mind, summoning her face as it had been.
At first, it came easily: her faded blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, that crooked smile, the subtle lift of her right eyebrow, the little asymmetries I loved.
But with each passing night, the edges frayed. The lines of her face softened, then dissolved. Her voice grew faint, blending into the other whispers I had been hearing through the walls.
It felt like watching her die a second time—this time slowly, inside my own head.