5. Six Days Until Bonding
Chapter five
Six Days Until Bonding
Carrson
Ms. Noisette, the madam of Sinners, gave me a key to the side entrance several years ago so I could come and go without being seen. At the time, I thought it was a privilege. Proof I belonged to the small group of men important enough to enter through any door we pleased.
Sinners is half strip club, half brothel, and the fact that it belongs to the Beaumonts only heightened the thrill.
Now the key feels slimy between my fingers.
Graffiti covers the walls of the narrow alley, and trash cans overflow in one corner with liquor bottles and God knows what else. I unlock the side door and slip inside, wincing when the rusty hinges announce my arrival with a shriek. No one comes to investigate.
It’s early afternoon, which means most of the staff and the few patrons left over from last night will most likely still be asleep.
This place runs on a more nocturnal clock than the rest of Ashport.
Its nights stretch well into morning, and its days begin only after the evidence has been cleared away.
I take the stairs rather than the elevator, descending four floors to the lowest level.
Much like how I imagine hell to be laid out, Sinners gets darker and more depraved the lower you go.
I already know the man I’m hunting will be there.
It suits him and his vices. Down here, there is no need for him to pretend he’s civilized.
The walls are black. The lights are red.
The doors are thick enough that screams become part of the music.
A woman wearing a silk robe steps from one of the rooms and nearly walks into me.
She jerks back, clutching the fabric closed over her chest. I don’t recognize her, which doesn’t mean we haven’t met.
There was a period when I came here often enough that the women all blurred together, not because they lacked faces or names, but because I’d trained myself not to see either.
I ask if she’s seen him, and I’m directed to a door on the left. He didn’t even bother to lock it, the idiot. Probably too high to think about self-preservation.
The room is dim, thick with the musky scent of sweat, blood, and sex. Chains hang from the ceiling and walls. A large black dildo sits on a chair. There’s a whip on the bedside table, next to a small mountain of black powder, some of which has fallen on the floor.
Devil’s Dust.
I’ve been hearing about it more and more over the past six months.
Two women and a man lie naked in bed. My stomach curdles when I see the whip marks on the women’s backs and the red, raw skin at their wrists and ankles. The woman nearest me has a bruise darkening around one hip, shaped too much like the heel of a foot.
Then I notice the knife on the table.
It’s ordinary. A black handle. A narrow silver blade with blood drying along the edge.
Corresponding cuts mark both women, shallow but numerous, concentrated across their breasts, stomachs, and thighs. None are deep enough to cause serious damage. That almost makes it more awful. Jackson took his time. Chose every place he wanted the blade to open their skin while he fucked them.
My disgust deepens. Jackson has always been vicious, but I didn’t realize how badly he needed cruelty to become part of everything he touched. Even sex.
Maybe I shouldn’t feel so sick. This is Sinners, and people pay for pain here as readily as pleasure. The club requires every act to be negotiated before a client enters the room. The women agreed to the restraints, the whip, the knife. They’ll be paid more because of the marks.
That doesn’t make the blood on the blade any easier to look at.
They chose what happened to their bodies.
Jackson chose to make hurting them the center of his pleasure.
Seeing them makes me think of Rose, a half-sister who’s more rumor than fact.
Real or not, one of my greatest fears is that she’s somewhere within reach of a man like Jackson.
No one stirs as I move closer and bend over each woman.
I have no idea what Rose looks like, but I have to believe she’d resemble me at least a little.
Neither woman does. Still, there’s an unsettling familiarity to them, and it fills me with a deep homicidal rage. They both have slim shoulders, long brown hair, and delicate freckles across their noses and cheeks.
They look like Laurel.
Not exact copies, but Jackson chose enough familiar pieces to build a fantasy around them.
Of all the bad decisions Jackson has made, this may be the one that finally kills him.
I crouch beside the first woman. Up close, she looks younger than I initially thought, although the drugs could be softening her features. I touch her shoulder and gently shake her awake.
Her eyelids lift slowly.
I press one finger to my lips before she can speak. “Get dressed and leave.”
Fear clears some of the haze from her face. She woke to a stranger looming over her while Jackson lies unconscious in the bed. She has no reason to trust me.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
How many men have said the same thing to her before proving otherwise?
She glances toward Jackson. “Did we do something wrong?”
“No. You’ll still be paid. This is between him and me.”
She nudges the other woman awake. They gather their clothes from the floor without speaking. One pulls on a dress. The other doesn’t bother with underwear before fastening her skirt. Neither asks what I intend to do to Jackson before they slip out the door.
He’s larger than I am and may be stronger when sober, but Devil’s Dust has reduced him to dead weight. I roll him onto his back and secure his wrists and ankles to the metal hooks built into the bedframe.
I could kill him now.
The thought is simple and appealing. One clean cut across his throat would end the threat he poses to Laurel. The Beaumonts would protest, Jack would demand an inquiry, and my father would complain about the inconvenience, but no one could honestly claim Jackson hadn’t given me just cause.
He touched my Bonded.
That's enough.
But death is generous. It ends fear, pain, and anticipation in the same instant, and I have no desire to give Jackson relief from any of them. I want him awake. I want him to know why this is happening. Most of all, I want him to remember it the next time Laurel enters a room.
I set my supplies on the table beside the bed. My favorite dagger with its smooth black resin handle. Pliers. A compact blowtorch. Several syringes. The healing spray developed by Dr. Wainwright, Thomson’s father.
The spray makes this easier.
Not morally. Nothing could accomplish that.
It allows me to do more damage without leaving evidence.
I sit beside Jackson and slap his cheek. His head rolls toward me, but he doesn’t wake.
“Jackson.”
Nothing.
I hit him harder.
His eyelids flutter, revealing pupils reduced to pinpricks. He tries to lift his head, fails, and sinks back into the pillow.
That won’t do. I need him alert enough to feel everything and lucid enough to keep the memory afterward.
I remove a syringe from the kit and flick the barrel with one finger. “I’ve only got forty-five minutes, so we’re going to skip the part where you lie.”
I told Laurel I had a few things to take care of before we went on our road trip tonight. When I said that, I was already calculating how long it’d take me to drive from school in Ashfordville to my hometown of Ashport, where Sinners is, and back again.
The needle goes into his arm with more force than necessary. He jerks and makes a wet, confused sound as I depress the plunger.
Within minutes, his breathing changes. His eyes open fully, confusion giving way to pain and then rage as the Narcan races him toward sobriety.
He strains against the cuffs.
“What the fuck?” His voice breaks. “Carrson?”
I pull a chair up close to the bed and sit back with my ankle crossed over my knee, letting my foot bounce.
“Good. You know who I am.”
“Let me go.” He pulls on the cuffs, testing them. “Let me go, or I’ll kill you.”
“Not until we have a little chat.” I try balancing the tip of my dagger on my finger, like my father does, but it clatters to the floor. I’ve never been able to master that trick. It’s irritating.
“Chat about what?”
“You didn’t think you could touch Laurel and not have to answer to me.” I tip my head to the side. “Did you?”
Without making a fuss, I lean over and scrape the sharpened tip of the dagger down his side, a long straight line. Jackson screams, high-pitched and warbling, as blood wells.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Several people have asked me that recently.”
I make another cut parallel to the first, deeper this time. His body jerks, but the restraints hold.
The violence feels good.
I came for information. I came to warn him away from Laurel. Either objective could have been achieved without opening his skin.
But Jackson selected women who looked like Laurel and marked their bodies while imagining hers. He crossed a line I can't ignore.
I do it again, a little deeper, and get the same response. On the third pass, the wound opens wide enough that blood spills freely down his side.
“You hit her, dragged her through the cornfield, and took her to Silas.”
“Silas let her go. He didn’t even touch her.”
I push my thumb into the cut, digging and twisting. Jackson’s back bows from the mattress. Blood leaks around my hand, staining my knuckles. “But you didn’t know that when you delivered her to him, right? You had no idea what he’d do to her.”
Jackson turns his face into the pillow, refusing to answer. Sweat collects along his hairline.
“What did Silas give you for her?”
His eyes betray him, sliding toward the black powder scattered across the bedside table.
I follow his gaze. “Say it.”
“You already know.”
I push my thumb farther into the wound. “I want to hear you say what Laurel was worth to you.”
“Devil’s Dust.”
“The entire sentence.”
“I traded Laurel for Devil’s Dust.”
He assigned her a price.