Chapter 76 #2
Outside the door, I hear more gunshots. Onyx, Riggs, and Scout must be inside.
I head back to Camryn, curled on the floor.
I yank the blanket off the bed and wrap it around her.
“I got you,” I murmur as I help her stand.
I need to get her to a hospital. But before I can get her out of the room, she limps over to his prone body, kicking him in the ribs.
“That’s for Cara,” she whispers, crying.
She wraps the blanket tighter around her, looking like the goddess she is.
I pull her forward and kiss her forehead.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper against her skin, filled with so many regrets.
She has no idea my role in this, and I don’t have time now to tell her.
Her eyes are glazed, and shock is starting to set in from her blood loss and adrenaline.
Urgency fills me. I lift her in my arms, holding her close to my body, needing to feel her skin, her heartbeat, her wholeness.
If I had arrived later, if I had been slower, El Jefe’s threats could have been real.
Even now, the room reeks of blood. His blood.
Her blood. Its sticky warmth saturates my shirt. She lets out a moan, and I move faster.
“Jacinda and Kami?” She mumbles, tucking her head into my neck.
“Don’t worry about that now. Stay away, baby. Keep your eyes open.” I marvel at her. She just experienced a terrible ordeal, yet her thoughts are about her friends.
“Cara. You need to help Cara.”
“Who’s Cara?” I ask, needing to keep her awake and talking.
“Only 15. Ten when he hurt her.”
Her words are disjointed, slurred, and her body suddenly goes more limp.
Fuck. “Camryn!” I shake her slightly. She opens her eyes briefly and looks at me.
She’s getting weaker. Hypovolemic shock.
I recall it well from my time in the Marines.
I hustle out of the room and down the hall until I reach the stairs and descend quickly.
I step over the bodies of men strewn around the living room and look up to find Onyx patiently escorting women down the stairs.
They look shellshocked, mutely following his soft commands.
One looks back at me. Her young eyes widen as they settle on Camryn in my arms. Heavily pregnant, she waddles toward me.
When she’s close enough, she touches Camryn’s arm gently.
“Is she alive?”
Yes. For now. I press Camryn closer to my chest, desperate, wanting to give her my strength.
I give her a slight nod, because I can’t voice that I have no idea if Camryn will stay that way.
I have no clue what her injuries are. I don’t know what he did to her before I got into that room.
He could have hurt her internally. I know well how brutal sexual assaults can be.
“I’m Cara.”
The name registers.
“When she wakes will you tell her that I’m wishing her the best?”
I nod, hoping that she will be okay. Cara hurries to rejoin the long line of women following Onyx.
I watch her go, thinking about what Camryn said.
She is just a child, yet her eyes look older.
The result of her captivity with a monster.
Walking out, I don’t look at the other dead bodies littered around the large yard.
Clean, efficient kills. I spot Scout helping the women in the same van that Camryn, Kamilah, and Jacinda were transported in. Onyx walks toward me.
“Is he dead?”
“No. Last bedroom. He’s bound. I need him delivered.” The look exchanged between us doesn’t need words. He knows. He understands. Without another word, Onyx walks back inside. Riggs speaks in my earpiece.
“You have her?”
I look down at Camryn. “I have her.” I lean my forehead against hers, imagining I can smell her subtle honeysuckle scent in her sweat-matted hair.
A flashback of me washing it the first time hits me in the chest. The way she leaned on my body, allowing me to clean her up.
The way she looked up at me on her knees.
My heart beats harder thinking I won’t get that again if she…
“Any sign of the others?”
Riggs’s voice pulls me from the precipice I’m mentally standing on. I clear my throat to rid myself of the burning sensation. “No. They’re not here.”
Riggs’s curse is vicious. ‘They must be headed to the other two locations.”
“I need to get Camryn to the hospital. Now.”
“How bad?”
“Now, Riggs.”
“A private ambulance is already on its way. Estimated three minutes out.”
“Who?”
“Her brother.”
Of course, Jace Park would have access to a private ambulance service. I close my eyes, knowing I will have to face her brother with his almost dead sister in my arms. I hold onto the most important thing in my world, praying for the first time in years to a God that may have abandoned me.
Hours later, I close the barn doors slowly, softly, and turn, breathing in the smells. The beautiful effluvium of damp, of chemicals, of El Jefe’s blood mixed with the fresher scent of fear. His scent.
I take out my cherry candy, opening the small tin slowly, relishing the ritual.
Popping it into my mouth, I suck vigorously, the tart, sour flavor coats my tongue, bringing me back to every kill I’ve ever done.
The cherry scent combines with the foul, with the rawness of carnage.
It makes my brain buzz with excitement, and I turn to visually feast on my prize.
My rage bubbles to the surface at the sight of him slumped, naked, hanging from my carcass pulley.
The cattle hoist I had installed is usually used to lift cattle for assassination and bloodletting, but it works just as well for other kinds of monstrous things as well.
I typically prefer to kill in the forest, disembowel, and torture among the fetid and foul smells of the other carcasses in my graveyard, but he deserved my full attention.
He deserves a slower pace, and I deserve to savor this because I can’t let go of the way she looked in his arms, hurt and scared, but still fierce.
Thoughts jumble together when I remember what happened hours ago.
I was resting Camryn on the gurney and being pushed out of the way as the private EMTs who arrived minutes after Riggs disconnected from me began working on her.
When Jace and Sophia raced up behind the ambulance, running toward me, I was shocked to see tears on my friend’s face.
Sophia was also crying when she spotted Camryn wrapped in the bloody sheet, pale and unresponsive.
“Is she…?” Jace demanded.
I shook my head as one EMT started taking her vitals while the other wheeled her into the back of the ambulance.
My fingers clench when I recall their rapid-fire communication.
“Blood pressure 59/40 mm Hg.”
“Low body temperature.”
“Rapid pulse.”
I watched them elevate her feet. I watched them assess her feeling helpless until Jace turned on me.
“Was she raped?”
Sophia’s hissed inhale accompanied his question, and I raged, thinking about the answer. Sick to my stomach about the possibilities. To know that he touched her, may have violated her in a way that no woman should ever experience, was enough to make me want to rip him to shreds.
“Stone?” He looked at me, and I growled, not being able to answer him.
“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”
I walked away from them, the rage, the accusation in his eyes, and the devastation in Sophia’s eyes were the last thing I saw. I climbed into the van next to Onyx, with the body of my enemy loaded up in the back.
My response to Onyx’s question comes back to me now.
“Where are they taking her?”
“Where she needs to be. Away from me.”
The fury simmers, and I walk to the table with all my tools.
My branding iron, ropes, needles, and zip ties are all neatly organized.
My barbed wire and knives glint in the light.
All devices used to inflict my favorite kinds of torture.
Touching each knife, I think about how I’m going to use them.
The cold metal is familiar, giving a sense of control that seeing Camryn near death took from me.
I pick up my Dexter Russell 6-inch Skinner.
Lightweight and sharp, it feels comfortable in my hand.
Ready to remove his skin for my trophy, but I pause when I spot another knife.
The newest one I have. One that I made. It’s Camryn’s artist palette knife.
The one I stole all those months ago. The night I stalked her.
The night I watched her through the glass.
I pick it up instead. I am going to cut him with the knife I made from her art tools.
It will be my tool to divest him of his organs, his skin.
It feels divine. I test the edge, and when the sharp steel nicks my skin, creating a shallow wound, I enjoy the pain.
A groan makes me turn around and my prisoner.
The mild sedative Onyx was administered while he was being loaded, and now it’s wearing off.
I walk back to my table and pick up the hypodermic needle filled with Morphine.
I will let myself enjoy it more. My boots sink into the wetness pooling below his naked feet, his urine and life’s blood making the ground muddy.
As always, the sight of someone like him in pain, hurting, adds to my bloodlust. The tingling in my cock.
I inject it right into his skin. Just enough to take off the edge.
And watch as he settles, the pain fades.
It will wear off just in time for my favorite part.
I want him awake for this, not so incapacitated with pain that I can’t enjoy.