Bone: A Dark Billionaire Romance (With bonus book Exhibit!)

by Noir, Stella

  There are potentials here, and I can smell every single one of them. There was a girl who was fawning over me during my speech, and had she been pure, I might have taken her with me. Instead, I lied through my teeth when we chatted afterwards, I made my excuses to leave, and now here I am again, on the hunt, me and Bone.

  I want to talk about Bone, and I want to talk about Maude. Bone’s plan for her will become clear, even if he’s not mentioned it to me yet. There is nothing I can do to stop him.

  There are the two of us, him and me. We look the same, we even dress the same, we might even want the same things.

  That’s Bone. Sometimes he talks for me too.

  It has been a long time since we have done this. Over two years have passed, since we went out together to hunt.

  Do you ever have the feeling that there will never be a sensation in the world to surpass the one you are feeling right now? Perhaps it’s the crescendo to your favourite song, perhaps the point of climax with the person you love, perhaps, like me, it’s the raw buzz of anticipation that makes your heart beat adrenaline so fast around your body, each movement feels like a demonstration of controlled perfection. I see the world in a different way like this, through his eyes, and I’ve missed it.

  Bone is back, and this time, I know he won’t stop until he gets what he wants. I know he has plans for Maude too, I know he wants her to share in his world. He wants her to be a part of his masterpiece, his illness, his sickness, his perfection.

  Breathe. Concentrate. Tonight, the world is ours to take. The beast is locked up no longer.

  Bone is awake.

  Chapter 13

  Christopher

  There is a near full moon tonight, but here, away from the lights of the city, and hidden in the dark shadow created by overhanging oak branches, the world looks darker than the heart of coal seams. I know about this place but I’ve never been here. Everyone knows about it.

  The car I’m driving is not mine, of course. Bone boosted it with a skillful flick of his wrist, a toss of a lump of rock through the back seat window, where glass that was once in one piece now lies shattered on the torn upholstery behind me.

  It reminds me of them. Broken lives left in shattered pieces, although these, like every other I’ve seen, I never forget about. It’s a talking point, and it’s a reinforcement of character. This is the kind of car the kind of person that comes here drives. I flash the smile and look them up and down. I imagine myself as a lion, eyeing a gazelle from across the plain.

  They say you can see it coming for you if you look hard enough. You begin to see it out of the corner of your eye until it gets more prominent day by day and eventually it’s standing right there in front of you, the knife held prone. It’s there for everyone, but only some know where to look. Only some know that it’s not the wind, nor the cat, nor deja vu, it’s death himself, Bone, Beelzebub, whatever you want to call him. We are all marked. Some of us hold the pen, some of us present our skin like cattle to have the area tainted.

  “What the fuck do you want?”

  Her black skin is swallowed whole by the lightlessness around her, so what addresses me out of the chasm of nothingness is a pair of hateful green eyes, the cherry burn of a cigarette and the flash of cheap jewelry. I can’t smell her through the roughness of her perfume. The madam. I want to see her brood.

  “They told me to come here”, I say. “Maybe they were wrong.”

  There is an expensive watch on my wrist. It doesn’t match the car, but I flash it anyway. I see her eyes go to it, like a magpie eyeballing a slip of silver foil in a crack den. She spits. She looks behind her and she spits again, the saliva yo-yoing like sugar syrup to the floor.

  There is a moment of silence. This is the anticipation that Bone lives for. She looks past me to the passenger seat, and regards the space there for a moment. Bone smiles back at her, arms crossed, resolute in his silence. She huffs.

  “It’ll be five thousand dollars”, she says.

  I watch her eyes light up when she puts the cigarette to her lips and pulls on it. Round spaces filled with hopelessness. She’s marked, but not by me. You spend enough time around death, you learn how to see it. Cracks like rivers of blood. A thousand hours of pain a whole lifetime of drug abuse won’t wash away. I wonder how much cum she has swallowed. I wonder how many dicks she has sucked.

  “Show me the girls”, I say.

  “Show me the money”, she says.

  I take a money roll out of my inside pocket, unfurl it and show her how green it looks even in the darkness. She nods, holds her hand up into the air and beckons the girls forward.

  Five thousand dollars. I’ve paid less and I’ve paid more. Sometimes I’ve taken girls from the street and all they cost me was a bottle of champagne. We work like that, him and me. I collect and he does the killing. It’s a perfect relationship. I get to fuck the girls and then he steps in, taking the task over from me. I wonder what it will be like with Maude. I like her. I wonder how much he likes her too. I wonder how much he needs her. I guess we will see. Time will tell.

  They come forward, like soldiers coming out of hiding. It’s like watching a magic eye picture come to life. Six girls, almost close enough that to touch, camouflaged by the darkness of night. Evil doesn’t have any bounds. Evil is only someone else’s perception. Artwork is mastery. Death lives above us all.

  I have never been here, but I know this place. These girls are all virgins. I can smell them. For that, they have a high price. This is where they begin. This is where their lives as call girls or prostitutes or links in a serial killer’s chosen work, begin.

  They call this place the farm. The girls find their way here from broken homes and forgotten, cluster-fucks of lives. Almost all of them are from different countries. Most of them are addicted to drugs. It’s a miracle that there are so many that are pure, but that’s the way they keep them here because they can make more money that way.

  I don’t even need her to show me, I can tell. I thought this would be perfect for the first time back. Bone didn’t want a college girl making good in the city. He didn’t want Daddy’s little princess with the whole world ahead of her. He’s had too much of that already. He wanted pureness in a world without it. He wanted the gem in the ocean of horse shit.

  “That one”, I say. “Come closer. Come into the light.”

  Stick thin and nervous like a bunny rabbit. Shifty eyes. Can’t stand still.

  “How old is she?”

  She looks at her madam and then back at me. “Twenty one”, she says.

  “Bullshit”, I say. “How old are you?”

  Nervous eyes shift from left to right. She’s barely got any tits on her. Madam steps in. “She’s nineteen”, she says. “You want something younger, it’s twice as much.”

  My eyes go briefly to the other girls. Faces of a missing generation. Hopelessness. I can tell some want me to take them away, others want nothing to do with me. Perhaps they know. Every other girl that has left here they never hear from again. Half end up dead before the week is out. Life expectancy isn’t much more than the years they’ve got.

  “Show me your wrists”, Bone says. “Come closer and show me your wrists.”

  The nineteen year old girl approaches the car window, her wrists held out obediently. No-one asks any questions. The request, it seems, is a normal one. Madam doesn’t give a fuck. She lights another cigarette with the stub of the first. It’s then that he sees her, illuminated briefly in the toxic burn.

  “Her”, Bone says excitedly, his hand pointing to the bleed of blackness beyond the brothel madam.

  Everyone turns. The girl drops her head and walks into the soft, thin light.

  “Yes”, Bone says. “Her.”

  “She is not for sale”, Madam says.

  “Everyone is for sale”, Bone says.

  Madam huffs. She spits on the ground. “She has been reserved.”

  “How much?” I ask.

  “She has been reserved fo
r a very long time”, Madam says. “I have a down payment.”

  “How much”, I ask again.

  The girl won’t take her eyes off the ground. There isn’t much to her. Tall, full in the chest, undeniably beautiful, twenty, maybe twenty one years old, calm, chocolate colored skin. Bare feet. Good bone structure. Strong. Willing. Marked.

  “Twenty thousand”, Madam says. “That’s a thousand dollars for every one of her years.”

  “Bring her to me”, Bone says.

  Madam pushes her lightly and she takes the twelve or so steps to the car. Bone leans over and takes her wrist. When he does that, she looks at me. Green eyes full of knowing acceptance.

  I smile and then I pay. I’ve found her.

  Chapter 14

  Maude

  I have a date with Christopher. At least that’s what I’m deciding to call it. He phoned me and invited me to see what he referred to as his special collection on Bone at his house, after which he promised to take me to dinner and show me the last part of the interactive tour, before starting work next week. I’m really fucking excited. Naturally, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him all weekend. Naturally, Jasper is jealous at not being invited himself. Jasper couldn’t give a fuck about Bone, but ever since Christopher has shown interest, he’s been acting weird. I think he feels like I’m going to ditch him completely. I think he also thinks that Christopher is something that he’s not. Jasper can get like that. He’s a paranoid motherfucker at the best of times.

  People who obsess about death are usually weird introverts who spend too much time on their own. From what I can tell, Christopher is nothing like this. He’s charming, socially well adjusted, engaging, happy and very successful. These qualities could also denote a tendency for psychopathy, but psychopaths in general have an inability to show empathy. I haven’t spent that much time with Christopher, but in the short amount of time I have spent with him, I would consider that not to be the case.

  Yes what happened was weird and extraordinary, but that just makes me want to spend even more time with him, not less. This guy could be perfect for me. He’s obsessed with death and murder, he’s handsome, rich and expressive with his emotions. That turns me on.

  I imagine myself fucking him watching snuff films, then I imagine him fucking me as we recreate one of Bone’s murders again. Fuck it, we could even do Hunter or Cole, or work our way around the top ten. The opportunities are truly endless.

  Besides wanting to see him again, I’m really excited about seeing his collection. If he truly does know Bone, and I’m not sure he meant it in a personal way anyway, because what he said could be interpreted in a number of different ways, he’s going to have a number of things in his collection that no-one else has ever seen before.

  I want to know how he knows Bone. I want to know if he knows him personally, as a friend and confidant, or whether he just knows who he is, because he’s worked it out like a top notch TV detective.

  I don’t know what to expect. I know he’s loaded, but I have no idea how much money he’s actually got until I get there and see his palace. I mean this house is like something out of a film. I didn’t know these things even existed in New York. I thought I’d fucked up and the taxi was dropping me off at a park. Turns out the open space is just the grounds of his estate. I have to get buzzed in, and then driven up to the front porch because it would have taken me at least fifteen minutes to hike it. Even the taxi driver is gobsmacked.

  I’d like to say it looks like a haunted house with lightning exploding in the sky above it, but it doesn’t and it’s not. Christopher is waiting for me when we arrive. He comes to the taxi and pays for it before I even have a chance to take the money out of my wallet.

  There is an awkward moment of silence between us just after we greet each other that makes me realize just how excited I am. His gaze is intense, like he’s desperate to tell me something, and he looks different somehow. Rawer, more alive. It’s an animalistic look that turns me on, and I wonder if he’s aware he’s giving it to me.

  His lips are so plump and sexy I can’t help but imagine myself biting them and then licking up all the blood that spills out of them like juice from a squashed berry. Sometimes, when I look at people, I imagine what they look like either fucking or dead. Sometimes both.

  He takes my hand and pulls me back to reality.

  “Your house is fucking massive”, I say, as he leads me to it. That makes him laugh, and it does a good job of breaking the tension.

  “Come on. I’ve never shown anyone this before in my life, I can’t wait to share it.”

  The excitement is palpable. We’ve barely stepped foot inside the house before I’m being whisked urgently through it.

  Through the porch, into the beating heart of the property, past the kitchens, out towards the back and then down, first through a locked wooden door that looks like it leads to a cupboard, afterwards through a trapdoor in the floor that takes us down even further by a stone cut spiral staircase deep into the shadows beyond.

  It’s insane.

  My palms are sweaty. My heart is beating wildly. I fear for a moment I won’t be let back up but I know now if I’m not, it’s too late for me to avoid it.

  “Are you ready?”

  We are deep underneath his estate. The space that spreads out behind us is like a vaulted car park. In front of us is a thick, harmonica style metal door, cut professionally into the brick work. Beyond that lies the truth.

  I nod. I wonder if I should ask him something else, like, “are you ready?” but the words don’t come to me.

  I’m breathing hard. I’m excited. Christopher takes a key out of his pocket. The matted fur of the rabbit paw has grayed and hardened. He slides it into the lock, turns the bolt and pulls it out.

  “I haven’t been down here for a while”, he says, and then pushes the door wide open.

  Chapter 15

  Maude

  This place is like a museum. For a long time neither one of us says anything. There are lights that hang overhead, the kind you’d find in an aircraft hangar or a nuclear bunker, or a secret underground museum filled with artifacts that shouldn’t still exist. Christopher has enough money to have this whole thing tiled and lit properly, the fact he hasn’t makes me think it’s an aesthetic choice to add to the ambiance.

  The artifacts are set out as though left for someone to come and play with, rather than kept behind crystal display units or boxes out of reach of visitors. Not that there are any. Christopher has made it clear that I’m the first one.

  There are dresses from victims. Photographs of corpses left on tables taken from murder scenes. I have no idea how he’s got his hands on the stuff.

  There are spaces divided lazily in a kind of chronological order so as I walk through it, the light from above just enough for me to see - more so as my eyes get accustomed to it - I see sections of lives from the women Bone has killed, year by year. It’s incredible.

  The amount of stuff he has here is truly shocking. I turn to look at him, to ask something I’m not able to, and all he does is smile encouragingly, excited by my excitement, his arms open to lead me further into his dungeon, where the light doesn’t reach and the cockroaches and God knows what else climb up the walls.

  Dolls, personal items, evidence bags, court notes in huge official boxes. In one section he’s set up a movable whiteboard which looks like it’s been taken directly from a police station. It’s the kind of thing you see in films that shows a map of all the murder locations, the key witnesses and any other crucial information.

  Most of their lives are here. I half expect to see Bone himself, rocking away on a chair in the corner, his tongue licking his lips, eager to show me what he has done. Perhaps eager to add me to his collection. As I get closer to the clothes, I see some are blood stained, and others still are torn or cut.

  I recognize some as the ones the girls were wearing when they were found. On more than one occasion, Bone dressed his dead girls up and p
ut them on display. He cherished them, for want of a more appropriate word. He idolized them, in life and death, as long as he was able to control it.

  “This is”, I begin to say. I don’t know how to finish, but I need to know. “How?”

  Christopher moves over to join me in the center of his basement room. I want to ask, “why here, why not upstairs, why not in a real museum?” but I think part of me is scared of the answer.

  Part of me likes the fear it’s putting in to me too. If there was enough light to see, if the darkness didn’t look like it was alive and ready to swallow me up soon as I let it, there wouldn’t be the same effect. These could all be fake for all I know, but displaying them as he has, which is not displaying them at all, makes them all that more real. It’s empowering. It’s like being in one of the thousands of horror films I’ve seen.

  Christopher’s hand on my neck makes me jump. He’s close in behind me, pressed against my back.

  “Do you like it?” he whispers, his breath hot on my ear. I can feel my skin fizzing. I don’t know whether it’s fear or excitement, or a bit of both. Am I trapped? Could I leave if I wanted to? Do I want to?

  “I love it”, I say, wondering whether I’m able to say anything else. “It’s incredible. Where did it all come from?”

  Christopher runs his hand from my neck across my shoulder and down my arm. There is no way he can’t feel how goose-pimpled my skin is. If he stopped holding me, I’d shake. I’d explode into a million pieces. The only thing holding me together is the pressure he’s putting on me. I feel the connection like hot patches.

  “If I tell you, will you promise to keep it a secret?” he says.

  I nod. Like this, my back pressed into his, I can’t see the look on his face, but I can imagine it. I tilt my head back. I want him to kiss my neck. I want him to bite it. I want him to release the pressure I can feel building inside me.

  “I’ve known Bone for a very long time”, Christopher says.