Camille, Claimed

by Ginger Talbot

  Camille, Claimed: A sequel to the Blue Eyed Monsters duet

  Copyright 2018 by Ginger Talbot

  This book is intended for readers 18 and older only, due to adult content. It is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this book are products of the imagination of the author.

  License Statement

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Prologue

  Bastien

  Legacy: noun | leg·a·cy | ˈle-gə-sē

  Something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past

  * * *

  I’m a wolf who was raised to be a sheep.

  I have a long, rich, complicated family history. A legacy of evil and beauty. Power and terror.

  My history and the truth about my nature were hidden from me, because I was raised by liars. I was raised by traitors. They feared me, loved me, caged me, comforted me, tried to ruin me. But a voice from my past came calling, the only true voice I’ve ever heard, and whispered in my ear. The voice told me where I really came from.

  And now I’m free.

  Free to hunt. Free to kill, to maim, to torture—whatever amuses me.

  Free to claim her…Camille. My obsession. My first and only love. The princess I was born to conquer. The girl who was sworn to be mine…until she betrayed me with lies and ruined my life.

  Nothing’s holding me back now. I’ll bury Camille in the deepest, darkest dungeon, where only I can hear her pleas for mercy…of which there will be none. I’ll be her nightmare, her tormentor, her only solace.

  There are others who would take her from me if they could, because now that I’ve claimed her, she’s become a pawn in an ancient game. Let them come after her. I’ll kill them all, one by one. She’s mine. Mine to punish, mine to take apart, mine to make into my willing and eager slave—before I deliver the cruelest blow of all. The blow that she won’t survive.

  Camille

  Turning point: noun

  1. A point at which a decisive change takes place; critical point; crisis.

  2. A point at which something changes direction, especially a high or low point on a graph.

  * * *

  Bastien Durand was my turning point.

  My life is divided into “before Bastien” and “after Bastien”. Life before Bastien was cool, monotone, lived carefully by the rules. Life after I met Bastien was a storm of color and emotion.

  When I met him, I knew my life had forever changed. I just couldn’t imagine the horrible path he’d drag me down.

  I sensed him before I saw him, and tensed, a gazelle in the sights of a lion. He slid next to me at the lunch table at school, and I felt a crackling in the air, like heat lightning. My heart beat faster. The forbidden place between my legs came to life, and shameful longings crawled through my mind.

  Every day after that, for three delirious years, was like a fever dream of desire and a pleasure so intense that it was painful. But I learned to love that pain, that yearning, or maybe Bastien’s darkness spoke to a perversion that was slumbering inside me all along.

  And then it ended.

  And then he destroyed us.

  I’ve spent the last ten years trying to recover, putting together a semblance of a life.

  Now he’s back, with hate in his eyes and a knife in his hand. I’m still a gazelle in the sights of a lion, but this time he means to bring me down and tear my heart open the same I way did to him, to drink in my dying breaths. There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Our collision course can’t be delayed anymore. He’ll slam into me, and we’ll explode, matter meeting antimatter, and God alone knows if anything will rise from the wreckage.

  Chapter One

  Bastien

  Ever since I was very young, I knew that there was a sickness in me, something that made me dark and different.

  I also learned how to hide it when I was very young. There was no room for that kind of thing in my family. My parents were loving but strict and watchful. They expected a lot of us, my brothers and sisters and I, and we loved them, were in awe of them. They were gods to us.

  They weren’t much for spanking; a swat on the butt was about as bad as it got, and even that didn’t happen often. It was the rare look of disappointment in their eyes that hurt so much that we’d do anything to avoid it.

  My sisters and brothers—Emilie, Francois, Odette, and Jules—they succeeded. That’s because they weren’t born with the devil inside them. They grew up happy and normal, and they married and had kids and never wanted to rape and torture anybody.

  Yes, that’s right. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to do very bad things to people.

  Not all people, mind you. Just people I disliked. The gardener who kicked my dog for digging in the flower beds. The nanny who told my little brother a ghost story and made him cry, and then sat there with a small smile curling her thin lips. I had very specific images in my mind of what I wanted to do to them. Flaying. Burning. Making them scream and crawl. And in the end, I always killed them—in my head, anyway.

  I was fascinated by violent scenes in movies and books. As soon as I learned to read, I’d go through my parents’ enormous library looking for books that had scenes of violence and cruelty. One time, when I was six, I almost got caught indulging. I learned to be more watchful after that.

  I’d been avidly devouring a scene where a thief was being tortured to make him talk, to reveal the location of hidden diamonds. Someone was getting ready to shove a red-hot poker up his rectum. The idea fascinated me. I started thinking about the things I’d do to the man. He’d be talking in no time. And I’d still keep hurting him.

  I sat curled up in an overstuffed leather chair. The library was my idea of heaven—walls and walls of bookshelves, and the smell of old paper and a faint whiff of my father’s cologne mingling with my mother’s light honeysuckle perfume. I got so distracted that I didn’t notice my mother walking up behind me. She reached out and took the book from me, and thankfully, it closed, so she never found out what page I was on.

  “What are you reading, mon petit chou?”

  It means my little cabbage. Doesn’t really translate well, but it was a term of endearment, her pet name for me. She had one for each of her children. Her voice made me start guiltily.

  “Just a book. I finished my homework,” I said quickly, putting a little bit of a lie in my voice. I did that because I’d acted guilty when I heard her voice, and I needed to have a reason for acting guilty. If I made her think I hadn’t really finished my homework, she’d concentrate on that and not on the contents of the book.

  That’s another part of my sickness. I’ve been a devious bastard since I learned to string sentences together.

  She frowned. “Did you now? We should go check up on that and make sure you haven’t forgotten any of it.” Not a hint of reproach in her voice. My mother was an angel.

  My father would have taken away dessert if he’d caught me lying about my homework, and expressed disappointment, which would have curdled my stomach and made me want to cry. Then my mother would have sneaked dessert into my bedroom when she came to read me a story. I shared a room with my brother Francois. He would have covered for me. We were all c
lose, once upon a time.

  But my mother preferred to talk things out. She held up the book and looked at the writing on the back cover. Her brows drew together.

  “Oh no, this is for grownups. This is much too adult for you. Why are you even interested in it?” She looked puzzled.

  Even then, I knew better than to tell her what I liked about the book.

  I made my big blue eyes even bigger. My mother was a smart woman, but she always fell for that. She wanted to believe her children were angels. And in four out of five cases, she was right. “It’s about Africa. I like reading about Africa.”

  “Oh,” she said, nodding with understanding. “I’ll get you books about Africa, but ones that are for your age. What do you like about Africa?”

  “They have elephants. I want to ride an elephant.” I just pulled that one out of my ass. And she totally bought it. And I had elephant rides for my seventh birthday.

  That’s how things were for me until I was fifteen years old and my world was swallowed by darkness.

  My brothers and sisters and I, we’d just ask, and we’d get it. Whatever “it” was. We studied hard, we had excellent manners, we got perfect grades, and we were rewarded abundantly with love and toys and attention and approval.

  There is no reason for me to be the way I am. I have no one to blame for the sickness in my soul.

  I wasn’t diddled or tortured or humiliated. I grew up in a medieval chateau on an enormous estate with a loving family who taught me right from wrong. We were swaddled in privilege and waited on by an army of servants. We traveled the world. We lived a dream life.

  And yet.

  I was only a little boy and wanted to hear people scream in pain. I wanted to cause that pain. I yearned to see people die, very slowly, at my feet. True, I only wanted to hurt people who had wronged me or my family, but I knew that my vengeful cravings were terrifyingly out of proportion.

  Why was I like that? My parents were so good, so pure, so moral that I was racked with guilt for my disgusting cravings.

  I was always trying to find acceptable outlets for my violent urges. I got into martial arts and boxing and fencing when I was seven, but my parents seemed to worry that I was a little too eager. After I “accidentally” hurt my opponents a few times, my father stopped letting me spar with people my own age and practiced with me himself.

  The message was clear. My parents didn’t want me to cause harm to people. But I was clever and cruel, and I learned pretty early on that I didn’t have to use my fists or weapons to hurt people.

  Like Remy, a fat little bastard in my sister’s grade. I ruined him, and to this day it makes me smile to think of it.

  What was his sin? When I was eight, he made the mistake of crossing me by bullying my older sister Emilie. They were in cours moyen première année, the equivalent of fourth grade in America. I was a year behind her, in cours élémentaire deuxième année. She had her recess at a different time, so when he bullied her, I wasn’t there to defend her.

  So, to start, I convinced Emilie to invite him over to play. She knew from the look in my eyes that I was up to something. She gave me a secret smile; Emilie was a little bit like me.

  When we were playing outside in the garden, Remy pushed Emilie down and made her scrape her knees on the pavers. Emilie fell with a cry, and when she staggered to her feet, beads of blood dotted her knees. Remy gave her the finger and made a farting raspberry noise as Emilie struggled to hold back tears. Then he ran from me and hid behind his mother, who was sitting with my mother, drinking coffee. I walked up to them and smiled at him. It was a special smile, the one that opened the windows into my poisoned soul. It made him scream and wet himself with terror.

  When his mother asked him what was wrong, he just cried and said, “Bastien smiled at me! He won’t stop smiling!” So his mother hit him on the head and snapped, “What are you talking about? Don’t be such a baby. You’re embarrassing me.” He never came to our house again. And he wouldn’t even look at my sister on the playground.

  That wasn’t enough for me, though. I started a campaign of terror against him at school. It was fun. I had a group of friends, or rather boys who were in awe of me, even back then. I didn’t feel close to them. There was a coldness in my heart that didn’t let me get truly close to anyone outside my family. But the boys at school followed me like a pack of wolves follow their alpha.

  My friends and I would hide behind doors and leap out, making him scream. We’d gang up on him in the bathroom and force rotten food down his throat, making him vomit. We’d dump water on his crotch to make it look as if he’d pissed himself. He was a large boy, and he outweighed every one of us individually, but I knew tricks, knew how to hurt people who were bigger and stronger, and I taught them to my friends.

  And we never left bruises.

  When he told on us, we denied it so convincingly that we didn’t get in trouble. We were sickeningly polite and respectful to our teachers; I taught my friends that too, the subtle art of manipulation. I insisted that anyone who wanted to be friends with me behave with enormous respect to anyone in authority and get excellent grades.

  My friends’ parents loved me and called me a “little gentleman”. They didn’t know our behavior was just a cover, and that we chose people to torture in secret. Like Remy.

  By the end of the year, Remy had a nervous breakdown and had to leave school. My mother mentioned it to me, and I shrugged. “I didn’t like him,” I said honestly. “He picked on Emilie.”

  “Oh, that’s just what boys do when they like girls,” she told me breezily. “Pull their pigtails, push them over, tease them.”

  “They do?” I found that fascinating, but the kind of images it called up in my mind were dirty and dangerous. “Did Papa do that to you when you first met?”

  She got a funny look on her face. “Something like that.”

  It was hard for me to imagine my father pulling my mother’s pigtails. He treated my mother like a queen, and heaven help anyone who did otherwise. He was not normally a violent man, but there was this air of menace that clung to him like smoke, and once, when a man shouted something crude at my mother in the street, my father grabbed him and bent his arm behind his back until the man shrieked like a little girl.

  I thought about what my mother said for years. I thought about things that I might like to do to girls.

  The girls at schools were fascinated with me, so I started experimenting with them a little bit. I made one girl cut off all her hair. I made another girl wear only red underwear, because red was my favorite color.

  As I got older, I stepped up my game a little. I made a girl crawl across an empty classroom on her hands and knees during lunch hour, and I put her sandwich on the chair between my legs and make her kneel while she ate it.

  But I knew I needed more.

  Like all boys, I had access to internet porn on occasion, and as I grew up, I learned what BDSM was. It fascinated and disturbed me. I wasn’t upset by the dark intermingling of sexuality and pain; I was upset because I knew that even the BDSM lifestyle wouldn’t be enough for me. I didn’t want consent. I wanted real fear and pain.

  But for the sake of my parents, I stuffed my worst urges deep inside me and let them fester. If I hadn’t, a number of my classmates and at least a few of my teachers would have been the subjects of my experiments. I would have found a quiet place to tie them down and gag them, and learned my anatomy lessons on their suffering flesh.

  When I was twelve, we got a new pupil. Her name was Camille Manning. She was American.

  She had auburn hair that flowed like a river of fire down her back, and eyes of light green. Her lips were the delicate pink of the rose petals in my mother’s garden. Because we went to private school, we wore school uniforms, and hers hung on her willowy frame. A lot of the girls wore expensive designer shoes and carried thousand-dollar purses, the only way to show off their family’s wealth, but she had scuffed white sneakers and a small battered denim clut
ch.

  I looked at her and thought about doing bad things to her.

  So I walked over to her table.

  As I headed in her direction, my best friends Antoine and Simon looked my way. I usually sat with them, but they also knew how I was with girls, so when I strolled past them, they just smiled.

  Camille sat at the end of a table by herself, eating a sad-looking wilted salad and an apple.

  “My name is Bastien,” I said to her in French. “Move over.” And as I said it, I felt a strange thrill inside me. I liked giving her orders. I wanted her to do what I said.

  She looked up at me with disdain, and chewed and swallowed a bite of apple before answering. “You didn’t say please,” she said in prim French with a thick American accent.

  Somehow, this thrilled me even more. I realized that it wouldn’t be any fun if she just obeyed my orders. Those girls who stared at me with their huge cow eyes, so eager to obey me…they bored me to sleep. I wanted to make this girl do what I said.

  My parents had drilled manners into my head, though, so I said, “Move over, please,” but as I said it, I made my eyes flash in the way that scared people.

  She frowned at me, looking a little suspicious, like she knew there was something wrong about the way I said it, but she didn’t quite know what to do about it. That was part of my game. I liked keeping people off-balance.

  I set my tray down next to hers. Most of us didn’t bring our own lunches. I had bread and cheese and parmentier de canard, a dish made with duck, onions, shallots, and butter. She stared at the dish with big hungry eyes before she tore her gaze away to look at me.

  “I’m Camille,” she said.

  “That isn’t all you brought, is it?”

  She looked unhappily at her salad and picked at it. “It’s all I’m allowed to have. My mother says I’m getting a little fat.”

  That was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. Americans and their obsession with weight. Our lunches were ten times better than what they eat in American schools. We got an hour for lunch, and none of the girls in my school were heavy.