Camille, Claimed

by Ginger Talbot

  “Stay the fuck away from them, Camille!”

  But she’s climbing into the cab, and it peels away.

  Damn it. She’s right; she does know my weak points, and I just let her provoke me into confirming them. This is my fault. I was so angry with her that I threatened everything she had, until she had no choice but to fight back.

  I’m staring at the spot where the cab disappeared around the corner, enraged but also riveted. When Simon comes up to me and says something, I can’t even hear him.

  I always knew Camille was the perfect match for me.

  Too bad I’m going to have to fucking kill her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bastien

  She’s getting smart, and she manages to disappear completely for a few days. I’m hampered by Troy and Benedict, so it’s not a good idea for me to leave my rented house too often. I’m trying to track her, but she’s ditched her phone and sold her car, which gives her even more money.

  She’s not staying at her house, and she hasn’t checked in to any hotels that I know of.

  It drives me crazy not knowing where she is.

  Is she fucking somebody else? Lying there faking an orgasm the way she does with every man who’s not me?

  Thinking about that keeps me up at night. I know she’s not back with Landon, because I’m still keeping an eye on him, the pathetic bastard. Poor Landon, all mopey and miserable. Watching him cry alone in his apartment cheers me up briefly, but then my black rage returns.

  I call up Emilie. I tell her I appreciate how loyal she is, but she needs to let me handle Camille. I debate using our old childhood code-talk to warn her to grab her family and run, but I am sure her phone is being monitored, and there’s no way for me explain the situation properly before Augustus detonates the implant in my body.

  I have no choice but to win the challenge.

  When I’m not searching for Camille, I spend my time keeping up my training regimen, spending hours in the gym, and studying up on the landscape in Virginia and planning out my strategy for the challenge. It’s in ten days. I’m always in peak physical condition, and I’ve never lost a physical fight in my life, but then, the Franklins are all in excellent shape as well. It will all come down to strategy. For once, I wish I could call my father. He’s a world-class chess player and wins at every strategy game.

  I’ll just have to rely on the lessons he taught me as I was growing up.

  I finally track Camille down at an Airbnb. It’s in a suburban neighborhood, with lots of people walking the street until late at night, and the houses on either side are occupied.

  I wait until three a.m., when the neighborhood is dead quiet. I use my thermal imaging sensor to determine where in the house she’s sleeping. She’s alone.

  Then I use my home-made alarm disabler to jam the signals that the door sensor sends to the alarm control panel, and I jimmy open the back door. I’m carrying a bag of tools that are designed to inflict maximum pain in the minimum amount of time—because I will find out where she’s hiding those damn recordings. Unfortunately, she’s gone old school, rigging up an alarm that can’t be hacked into—when I push the door open, a pan full of silverware falls off the door sill and crashes onto the floor.

  I barrel through the house to the bedroom and kick the door several times until it flies off the hinges. She’s frantically pushing buttons on her phone, and I slap it out of her hand.

  When I look at it, I see she didn’t finish whatever call she was trying to make. Good. That means I don’t have to hurry.

  “You son of a bitch! You weak little bastard!” she yells at me, shaking like a leaf in a very violent storm. Then she looks at me with pure spite. “What does it mean that your family was so willing to believe you’d stabbed my dog? It means they already knew you were a sick son of a bitch, that’s what it means!” she screams, kicking out at me. I grab her by the collar of her pajamas and drag her out of bed, dropping her on the floor.

  Yes, she’s good at pushing my buttons, so now I’m going to push back.

  I’ve managed to hack into some of the records from when she saw a therapist in her early twenties. I know she’s claustrophobic and terrified of closets, so I drag her over to the bedroom closet, which is thankfully very small, and throw her in.

  She goes crazy when she sees where I’m taking her, spasming, howling.

  “Where are the recordings, Camille?”

  I sit down, my back against the door, listening to her scream and pound. I close my eyes and drink in her terror.

  “Let me out! Please! Oh God, I can’t take it in here, I can’t, I can’t! Please!”

  “Where are they, Camille?” I say in a bored voice.

  She howls like an animal caught in a trap. “No, no, no!” She hardly sounds human anymore.

  “Where, Camille?”

  “No, no, no!” She’s mindless with terror. I may have to drag her out and let her regain her senses, then stuff her back in. I’ll keep doing it until she tells me what I need to know.

  Then, abruptly, she stops screaming.

  I pull the door open, suspecting a trick, and find her slumped over.

  She’s vomited and choked on it, and lost consciousness. Her face is reddish-purple, her head lolling.

  Panicked anger flares inside me, and I grab her under the armpits and haul her out of the closet. Oh, no, she doesn’t get to die. She doesn’t get away that easily.

  I Heimlich her, and she throws up on the floor. Then I drag her weakly flailing body to the bathroom and dump her in the tub, still in her pajamas, and hold her head under a stream of freezing cold water.

  She screams again, and the bath is filling up with cold water, so I hold her head under to shut her up.

  The water level gets higher. I release her, then shove her under again. When I let her up, she gasps for air, her eyes huge and panicked.

  “I told you that you messed with the wrong guy, Camille. Where are the recordings?”

  “Fuck you!” she screams, her voice raw now. I’m impressed with her strength. She’s mad with terror, and her strength is draining from her body, but she’s taken everything that I’ve thrown at her and she’s still resisting. I hold her head under again, longer this time. Bubbles leak from her nose as she flails weakly. When I pull her up, her eyes are rolling in her head. I slap both cheeks to bring her back to consciousness.

  “Still love me, Camille?” I taunt as she gasps and wheezes.

  Her pajamas are see-through now; her nipples are hard from the cold and she’s shivering violently.

  Suddenly I hear a male voice. “Camille? Sorry, I fell asleep! The front door was unlocked! Are you all right?”

  Damn. She’s probably paying someone to keep an eye on the house, and I must have tripped some kind of alarm that I didn’t notice. She’s more resourceful than I thought. I go to dunk her head again, but she manages to let out one strangled squawk, loud enough to be heard, and the voice yells, “I’m calling the police!” I hear panicked footsteps thudding down the front steps.

  I let go of her hair and stand up. She’s sloshing around in the tub, eyes dazed, gulping like a fish, and her lips are blue with cold. Her fingers are bleeding from clawing at the closet door.

  “You won’t be lucky forever,” I say coldly, and I grab my bag and run out the back door. Her words echo in my head—What does it mean that your parents were so quick to believe that you stabbed your dog?

  Because it’s true.

  Camille is going to pay for her sins, for sure, but she’s not the only one who deserves my anger. My parents instantly swallowed her lies—because they had that darkness in themselves, and they knew they’d passed it on to me. If my father was suspected in various people’s disappearances, given what I now know about my family genetics, he was probably guilty.

  And he was raised by my grandfather—a sick, abusive pervert, if Augustus is telling the truth. My grandfather was a killer, my father was a killer, my mother was a killer. I am carved fr
om tainted meat. My parents knew about my hereditary tendency toward perversion and evil, and yet they let me suffer alone. They let me think there was something wrong with me; they never told me that it was their fault, that they were the ones who made me the way I am.

  As I drive away, I’m getting angrier and angrier. If I could just save my siblings, I’d let my parents burn for their sins. I’d let them suffer a million times worse than they made me suffer. Abruptly, I pull the car over. Fuck this. I need to hurt someone. And since Camille’s the closest to me, it’s going to be her, right now. Damn the consequences.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Camille

  I stagger out of the tub and fall to my knees.

  Roy, that nerdy Neighborhood Watch volunteer that I’m paying, should be calling the cops for me right now. I drag myself to my feet and stumble to the bedroom to pull on some fresh clothes. Unfortunately, I happen to know that police response time to this neighborhood is pretty slow—twenty minutes at least. I hope to God Bastien doesn’t know that.

  I frantically blot myself with a towel and pull on flannel pajamas. I’m shaking and coughing.

  I hate Bastien so much, but worst of all, there’s still love mixed in with the hate. I’m weak with terror and exhaustion right now. I want him to stop hurting me. I want him to care about me again. I’m cold and scared and I want the strongest man I know, Bastien, to take me in his arms and tell me that he’ll protect me from the nightmare and that everything will be all right. But Bastien is the nightmare. What the hell is wrong with me? I can’t stop myself. I wish I could.

  I am still freezing, so I head to the thermostat by the front door to turn up the heat. Two men dressed all in black burst through the unlocked door. Before I even have time to scream, one of them throws a hood over my head.

  Something stings my butt cheek, and my head grows fuzzy.

  * * *

  I wake up on a wooden floor.

  How much time has passed?

  I open my eyes, struggling to sit up.

  “Here, need a hand?” A man’s voice is laced with nasty humor. Not Bastien. Somebody is pulling me into a sitting position.

  Two men are towering above me. They’re muscular guys in their thirties. They both have military buzz cuts and scars on their faces, and one has a nose that was broken and badly reset. The other one has a thick scar slashing vertically through his right eyebrow. They’re wearing black jeans and T-shirts, and they have guns holstered on their hips, and magazine clips. Their eyes rove over me, and I realize to my horror that I’m naked. I hide my breasts and crotch with my hands, mortified.

  I can’t believe Bastien is doing this to me. I can’t believe he didn’t have the guts to do it himself. Apparently I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did, because if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that his attacks on me were deeply personal. He needed to see my terror, drink it, bathe in it. But no, he didn’t even care enough to do this himself. He’s handed me over to these bastards…and they’ve let me see their faces.

  They’re going to kill me.

  Terror turns me liquid. They’ll brutalize me, then…oh God. This is my last day on Earth.

  “I see what he likes about her,” Broken-nose says to his friend, his gaze sweeping over me as I cringe away from him. He smirks at me, waggling his eyebrows. “You want to choose which hole we use first?”

  “Stay away from me!” I half shriek, half sob. I leap to my feet, burning with shame at my nudity. I run for the door. He’s on me in a second, arms wrapped around me, pinning me. Scar-eyebrow walks over and runs his hands over my body, squeezing my breasts. I go stiff with revulsion. This is nothing like when Bastien forces himself on me. There’s always an intimacy between Bastien and me, and underneath all his cruelty and madness, I swear Bastien still cares for me.

  This is grotesque. My skin wants to crawl off my body as the man probes and paws at me. I desperately squeeze my legs shut, but he forces his hand between my quivering thighs and shoves his fingers up inside me. I cry silently, tears of pain and disgust running down my cheeks. I struggle not to make any noise, because I’m sure there’s no one to hear me and I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.

  This is how I die…with the feeling of their filth inside my body…

  Scar-eyebrow pumps his fingers inside me, and I’m dry inside, so it hurts. I swallow my sobs. I won’t beg, I won’t…

  “Nothing to say, whore?” Scar-eyebrow sneers, and he grabs my breast in his big sweaty paw and squeezes until I scream.

  “We’re going to make a little movie right now. Starring you. Being double-teamed by us,” Broken-nose says, and he licks my ear with his wet, sloppy tongue, and laughs when I jerk my head away from him. He starts to drag me from the room, and I can’t stop myself from kicking and writhing in his arms. Not a movie! No! Strangers will see me naked. They’ll look at my body. The movie will be forever; everyone will see me. My throat closes in panic. No, no, no…

  As I’m dragged down a hallway, I realize I’m wailing aloud. I broke. I’m so weak, so pathetic… Why can’t I be like the victims in the movies, the ones who are pushed too far and then they turn superhuman? I’m kicking and thrashing—why can’t I get these men off me?

  I hate Bastien so much…

  And then I hear a loud explosion, and the lights go out.

  I hear shouts, and more explosions, and Broken-nose drops me. Mad with panic, I scrabble for his gun and pull it from the holster. He grabs my arm in the dark, but it’s the arm that’s not holding the gun. I shove the gun against his crotch and squeeze the trigger. The bang is tremendously loud, and I’m splattered by blood and chunks of flesh. He screams in a pitch so high that it splits my ears.

  Bullets start flying, and I drop to the floor and crawl. My ears are ringing from the gunshot. I feel strong arms grabbing me, and somebody hauls me to my feet.

  Bastien.

  I can tell, even in the dark. He drags me down a hallway, through a door, and then I’m outside, gulping for air. I’m alive, I’m free! I’m still crying, but with relief now.

  I glance behind me and get a blurry impression of a nondescript, squat brick house surrounded by scrubby trees. Before I can protest, I’m being shoved into the back of a van and Bastien’s leaping in with me. The van drives off with a screech, and I’m thrown into Bastien’s arms.

  He settles me onto a bench in the back and pulls a towel out of a bag that’s resting on the floor. He starts scrubbing me off frantically. Instinctively I try to cover up my nakedness.

  “Did they hurt you?” he demands. “Are you bleeding or is that someone else’s blood? I don’t see any wounds on you. Answer me! Did they hurt you?”

  In response, I elbow him in the face, hard. My elbow bounces off his cheekbone, and he grunts in anger and pulls back. “What the fuck was that for?” he snaps.

  “Did they hurt me?” I scream at him, and I rain blows on his face. He swats them aside easily. “Did you ask me if someone hurt me? Are you kidding me? You of all people are asking me that?”

  He slides back on the seat, out of my reach, and thinks about it for a moment, then starts to laugh. He reaches down into the bag on the floor, pulls out a bottle of water and a T-shirt, and hands them to me. I dump the water on myself to rinse off the rest of the blood, then pull the T-shirt on. It’s man-sized, hanging down to my thighs.

  Then I start to laugh too, but I’m laughing and crying at the same time.

  Finally we both quieten down.

  “You are going to take me back to my house so I can get my suitcase,” I tell him. “And then I’m leaving. I’ve still got that recording.”

  “It wouldn’t be safe.” He’s got a weary look on his face. “I’ve got a…situation with a distant branch of my family. You’re going to have to stay with me, under my protection. Those men took you to draw me out. If you’re running around without protection, they’ll take you again, to get to me. And I’m sure they’ll do a better job the next time.” />
  “What the hell… I mean…why would you even care?” Then I give him a bitter look. “Oh. Because you want to be the one who kills me.”

  He clenches his fists at that, and the muscles of his face tighten. “I can’t,” he says. My eyes widen briefly at his admission. “I can’t kill you. If I could, I’d have done it already. When I thought of those men hurting you…”

  “You can torture me, humiliate me, ruin all my relationships, cost me my job, but you can’t kill me?” Fury works its way through my veins.

  He considers that, then nods. “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

  “And you think I should stay with you? For my own safety? No thanks, I’ll take my chances.”

  Bastien straightens up, a look of determination on his face. “If you come and stay with me, I will agree to leave your family and friends alone, forever. And I’ll tell Emilie to do the same.” I start to argue with him, but he cups my chin in his hand and makes me look him in the eye. “I don’t lie to you. Do you believe me?”

  My heart squeezes and I start to cry. I cry because I hate myself for wanting him so badly. I cry because he’s swooped into my life and shattered it to pieces and nothing will ever be the same.

  “Yes.” I choke out the word. “I believe you.”

  I’m almost ready to hope again, but then his face hardens and his voice turns ugly. “I won’t kill you, because every time I think of you being gone, all I can see is emptiness. But you lied about me and you abandoned me, and you fucked up my life, so I will punish you, Camille. I’m going to be an absolute bastard to you, and you’ll hate what I do to you, and you’ll have no choice in the matter. Do you agree to my terms?”