“One does not have to deserve the misfortune they suffer.” His anger landed in my face in dots of saliva. “You were to die by torture for his crimes, but now you will endure it more slowly for your own mouthy impudence, you stupid, stupid girl.”
“Ara-Rose!” Voices echoed off the shallow valley, getting closer then. Jason’s grip eased until he untangled his fingers gently from the loose remains of hair and removed his hand.
I looked up at him, my scalp burning like the rage rising within me. “Go ahead. Do what you want. It will never change the fact that Rochelle’s dead, and all it will achieve is your own pain when David takes revenge on you.”
“Actually, my dear, the laws of our kind prevent him from seeking retribution for the death of a human.” He squatted down beside me, seemingly pleased with himself. “The unlawful changing of one to a vampire, yes—but not death.”
“What?”
“I have the right to mutilate my kill in any way I see fit, as long as I eat you. The law will not side with David this time,” Jason explained. “There is nothing he can do, since he did not see fit to mark you as his own. And he will have an eternity to reflect on the horrific way in which I hurt you. Oh, Ara”—he rolled his head back, sucking down the bliss of his own deranged ideas—“it will kill him inside. The images I will savor for him shall be etched into the iris of his mind’s eye for all time.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Life is not fair. But you refuse to believe that, don’t you?”
I shook my head, the anger becoming a physical form of hatred inside me. “I won’t let you destroy my faith in—”
“I don’t need to destroy it,” he yelled. “I will destroy you instead; then David’s hope, his faith in life, in love, will be lost forever.”
“No. You will let me go. I will not be the victim in your family feuds,” I demanded with an unsteady cry, trying to sound strong.
“You know”—he stopped and listened as the hunters came closer—“you only make this more of a game for me—to see how long I have to hurt you until you finally realize that no one is coming to save you.”
“And all that will do is prolong my life, because I will never lose faith. Love will prevail. David will come for me, and I will go home and live my life, and you”—I spat the words out—“will suffer for eternity without Rochelle.”
He reached sideways and knocked his forearm across my chest. I yelped out an odd sounding whimper as I fell to the ground with my hands across my ribs, winded. “Keep up this attitude, and I will see to it that death and torture is not the worst you suffer.”
I snickered miserably to myself, pressing my hands to the ground to sit up. “What could be worse than that?”
“Many things,” he scoffed. “How ’bout if I ensure your replacement lover is the one who finds you: his precious baby girl? No one will have a chance to cover your naked, defiled body before he sees it. He will be privy to every sordid thing I did to you.”
“Please! No!” I jumped to my knees and grabbed his sleeve. “Kill me, do what you want, but don’t let Mike find me. I’m begging you.”
“Begging?” he asked, cold amusement oozing through his voice. “I gave you the chance to beg, but you were too proud. Curious though…” He rubbed his chin. “You care not for what I show David, but for Mike… you wish him to be free of this detest. Why?”
“He’s good, Jason.” Hysteria turned my words to hiccups. “He doesn’t deserve this. It has nothing to do with him. Please just don’t hurt him like this.”
“Shh, hush now, sweet girl. It will all be okay—for you. You’ll be dead in a few hours, and all of this—the cold, the dark, the fear of what his last vision of you will be—will all be over.” Jason softened then and stroked my face gently, making my stomach turn.
“No it won’t. Not if you plan to let him find me like that.”
“I know how much Mike means to you,” he said softly, rising to a squat beside me. “I know that finding you brutally eviscerated and spread-eagled, your breasts and vagina exposed, will haunt him every time he closes his eyes. But that’s really half of the fun, Ara,” he added, speaking softly, as if he were trying to cheer me up. “You cannot deny me the satisfaction of seeing the look on his face.”
As his laughter filled the silence, images flashed in my mind of so many horrible possibilities. I shook my head, trying to find words in the back of my closing throat. I didn’t want Mike to see. I didn’t want his last memory of me to be something horrible. Already, my mere death would destroy him more than anything in this world ever could. Especially because he was just inches away from me when I was taken. He’d blame himself, and nothing that anyone could say would fix it.
I had to escape. I couldn’t let him do this to Mike.
“Now, let me start by undressing you,” he said, tracing a fingernail from my chin to the front of my dress, relishing in his own sickness. I gauged the distance between his parted knees, leaving open the one place no man was immune to pain. Then, with every ounce of force I could muster from my weakened body, I lifted my foot and slammed it down into Jason’s groin.
A bawl of anguish rang out into the night. The vampire folded in, clutching his weak spot. As I spun quickly onto my hands and knees and jumped to my feet, his fingers caged my ankle. I screamed and managed to kick them off, but I jerked away too fast, losing the grip on gravity.
A wicked jolt sent me down to kiss the grass a few feet away from him, and as the blow wore off, I pushed up on my hands again, spitting lawn clippings from my mouth.
“Get. Back. Here,” Jason grumbled, so strained with agony I knew there was still time.
I got back up, stumbling onto my fingertips for a second before finding my feet, and ran. Just ran, ignoring the sear of pain in my nail as I hoisted my skirt above my knees, fighting for each step I took. I wanted to look back. Wanted to see if he got up—see if he was behind me—but I’d watched enough movies to know that would be my final mistake. So I charged on, my legs hot and shaky with adrenaline, making them move faster than I knew possible. But not fast enough. I pictured the face on the vampire behind me, feeling the crawl of my skin as I imagined him rising to his knees and watching me run—giving me a moment to believe I’d escaped.
But hope filled my chest as I reached the border of the trees, my feet slipping for a second on the skinny dregs of pine needles. I searched the darkness for a shadow—a figure, a person that might have wandered away from the hunting party. The beat of my heart was so ferocious I could hardly breathe, but I took a gulp of the icy night air, shaping it to scream, “Hel—”
“Nice try.”
My body shot backward like a lasso snagged my neck. The iron grip of the vampire cut off any hope of rescue, muffling my scream. Only a whimper escaped, lost to the empty silence of the dark night, where no one would hear it.
“You cannot outrun a vampire. It is pointless to even try.”
A series of consonants rolled from the back of my tongue, trapped by his stranglehold, my nose and cheeks pulsing like they were about to pop open.
“I want to kill you right here, right now,” he said through his teeth, his voice quivering with rage. “But I will not show you such mercy.”
Nearby, the hunters finally came so close that I could hear their private chatter and the instructions being called out to each one from the voice of my fiancé. If they’d only been there two seconds ago, they might have heard me.
Jason squeezed my throat tighter as I wormed my fingers under his, kicking at the ground to break free.
Please, Jason, I thought, You’re hurting me.
“Do you think I care? If I had any compassion for your adversity before, you just destroyed it,” he muttered, his grip easing. “It’s time to begin.”
He moved quickly, folding my chest across his arm while the other hand tore the back of my dress open, the grass pinching my bare skin as he threw me down hard onto my back.
I coughed the air from my
lungs, nudging my elbows into his chest as he landed on top of me, but he separated my hands and forced them onto either side of my head.
“I didn’t want to do this to you, Ara, but I need him to see you suffer, and this is the only way.”
“Please! Please don’t!”
“Keep begging, human. It turns me on.” He slipped my dress quickly down my waist, jolting my hips upward as he tore it past my legs and tossed it away.
I pressed my knees tightly together, fighting him. “This is rape, Jason. This is worse than murder.”
“I thought you said death was the worst one could suffer,” he said cynically, winning the battle to subdue me.
I shook my head, panting heavily beneath his weight, my teeth so tightly knitted I felt a chip come loose and fall under my tongue. Digging deep for the training Mike gave me—for the times he laid on me just like this and wouldn’t back down until I broke free—I tried to find a way to get him off me. But it was gone. All of it. I couldn’t sidestep the paralysis of fear enough to think straight.
But I wasn’t about to let him have me, either.
I kicked my heels into the ground, rocking my whole body from side to side.
“Stop struggling.” Jason jammed the full force of his elbow onto my shoulder. I cried out, my upper body locked into submission beneath his arm. “Shut up or they’ll hear you.”
“I don’t care,” I cried. “I don’t want you to do this to me.”
“I know.” His palm cupped my mouth completely, only a weak sign of terror surviving in the back of my throat. “But I promise, if you lie still I will only hurt you enough to make you cry. After all”—he pushed his knee between my thighs, forcing my legs up and open—“you are a virgin. There are bound to be a few… rips.”
My soul drew away inside me, wide eyes closing as I tried to escape to someplace else in my mind.
“I’m going to enjoy this a lot more than you will.” He repositioned himself, freezing then. “Ah shit.”
“Over here!” called a stranger, and my eyes flew open to see an army of yellow torchlights. “I thought I saw something.”
“Ara?” Mike called, his deep voice almost touching me.
My heart skipped so fast. I looked up just as Jason looked down at me. Please don’t kill him, Jason. Please don’t.
Oh God. I wished he’d just taken me far away. I couldn’t die knowing Mike would too.
“If he finds us, he has to die. All of them do.” Jason released me.
“Please. Please, don’t kill them! Do what you want with me, but please just let them live?” I begged, staring into his softening eyes.
His brow pulled tightly together, forming two lines in the center. He gently took my wrist, tugging it to roll my shoulders off the ground, and then cradled my face to his chest. “Shh. Okay, just hold tight.”
Before I had a chance to react, we flung like a rocket into the trees outlining the field. My stomach hit my hips, and I wrapped my fingers firmly around his jacket, letting go once we landed on the long, scratchy limb of the tallest tree—what seemed like miles off the ground.
Peering back down, the men who circled the clearing looked like figurines, so small from up here. But most of them branched off then and disappeared through the trees when someone called out “Blue dress!”
I shivered all over, looking away. The air up here was cooler, thinner, making the cloud in my head fizzle a little. My heart was so confused by the combination of terrors that, if I was afraid of being this high up—of looking out across the city and the steep valley of trees—I didn’t notice it. All that stopped me from falling right now was the splintery shelf of a branch as wide as my hips, and the secure grip of the predator’s fingers around my arm. But, somehow, that made me feel safe.
Jason watched as Mike appeared in the clearing below, following his instincts and not the clue that had been thrown to the other field.
“You know, I’m in the mood for a little game.”
“What? Flesh-bombing hunters?”
He turned and smiled at me. “You’re funny when you’re frightened.”
“It’s a common emotional reaction,” I said. “I’m kind of embarrassed by it.”
Jason just laughed through his nose, his eyes filling with fondness before he looked back down at Mike, standing a few hundred feet away, talking on his phone. “He’s good. If I were a human attacker, he’d have found you by now.”
“I know.”
“Let’s have some fun with him, shall we?” he said in an unsettlingly smooth tone, then reached around my body. “And since you won’t be needing this.”
My hands shot up to cover my chest as my bra came away, leaving a loose feeling around my ribs.
“Just think of the things he’ll imagine when he finds it.” Jason laughed, and we both watched as blue lace floated like a ribbon on a breeze to the earth below—a part of me finally to touch the hands of the man I loved again.
“I’m sorry, Mike,” I whispered.
Jason smiled down at my crossed arms and then pried them open, drawing me into his lap with my legs around his hips, my chest against the silky fabric of his suit. Perfect position to scratch his eyes out.
“Be nice, Ara, and you shall live longer.”
“Stop trying to kill me, and I’ll be nice,” I retorted.
“Right now,” he whispered into my cheek, making my skin crawl with the gentle caress of his fingers down my spine, “I am not trying to kill you.”
“No, but you shouldn’t hold me this way. I don’t belong to you.”
“But you want to belong to me.” His words came out with a smile.
“You’re just confusing my mind. It’s not real.”
“It’s as real as you want it to be.”
I went to speak, but the truth was ugly and terrifying. I did want him. I wanted him to touch me. I wanted him to move his lips from their gentle whispers over my shoulder to the purlieu of my mouth, and kiss me. I had no control over my hand. I felt myself slowly move it and cup the side of his neck, my breath falling heavily against his jaw with soft little kisses. And even when I felt him expand between my legs, not one part of me wanted to move away. I saw what my brain craved, saw myself reaching down to unzip him—slip him inside of me—and dared not move in case I obeyed that desire.
“Mmm,” he hummed, running his hands down my thighs. “You’re getting hotter. This will make a nice memory to show my brother; the way you hold me, as if I were him.”
“In my mind, it is him,” I whispered.
“And yet”—he grabbed my wrists and yanked me away from his chest, my breasts exposed to him—“when you scream for mercy, it will be my name on your lips.”
I pulled my elbows in to cover myself. “And in that, you will become everything you despise about him.”
“I am nothing like him.”
“An eye for an eye says otherwise.”
Like a flash going off in my face, everything blanked for a second. I woke to a branch against my spine, my fingers clutching it tightly to stop from falling to the depths of the empty space behind me. And as the shock of his slap wore down to the pain, I wanted so badly to cry out to the hunters below—to David. To yell out and beg him to save me. I couldn’t understand why he never came. Surely my dad called him—told him what happened. He would have known right away that it was a vampire. He would have come… if he still cared.
“I’m sorry.” Jason gently laid my arm across my bare chest to cover me. “It is horrible that he made you believe you meant something to him.”
I looked up, livid with spite. “I meant everything to him.”
“And yet you refer to yourself in the past tense. So, you understand then, that he’s moved on?”
“I…” I wiped my cheek on my shoulder, trying to blot away the last of his slap. “I don’t know.”
Jason smiled sympathetically. “Yes, you do.”
Below, the voices of the hunters became louder over the savage barking of dogs
, headed quickly in our direction.
“Oh, look.” Jason jerked a nod at the ground. “Your replacement has unearthed a clue.”
32
I turned my head to see a bulky figure drop to its knees at the base of the tree, his anguished, incomprehensible sobs rising up as audibly as if I were standing right beside him. The lacy bra in his hands screamed every sordid tale to him that he’d feared as he hiked these gardens, searching for me all night.
“Oh, baby.” His voice carried on the trunk of the tree, all the way to my heart. “What has he done to you?”
“Mike!” Emily ran up behind him, barely able to catch her breath. But her steps slowed when she saw it, and a crowd gathered around them, dogs tugging at their master’s leads, eager to catch the scent in Mike’s hands.
“I’ll take that, Mike,” a man said, scooping up the lacy delicate and passing it to a woman in uniform.
I looked away, my limbs running hot with shame. All I could control in my world were my own tears, so I held them back, refusing to even breathe. “You’re a monster, Jason,” I whispered.
“Let’s see if you can’t come up with a new name for me once I finish with you. Now…” He pressed a flat palm to my chest and slowly pushed me backward. “Shall we continue?”
The scratch of bark on each bone in my spine meant nothing to me. I held onto the branch with both hands, letting tears trickle down my temples and over my ears as I watched my Zorro walk away, stumbling through his own deep agony. Emily wrapped her arm around him, and as each person finally melted into the shadows behind the eager dogs, the emptiness that their silence left behind took the last promise of survival. I closed my eyes, whispering goodbye.
“Are you done feeling sorry for yourself now?” Jason asked, looking down at me with a smug grin.
“Should I be?”
“I suppose not.” He pried my hand away from the branch and held it up, leaning closer. “Do me a favor. Don’t scream.”
Would there be any point?
“No.” He moved in with his mouth open, then stopped. “Do you always answer a question with a question?”
Dark Secrets Box Set Page 61
