by Ace Gray
Matching miserable rope appeared at my other wrist as Mickey started winding. The thick cuff he was making matched my other side but pressed into the dull aching scar that had obliterated my tattoo. A single tear cascaded down my cheek as he wound tighter and tighter. The rest of the rope piled at my feet when he pulled tight.
“I’ll have to admit that I was hoping to take you by force. I was hoping to break your body, not your spirit. Perhaps I’ll have to work on that.” He leaned in and licked from my shoulder up to my ear. “I want to hear you scream.” He yanked roughly on my braid and my head snapped up, my eyes finding that same wicker fan and my weak knees barely able to keep me standing.
His hand shot between my thighs to keep me from falling but as soon as I was steady he shoved his fingers up into me. I captured my lip between my teeth and bit down. Hard. But then his thumb pressed against my other opening. I screamed and instinctively tried to dart away.
Between the rope and withered state of my body, I did nothing but crash to the floor. My knees cracked against the dark brown tile and pain jostled my bones far more than the fall. Sobs real and unruly shook my wasted body, as I stayed slumped on my hands and knees.
“Well now, that’s much better,” Mickey’s seductive purr made my skin crawl but couldn’t stop my shaking shoulders.
The pointed toe of his dress shoe pushed on my ribs hard enough that I screeched as I tumbled to my side.
“Much better.” A full smile spread across his face as he bent down and grabbed the tails of the rope.
He made quick work of untangling them, finding the ones tied to my right wrist and using them to drag my arm back to my right ankle. The rope started pulling at the raw skin of my ankle as he bound my wrist tightly to it. Each circle, each wind, got tighter, the rope lit my skin on fire and sent pain pinballing through my body. My fingers and toes went numb as he tied the final knot.
With a wicked laugh and the same sharp shove of his toes to my ribs, I fell to the other side onto the knots of my limbs. It jerked on my shoulder and twisted my neck uncomfortably. I let the tears fall freely as he repeated the angry rope snare on my left side.
When he righted me, my knees and shins pressed hard into the tile, feeling bruised and battered. My shoulders were rounded and pressed just as hard into the floor. I twisted my head just enough to rest my forehead on the tile, letting my tears pool beneath me.
“Abulita, bring me a silver platter. The same type we serve dinner on,” Mickey commanded in his thick Irish accent, so at odds with my Spanish surroundings.
Soft shoes shuffled out of the room just before Mickey’s hands shoved around my body, unconcerned with how his grip ripped my skin against the rough rope. Pitiful whimpers dripped from my lips as fluidly as the tears down my cheeks. He plopped me on the bed then casually sat next to me.
His hand started exploring my body, leaving disgusted goosebumps in his wake. Over my knobby bones and the curve of my ass, between my thighs and then down to the bottom of my feet. They’d gone numb enough that the single fingernail he dragged down the sole of my foot felt like a hot fire poker. Soft footsteps didn’t interrupt Mickey’s hands wandering.
“Set it over there.” His hands didn’t stop, brushing away a few fly away wisps of hair then traveling to my mouth and pulling it open. “She’s going to be served on that platter as Sunday supper, you understand?”
“Si, señor.” The voice I knew too well agreed without hesitation and my heart sank.
“Bring me an apple,” he demanded, “perfect for the eve I take her sin over and over and over again.” He bent down and ran his teeth along the corner of my mouth.
My heart cracked the last little bit, a part I didn’t even know was left to break. Weeping as deep and dark as the cracks in my soul flooded the room. Maybe I had succeeded in being nothing before, maybe I’d been a void for days and days, but I’d been pushed past that into the darkness. The darkness that was about to swallow me whole.
“Yes, my pet, cry, bawl, howl at the moon.” He bit down on my ear as his words danced against it. “This is music to my ears and fuel for my fire.” He stood and twisted, pushing his erection against my tingling and trapped fingers. “I’m going to put every inch of you on display, inside and out.”
He grabbed my braid and pulled back, my chin jerked up and I looked out of the familiar windows of my room onto a small courtyard and from this angle, I found a tiny back door. I stared at that door, willing it to open as he held my head up. After a moment or two, he started jerking on my braid, jarring my brain. His movements simply smattered my tears onto different spots on the sheets below me.
My brain felt scrambled when he abruptly dropped it, his hands finding my ass cheeks and pulling instead. I was wide open for him and a moment later he took advantage, working up the saliva in his mouth then spitting on my sensitive spots. His thumb collected every bit of slickness then hooked into my ass.
I screamed and the sound threatened to split my insides even deeper. He didn’t thrust in and out of me but rather hooked and stretched. His spit splattered onto me again just before his other thumb pushed into me.
“Please no. Please, Mickey. Please!” Each panicked word dripped with tears. I’d never begged him, I’d never let him see softness, I’d never really let him break me, but as his thumbs worked to open me, gentle and slick, I crumbled. “Please,” I whispered before the warm breeze blew out the last bit of fire in my soul.
His wicked laugh filled the room but his hands never wavered. Blackness consumed me. Everything inside me was ash, everything around me looked burnt and broken. The tears that had been cascading down my cheeks dried and the reason I’d been crying in the first place turned to smoke and blew away on the breeze. An inky black seeped into me through any hole it could find.
I wasn’t nothing. I was worse—I was vile, despicable, depraved and pitch-blacked gloom.
Mickey’s wicked chuckles crescendoed as if he knew. As if he poured the black into me. And when I felt the world itself had flickered to nothing, he slid something cool and metallic into my stretched backside. The plug kept the midnight inside me, swirling as if was the endless ice of space. He jerked on my braid a second later, lifting my eyes back to the courtyard and small door. I watched, disinterested, as they faded into nothing. He jerked on me a few times then his sharp footfalls rounded the bed.
“Look no hands.” He waved mockingly at me as he slithered into view.
He’d tied my braid back to whatever plug he’d slid inside me. The pull on my hair and my ass would have registered as rough if anything registered at all anymore. Instead, black flame danced along my hairline and at my opening where it hugged the plug. I simply hoped it would burn me to the ground.
“You look lovely, Elle.” He shoved his hand into my mouth and pulled it open. From somewhere next to me on the bed, he grabbed the apple he’d requested and shoved it into my mouth. He put enough force on my chin and forehead to chomp my jaw down onto the fruit. “You look like mine to eat,” he said softly as he pulled me onto my silver tray and left me to wait.
You look like mine to eat. You look like mine to eat. You look like mine to eat. The words cawed in my head from a jet-black bird. I let them.
I let them as I waited in the bedroom and then again as two women carried me through a maze of hallways. I let them as I was presented on a long banquet table like a prized pig. I let them as I looked into the dark swirling eyes of an actual pig placed across the table from me.
I was darkness, the partner of evil, and I deserved this.
They raked their eyes over me while they feasted, flesh and wine dripping down their faces. When their hands started wandering similarly oil and alcohol dripped across me. The pig across the table from me was slowly being ripped to shreds, but they didn’t realize there was nothing left of me to tear.
“As a thank you, gentlemen…” Mickey’s voice was flat black against the alive and liquid dark inside me. “I’ve prepared dessert.” He grabbed
at the rope fastened between my braid and my ass and pulled.
My teeth sunk into the apple a little further but otherwise, I didn’t move. The men laughed, husky chuckles coloring their remarks on my training, at their want. I let the black consume me as they poked and prodded, each guessing what it would be like to gorge on my flesh. I surrendered to it, to the darkness, and let my mind fill with an oily expanse that lapped at my deepest, deadened parts.
I waited for them to take me, to fill me, with an abstract curiosity. Would the darkness flood from me or ooze out onto the table? Would it turn the world darker or snuff it out completely? Would I even care?
The black was my friend as I sat on that table, poised like food and filth. Its familiar touch held me still despite the sing and ache that dwelled in my body, the flame that lapped at my skin. I reveled in the blank of the world around me, I was happy to surrender to it.
But then there was a head splintering crash and the gold of a bright born sun split my entire world in two.
38.
Cole
Two very definitive men inhabited my body. The dark and the knight. I wanted nothing more than to dismantle Mickey piece by motherfucking piece except pull Elle into my chest and whisper sweet things to revive the life missing from her eyes. The guns being drawn and pointed at us made my decision for me.
Bullets started ricocheting across the room. Luckily the killing calm snapped against my body and the red that tinged my view kept the world moving slowly. Horse and I had already started moving in opposite directions as I took a deep breath and fired off my first shot.
One to a heart.
Breathe.
One to a forehead.
Stay Calm.
One to a stomach and since his gun was still working, another to his hand.
Stay focused.
Another to a chest.
Do not check on Horse.
Double tap to the face.
Don’t you dare look at Elle.
The room was growing eerily quiet. A few whimpers here, labored breathing there, but the whistle and zing of bullets was fading. And the maniacal laugh of a monster was growing.
“You really are the best in the business, Cole,” Mickey purred. “Horse, good to see you.”
He hadn’t moved, his fingers were still templed in front of his face and his ankle crossed loosely at his knee.
“I’m going to bleed you out, Mickey,” I started, my voice icy enough to frost glass. “I’m going to knife your thighs and your forearm and watch the muck and mire inside you flood the floor.” I holstered one gun, seamlessly swapping it for the knife hungry to pierce his skin. “While you’re dying, I’m going to cut you to bits, one wound, one peel of skin, for each and every person you hurt. Then I’ll let Elle shove this through your heart.”
She jerked when I said her name, recoiling like I’d set something poisonous at her. Mickey’s laugh went a little wild around the edges.
“Just shoot him, Cole. Empty every last bullet you have in your gun into his miraculously beating heart and call it a day,” Horse said sternly from the other side of the room.
I took a moment to let my eyes wash over him, to make sure he was safe. Blood was spattered on his shirt but he gave me a simple, single no and I knew it was someone else’s entirely.
“Yes, shoot me, Cole. End my miserable existence before reinforcements can zip up their pants and get here.” He reached out and rubbed the pale white of Elle’s peachy skin. “Before I can tell you what I did to break her.”
In one swift move, I leveled the gun at Mickey, took aim and pulled the trigger. My bullet spliced into his thigh, exactly where I planned, exactly where his knife had done a number to mine, and his wild howl rang through the room. I tried to shut out how equally pained and pornographic it was.
Besides her quick flinch away from me, Elle hadn’t moved. From my vantage point, I could see both the apple he’d shoved into her mouth and the plug he’d pushed into her ass. She didn’t seem to notice, she didn’t seem to care. I swore to myself that I’d make him choke on that fruit and shove the barrel of my gun up his ass.
“You’re starting to realize how far gone she really is, aren’t you?” Mickey’s voice was slightly wounded but mostly wondrous.
“If she’s breathing she isn’t gone,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Cole, we’re wasting time,” Horse reminded me, his gun still trained on Mickey.
“Trust me, she’s gone dark.” Mickey’s laughter roared a new even as he held his hollowed out thigh.
I walked toward Mickey with steeled purpose. He was still laughing when I shoved my knife blade into the right side of his chest, nice and close to his shoulder, conveniently far away from his heart. He cried out again only to cackle a moment later.
“Watch him, Horse,” I commanded and he nodded with a thin-lipped smile.
My hands reached out for Elle, suddenly unsteady. I balled them, then let them stretch, focusing on the tattoos that marked me not the helpless little bird in front of me. I breathed out loudly again and let my hand gently brush along her ribs. She shrieked as if I’d dragged another blade across her skin. My breathing hitched up and my eyes shot to Horse’s, they were a mirror of worry.
“Ladylove,” I whispered in her ear and she jerked away from me. “Ladylove, I’m here. I’m here for you.”
As gently as I could, I pulled the apple from her mouth. Her jaw hung open for a moment or two then eased shut. I unwound her hair too, letting the rope go slack against her too bony spine. She rolled her forehead to the platter beneath her but her eyes stayed open wide and staring.
I had to close my eyes as I grabbed at the toy sticking out of her and pulled. She didn’t make a sound—hell, she barely breathed—as I pulled the silver plug out and let it fall with its rope tie to the table. As soon as it clunked to the wood, Horse fired off a shot, leveling someone to their knees in the doorframe.
“We gotta speed this up, Cupcake.” He shot me a look complete with quirked eyebrows.
“She…” I couldn’t get the words out.
“I know,” he murmured. “But still.”
“She’s broken, Cole. Leave her for someone to kill. She wants to die.” Mickey’s pain was starting to color his words.
I seamlessly swiveled and shot a matching hole in his other thigh.
“I will never leave her. And if I can’t fix her, I’ll love each and every shattered piece.” My snarl made Mickey visibly shudder.
I set my gun down on the table, still pointed at the front door. I pulled out the blade that marred Mickey’s chest making sure to twist as I went. He winced and growled, his humanity finally on display. The blade was covered in his black blood as I set the serrated edge to the rope at Elle’s wrist and ankle. The sound of sawing against that rope was the equivalent to screeches of the damned. Every single person I’d sent across the River Styx was gnawing at my ears. I deserved it but I wouldn’t waver, I wouldn’t stop.
When the ropes fell completely away, Elle stayed frozen, her body resigned to its ball. I grabbed her arm to help her unwind and she screamed then hissed at me. I dropped her, certain from the way her voice cracked and split across my skin that I’d hurt her.
Mickey’s laugh started just as he managed to stand and wrap himself around me. Mickey had never been stronger than me but he was fury given flesh, ready to scrap and fight his way out of the filth. I felt that force wrap around me and start to squeeze.
We clashed backward into his throne then tumbled further into the bodies blanketing the floor. I crashed him into the tile flooring with every ounce of strength I’d been building. His bones crunched beneath me. But his hands still managed to find their way to my throat and squeeze.
It was the angelic white of the skin on the table above me that kept me fighting even as the world edged black. That beautiful woman on the table was hurt, and unbelievably so, but when I’d been aching, she’d soothed me. She’d told me to fight. I spun in Mickey’s ar
ms as Horse started unloading shells into the open doorway. My thumb shoved into his jagged knife wound and I dug with Elle’s voice whispering fight lovingly along my senses.
Finally, pain hung on Mickey’s lips and my smile quirked into place. Finally, a painless dimple hollowed out my cheek. I used my hold to leverage myself off Mickey, reach for my gun and shoot haphazardly at the entry to the room.
“Save it, Cole. We’re here to save her.” Horse didn’t look in my direction as he chastised after I missed the first few.
My eyes snapped back to Elle, pure and perfect meat for the slaughter on the table.
Fight.
Fight for her. She could be angry with my methods, angry that I hurt her, later.
If she can feel anything at all.
I yanked her off the table with one arm, her body far too light and frail in my arms, my gun resting against her thigh. It wasn’t the movement or the warm steel against her that made her start to scream. It was me wrapped around her. The tighter I held, the more wild, furious, and utterly painful sounds split her lips. The more she struggled. My utter revulsion to causing her pain begged me to drop my hands, to let Elle go free, but I fought against it. And against her.
“Help me,” Horse said sharply as he crouched beside me and tried to flip the table above us. He studied the struggle happening against my chest, his eyes going wide and the hollowness peeking through his features. “Just give me your back on three.”
He counted and when he hit three, I stood and shoved against the edge of the table with my back, trying to pin the wildcat to my chest as we went. He fired two kill shots over the top of the wood then reached for the gun still holstered at my chest. After a few more shots the room went quiet again.
