Before I’d hidden under the bed, I had retrieved some of the items from the duffle bag. The bag was too big and stuffed too full to fit underneath the bed with me, so I’d taken a chance and hidden it in the closet of one of the other bedrooms, hoping like hell he didn’t have a reason to go in there. The items I’d taken from the bag went with me in my hiding place. I now held two of those items, a bottle in one hand and a cloth in the other.
It was time to use them.
I quietly unscrewed the lid of the bottle and placed it on the nightstand. I cupped the cloth in my right hand and made a bowl shape out of it. I then took a deep breath and held it while pouring some of the liquid from the bottle onto the white cloth.
After setting the bottle on the nightstand, I braced myself for what I was about to do.
Turning my head away from my hand, I exhaled, took a fresh breath, and held it. Facing Ron, I prepared to place the cloth over his face. He was lying too far toward the center of the bed for me to simply lean over and do it. I had to jump on the bed, hope that I had great aim, and then wrestle with him when he woke and started fighting.
My stomach clenched at the thought of what would happen if he overpowered me or if I couldn’t get the cloth over his nose and mouth. A chill ran down my spine, but I shook it off and pushed all the negative thoughts aside.
After taking one more deep breath, I jumped. Onto the bed I went, landing on my knees at Ron’s side. I immediately slapped the cloth onto his face at the same moment I came down on the bed, hoping to use his moment of confusion to my advantage.
The cloth wasn’t lined up exactly with his mouth and nose, but it covered them both sufficiently. I pressed down hard, knowing that he would shake his head side to side to free himself of both the cloth and me.
When I landed on the bed, Ron’s eyes popped open. It took a second for him to realize what was happening, but when he did, he instinctively brought up his arms to shield himself from the attack. When his eyes locked onto mine in the dimly lit bedroom, they grew wide from shock. He had never anticipated that he would one day wake to find me of all people looking down at him.
Well there I was.
The struggle ended quickly. After taking a couple of breaths of the Chloroform, his arms fell limply to his sides and the fight left his body. I hadn’t just met Ron. I knew what he was capable of so I kept the cloth pressed tightly against his face for another minute to make sure he was really out and not just faking.
When I was certain that the Chloroform had worked its magic, I stuffed the cloth in one of the pockets of my cargo pants, got off the bed, and hurried to finish up before he began to stir.
While hiding under the bed, I’d placed three tie-down straps evenly on the floor so when I was ready, I could easily grab them, throw them over Ron’s body, and strap him down, which I did while he was unconscious.
Once I was satisfied that he was held securely to the bed, I stood back, caught my breath, and waited for him to come around.
It took a few minutes for his eyes to flutter open. When they did, I watched as the confusion settled over him. He tried to raise one arm—probably to rub his eyes or maybe his head, which was undoubtedly pounding—but couldn’t. His brows furrowed together as he looked left and then right, where he saw me standing, patiently watching him.
“Nicole.”
I cringed at the sound of my name on his lips.
“You’re back.” He smiled.
I said nothing.
“It’s good to see you again. You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.” His eyes traveled up and down my body, drinking me in. “You look different. Have you changed your hair?”
Whether or not the bastard meant it, there was sarcasm in his question. He knew damn well that I looked like hell. My hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Around my eyes were dark circles from worry, stress, and lack of sleep. My skin was pale and I’d lost weight, which could also be attributed to stress and lack of appetite. I looked very much like I did the day I’d run from his house.
“What brings you to me? Have you missed me as much as I’ve missed you?”
I wanted to bash his face in with the lamp from his nightstand. I thought about how satisfying it would be to listen to the bones in his face and head snap and pop as they were broken and crushed, and for a moment I considered actually doing it.
“Well? Have you?”
Seconds went by and I didn’t respond.
“Nicole. Answer the question. Have you missed me?”
“I’ve never had the chance to miss you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is that so? In what way do you mean?”
“I mean you haunt my nightmares. Your face, it’s what I see when I close my eyes. Your voice is what I hear in the silence of my days. I’ve never had a chance to miss you because you’ve never fucking left me.”
He smiled. “Aw. That’s really sweet, Nicole.”
“It’s not sweet, you sick fuck. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to think about you. I don’t want to remember you. I don’t want you to crawl through my brain while I sleep.”
“Well then, what do you want me to do?”
I looked him directly in his dark, hollow eyes and said, “Die.”
13
Nicole was back, which told Ron that he was right. She had missed him. He’d told himself over and over that her feelings for him were every bit as strong as his were for her. She felt what he felt and she couldn’t live without him any more than he could live without her. They were a part of each other, their lives intermingling, bound together by love. The fact that she was there now, standing in his bedroom, was proof of it.
She looked rough, there was no denying it. She appeared to have not slept well in quite some time. She was thin, much thinner than before. But still, even in her haggard state, Nicole was adorable dressed all in black—boots, cargo pants, long-sleeved t-shirt—hair pulled back in a ponytail. Of course his judgment was biased because of his love for her, but he felt certain that any other man would agree with him.
There was one thing he wasn’t sure of though. If she loved him as he loved her and had missed him as much as he’d missed her, why had she bound him to the bed? Why had she not crawled under the covers and pressed her naked body against his? That would’ve been a great surprise. Thinking of it now gave him an erection.
He entertained the idea that this was part of her plan to do exactly that. Maybe she was kinky and liked her men bound. He didn’t think she was that kind of girl, but maybe he was wrong. He supposed he’d just have to wait and find out for sure. And if she was that kind of girl, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. One of the many things he loved about her was her innocence. Innocent women didn’t do things like that in the bedroom.
He didn’t want to think anything bad about his beloved Nicole, so before jumping to conclusions he decided to wait and see what her motives were.
When Nicole turned and left the room, Ron was left alone to mull over her words. She certainly didn’t seem to be too happy with him. In fact, she’d said she wanted him to die. But surely she didn’t mean it. After all, no one wished death upon their loved ones. He figured maybe she was just angry, or at the very least feigning anger to make their sex together more enjoyable. The thought of having angry sex with Nicole made his erection grow harder. He preferred to be gentle with her because she was special to him, but if rough sex was what she wanted, he was more than happy to oblige.
Ron wondered where Nicole had gone. Perhaps she had gone to change into something slinky and sexy, or perhaps she’d gone to remove her clothes entirely. The thought of Nicole returning to the bedroom wearing nothing but a smile excited him even more, making his rock-hard erection throb with each beat of his heart.
For a long time he lay there, waiting patiently for her to return to the bedroom. When she didn’t, he began to struggle against the straps, trying his best to wiggle out from under them. It seemed impossible though. She had ratcheted them down so tight the
y dug into his skin. His arms lay on his stomach, held firmly by the strap that crossed his midsection. Another strap ran across his thighs, while the third strap lay across his throat. It seemed as though he was going to be there until she decided otherwise.
14
For a long time, I sat on the couch in the living room, listening to the tick of the clock on the wall and wondering what I should do next. I could go upstairs and rough him up a bit, give him a small taste of things to come his way.
Or I could stop being a pussy and open the door that almost certainly led to the basement.
I stood up and walked to the stairs. Instead of going up them, back to the second floor and the room in which I’d left Ron strapped to the bed, I stepped over to the door underneath.
I was positive this door led to a basement. Ron Redwine would never live in a house that didn’t have an underground torture chamber. I held out hope that I was wrong. I hoped with all my heart to open the door and find nothing more than a few coats and maybe a vacuum cleaner.
Still ignoring the instinct to run from the house, I reached out and turned the knob. Pulling the door open, I saw at once that I was right. My heart sank, taking with it my hopes of being wrong.
A wooden staircase led down to a dark basement.
For a while, I just stood there, staring into the darkness beyond the doorway. It was impossible to ignore the memories that washed over me, memories of being carried and dragged into and out of a basement similar to this one. Memories of watching as Ron carried trash bags of women’s body parts up the stairs and out of the house. Memories of blood and gore, coldness and horror.
I closed my eyes and willed the memories away, pushing them as far back into the recesses of my mind as I possibly could. I reminded myself that this time things were different. This time Ron was tied up in his bedroom on the second floor of the house. He was no danger to me now, no threat. What happened to me last time wouldn’t happen again.
Summoning my courage—what little of it there was—I flipped on the light switch and reluctantly stepped across the threshold and placed my foot on the top step. Then the next one, and then the next. Before I stepped on the next step, a thought occurred to me. What if I got down there and found a beaten and battered woman clinging to life? Could I stand to see that? What would I do if I came face to face with a woman who was begging for her life?
Obviously—assuming I didn’t throw myself into the nearest corner, bury my face in my hands, and scream—I would set her free. The problem would be when she fled the house only to return in a matter of minutes with the police in tow. That wouldn’t leave me time to do all the things to Ron that I’d planned to do, but I supposed it would be ample enough time to simply kill him and leave the premises.
It was a chance I had to take.
I took the next step and the next, descending into the basement until there were no more steps to take. Standing on the concrete floor, I looked around, terrified of the things I saw.
Though I could tell that the same things were happening in this basement that had happened in the last one, there were significant differences. Ron had put a lot more time and money into setting up this dungeon of terror.
The walls were concrete, but Ron had added wooden studs and soundproof insulation. I didn’t recall seeing any basement windows from the outside of the house, but if there were any, they were covered by the thick insulation, which also ran between the floor joists on the ceiling.
The lighting now was far better than a dim, bare bulb. Large fluorescents were evenly spaced across the room, the bulbs protected by a metal housing.
His work table was nearly three times as large as the one he used to have. The vast array of tools was neatly placed on the pegboard above the work table. There were much more of them now, and they consisted of both things I was familiar with—saws, drills, knives, pliers, and cattle prods of various sizes—and things I’d never seen before.
On the shelves above the work table were bottles of liquids with labels I couldn’t read from where I stood. There were also jars of what appeared to be human feet, but from this distance I couldn’t be sure.
Instead of chaining women to the floor, he now had a stainless steel table, to which he had attached bolts and leather straps. It appeared to be an autopsy or embalming table. I wasn’t sure which, but there was a trough that ran around the inside edge of the table for catching bodily fluids and a hose leading from it to the drain in the floor.
I was relieved to see that there wasn’t a woman currently strapped to the table, but the smell of bleach hung heavy in the air and the floor was still wet, which were both big indicators that there had been not too long ago.
My heart was heavy, my guilt heavier. If only I’d had the guts back then to kill Ron, no more women would’ve died. Instead of slipping my hand out of the handcuff and running out the front door, I should’ve walked down the hallway to Ron’s bedroom where he sat finishing up his book, and I should’ve plunged a knife into his blackened heart. Had I done that, so many lives would’ve been saved.
Tears clouded my vision, the same tears I’d shed a thousand times before. Without a doubt, I’d shed them a thousand more. I didn’t see the guilt leaving me any time soon. But I had to push it aside and not think about it. There was work to be done and I couldn’t do it while crying.
Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I stepped further into the basement.
It was easy to imagine the horrors that had taken place in here because it wasn’t that long ago that I was witnessing them first hand.
At the sight of all those instruments of torture, I felt sick. Not just sick with guilt but physically ill, as though I may vomit at any time.
I looked over his collection, which now included a car battery and a spool of wire, a hydraulic lift with a sling—the kind used to lift patients out of bed, a blowtorch, a collection of hunting knifes—all of which had a blade longer than four inches, a plastic tub large enough to hold an adult, several containers of hydrofluoric acid…I couldn’t look any more.
When my stomach rolled and I felt the bile rise up in the back of my throat, I turned around to run from the basement.
I was shocked to see Ron standing there.
He was no more than a few feet away from me, wearing only his underwear. There were visible marks where the straps had pressed against his skin, but somehow they hadn’t stopped him from getting out of the bed.
I’d sorely underestimated Ron.
“Stop right there,” I said as he took a step toward me. It was disturbing to know that the son of a bitch had been sneaking up on me and had gotten so close. I dared not think of what would’ve happened if I hadn’t turned around when I did.
“Isn’t this what you wanted, Nicole? Didn’t you want me to chase you? Women like it when men chase them. It adds to the thrill, I suppose. Well I’m here. I’m chasing you. I’m giving you what you want, just as I always have and always will.”
“I don’t want you to chase me. I want you to stop.” I held up my hand, a stop-right-there gesture that he ignored. He advanced a step, and I retreated. He took another step toward me, and I once again backed away from him. This time, I stopped when my back came in contact with the work table. I felt dirty just being in contact with it knowing what its purpose was, but at the moment I had no other choice.
“Now, Nicole. I’ve given you chase. Let’s end this charade and go back upstairs.”
“I said stop where you are.” A stern warning, once again ignored.
As he advanced another step, I pulled the Taser from the holster on my right hip. I kept eye contact with him while I withdrew the weapon. I wanted to keep him occupied so he wouldn’t have a warning of what was coming his way.
This was the Taser X26 CEW. With a field range of 35 feet, it was more than enough to stop Ron’s approach. And it did it well.
The darts shot out of the gun, prongs attaching themselves to the bare skin of Ron’s chest. His body stiffened and he fe
ll to the floor.
With no time to waste, I spun around and grabbed a bottle from the shelf above the work table. I rushed over to Ron and swung the bottle, smashing it against his head. The Taser had taken the fight out of him, leaving him with no way to defend himself. The bottle did the rest of the work. It knocked Ron unconscious.
It seems Ron had sorely underestimated me as well.
I pulled the prongs of the Taser from Ron’s chest and dropped the gun to the floor. I’d worry about replacing the cartridge later, when I had more time. But for right now, I only had a couple of minutes to get Ron off the floor and on the table before he woke.
Had there not been a hydraulic lift in the basement, moving Ron would’ve never been possible. There was no way I could’ve lifted him from the floor. But fortunately for me—unfortunately for others—he had added one to his collection and it was standing near the work table.
I wheeled it over to Ron, lowered the sling, and wrestled with him until he was in it. Then I lifted the sling and wheeled his limp body over to the cold, steel table. I wasn’t gentle with him in any way. In fact, I was much rougher with him than I needed to be.
As soon as he was on the table, I pulled the sling out from under his body, shoved the lift out of the way, and began strapping him to the table. I didn’t tighten the restraint around his throat as much as I could have. The last thing I wanted was for him to choke to death before I was done with him. But I still had to make sure he didn’t get loose again, so I pulled the rest of them as tight as they would go. Houdini himself wouldn’t have been able to break free.
Immediately, I picked up the Taser and changed the cartridge, replacing it with one of the extras I carried in the pocket of my cargo pants. That little episode just proved that with Ron, I could never let my guard down. Not ever.
Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) Page 26
