“Elias.”
My voice was a whisper, conscious of the sleeping staff and the demon hidden somewhere on the grounds who had attacked me earlier.
“I went upstairs to take a shower,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “I stood in front of the mirror and do you know what I saw?”
I nodded, but he couldn’t see me.
“It’s your drawing.”
I nodded again, taking a step forward.
“Don’t move,” I said, extending my hands to touch him but changing my mind at the last second. I couldn’t.
I turned and ran up the stairs, tearing into the room and heading straight to the drawer on the dresser where my amethyst amulet was snuggled on top of the pile of sketches I’d made of Elias after the night we met. I took the top one, the one I always felt close to, and left the room again, fighting for breath when my level of fitness punished me. Elias hadn’t moved. I wasn’t sure he’d even breathed or blinked, or fired a synapse that informed his body he was still alive.
“Look at me,” I said, clutching the picture to my chest.
He did.
He killed me. I knew, there and then, that this would kill me. We would kill me. I knew my time on Earth was running out…at least the way I knew it. I could feel it in my bones, something wasn’t right.
Elias was standing in the suit I’d drawn him in, the same two buttons at the top undone, the knot of his tie pulled tight and skewed. His hair was wet with sweat and had flopped to cover his eyebrows and shield his dark eyes. The whites were red with guilt and regret, yet the black diamonds sparkled with sadistic pleasure. His face was splattered with blood, smeared over his cheek, smudged over the bridge of his nose, crusted on his neck where it had dried mid-trickle. His teeth were smeared with blood, too, and I knew he’d been smiling when he’d shed it. I knew he’d taken a life tonight, and I knew something hadn’t gone to plan.
“You’re beautiful, Elias.”
He shook his head. I cupped his face, taking a share of the blood.
“Stop it.” He closed his eyes, unable to look at me—or unwilling to let me look at him. “You are. You make evil beautiful. You make darkness dazzling. You make blood look like velvet. You make hatred so arousing, so, so…”
He spun me around before I could finish my sentence and slammed my back to the wall. Gripping my face in bloodied hands, he crushed his forehead to mine, until the pressure on my skull made my eyes water.
“You have to do it.”
“What?”
“I can't.” He took a deep breath and pushed off the wall to put some distance between us. “I’ve done enough tonight. I can't make this right and taking justice would be hypocritical.” He growled, the conflict smothering him as his eyes met mine and burned into me with anger and resentment. “You want so badly for me to let you in?” I nodded. I wanted all the way in, no matter the consequences. “Then do it. Go into the Sector and fucking do it. I can't.”
“Do what?” I swallowed hard and took a step towards him. “Do what, Elias? What do you want me to do?”
“Take it away!” He thrust his hands into his hair and pulled hard. “Take her away! Take the images away. Make my wrongs right.”
“Her? Who?”
“Iris.”
“Who’s Iris?”
I took another step, using his moment of weakness to gather enough strength to shove him into the wall. What had he done? He’d promised not to betray me, and yet I had a gutting feeling he’d done just that. What had happened tonight? Where had he been? Who the fuck was Iris?
“Who is Iris?” I repeated, when he ignored me and shook his head.
Silence. A thick silence pregnant with suspicion from me, and guilt from him. I slapped his face, hoping to bring some life back into a man who had drifted to a catatonic state of remorse. I needed to get out the frustration. I needed to hurt him because I was suffocating in paranoia and worry—both for him, and my vulnerable heart.
“Do it again,” he ordered, gripping my wrist and forcing my hand above my head. “Do it again.”
I slapped him again, the harsh smack echoing around the empty foyer. I slapped him again and again and again, punishing him the only way I could up here, when my mind wandered to methods I could use down there to make him talk to me.
“I watched,” he spat, shoving me away from him and inviting me closer.
He wanted a fight. He wanted a physical fight.
“Watched what?” I asked, taking my place in front of him again and pounding his chest with the inside of my fist.
“I watched Lilin fuck her. I watched Lilin cut her and fuck her.”
My breath escaped in a rush and I wanted to fall to the floor at my knees and beg for this to be a nightmare. Why would he watch and who the fuck was Lilin?
“What did you do?” I asked, slapping him again. “What did Lilin do to her?”
“She fucked her ass with a metal hook, she restricted her movements by trussing her up like a prized fucking pig and she fisted her virginal cunt until she bled.”
I froze. There were no more slaps. I didn’t want to punch him, to hit him, to slap him. I wanted to crush him, and Lilin, and anyone involved in whatever he had done tonight. I was married to a murderer—it had never bothered me before. I was in love with a criminal—I hadn’t thought about the true effects of that before. I was bound to a monster—I’d known that all along and yet, I hadn’t really acknowledged it before.
But now it was real. It was far too real, Elias’ ability to shut off his humanity, close the door to his conscience and block the world of morality out. He’d watched something so brutal, been a part of something so vile, and he was standing in front of me…only just feeling remorse.
“This is it, Trixie,” he said, his voice low and seductive.
He wasn’t intent on seducing me with his charm or placating me with a comforting timbre that would make this all go away. He was provoking the evil in me to emerge and play with his. He wanted me to understand, to agree…to participate.
Still, I couldn’t move.
“This is who I am. This is who we are.” He paused, dragging his hand through his hair. “This is your life now.”
I shook my head and took a step back. Virgin. He’d been an accessory in the theft of purity. He’d been present when someone had lost their right to say no and was taken to the edge before being thrown off it.
“What happened?” I asked, the anger rising to the surface as I composed myself and took a step towards him. “What happened to the girl you so cruelly watched being restrained, fucked and fisted?”
I hated saying the words. I hated that they were more than words; that they held meaning and truth and memories of something that had really happened.
Elias said nothing. He tipped his head towards the door of the office in instruction for me to enter Sector 1.
“What?” I said, folding my arms and standing strong. I wasn’t going to take his cues and lead the way like I wanted to do this.
If he wanted me in the Sector, he’d damn well have to tell me as much. It was the least he could do. But he said nothing. Dipping his chin so his dark glare met my gaze with fire and anger. He shoved his hands in his pockets and released a long breath as he leaned against the wall. The battle had begun. Would he break first and lead me into the office? Or would I break first because I needed to know what had happened tonight, while I’d been waiting for my husband after a day in the autumn sunshine?
“I’m not doing this,” I said, mirroring his actions and leaning against the opposite wall. We were metres apart, but it could have been inches. Elias stole my oxygen and made the foyer feel three feet wide. “I will go into the Sector, but you will tell me to, you will follow me in, and you will tell me what happened tonight.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’m out.”
“Out?” He cocked a brow and his lip twitched into a smirk. “Out, you say?”
I nodded. Of course I wasn’t prep
ared to bow out and leave the Sector to him, but I would let him think he had the option of allowing me to walk away.
“Out. I’ve had enough of the toing and froing, waiting indoors like a woman from the fifteenth-century, waiting for instruction from her cad of a husband.”
“But you are-”
“No.” I raised one finger to shut him up. “I’m a twenty-first century woman. That’s the woman you married and that’s who I am. If you don’t like that, you can ask for a divorce.”
“Divorce?” he mused, biting his bottom lip. Why was he talking like a child? He hummed in thought and smirked again. Who was this man? “Cad?”
“Just get on with it, Elias.”
I didn’t want him playful now, with a roiling nausea wreaking havoc on my stomach, and fear ripping through me to make my hands clammy and trembling.
“Trixie Blackwood,” he breathed, pushing off the wall to close the distance between us. He placed his hands on my cheeks and held my head still so he could look into my eyes. “Will you step into the Sector, please.”
“Yes, Elias Blackwood, I will.”
I stepped away from him and held onto the handle. Pushing the door open, I wasted no time in heading into the Sector.
“We received a tip-off about a whore house.”
Elias led me along the corridor of Sector 1, past the room where he’d first chained me to the St Andrew’s cross, past the room where Sam was held captive…
“Elias?”
“Yes?”
“Is Sam still alive?”
How long had it been since I’d first stepped foot in his cell and heard the story about the man who had killed his entire family? He’d been stabbed twelve times when I met him, and only had forty-five to go. Even if he’d received one a day, I was sure we’d passed that point.
“No,” Elias answered, shoving into me to keep me moving. “Forget about Sam.”
We continued along the passageway, passed more locked doors with no windows, rooms that were open but starved of light so I had no idea what was hidden inside, and finally we stopped at a gate. Elias pulled out his key, trapped me between him and the gate, and dipped to slide the key into the lock. The metal creaked, echoing around us, the sound bouncing off the sopping wet walls of the dungeon. Another shove from Elias, hard enough to make my breath escape in a rush, pushed me over the threshold and into the dark passage. I couldn’t see a thing, my eyes robbed of sight as smells of rust and musk was overwhelming, the muffled drip of water and the muted sounds of people sent my imagination into overdrive, and pins and needles surged into my extremities.
“Where are we?” I asked, trying to swallow down the lump of fear that had settled in my throat.
“The holding cells.”
“What happened, Elias?” I turned to try and find him as something sparked behind me and he reached up to light a torch on the wall. “Talk to me.”
“The whore-house isn’t your typical joint. Men don’t enter, pay for sex, and then go home to their wives. They pay, they enter and what happens inside the walls of the house is entirely up to them.”
“What happens in there?”
“They killed. They fucked dead girls, they killed them before they fucked them…they tortured them, broke them, and devastated them before they put them out of their misery.”
“That’s what you did tonight?”
“I didn’t take part.” He laughed like it was a joke. “I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t even offer my saliva to help the hook go in. I stood back and I watched. I recorded it all, and then I struck and captured everyone in the house.”
“And Lilin?”
Elias grabbed my wrist, forcing it to where the blood was now almost dry on his clothes. When I’d collected some of the blood on my fingertips, he bent my elbow to hold my hand in front of my face.
“I’m wearing her.”
My knees tried to buckle, my heart threatened to break free of my rib cage, my eyes squeezed shut and my heart splintered. But Elias held me still. With one arm around my waist, he refused to let me break when all I wanted was to shatter.
“Why?” I asked, sobbing and hiccupping as the intensity of his skewed moral compass smothered me. “Why?”
“Because she was evil.”
“You’re evil.”
“Then it’s lucky I have all the power. There’s no one to punish me.”
It was a lie. He was lying. He had become someone else in order to cope with the remorse he felt tearing him apart. I knew he could be punished; a man wouldn’t be so afraid if there were no consequences for his actions.
“So why am I here?”
“It’s time to end it.”
“End what?”
We reached the end of the passage, to another gate at the end. Same as before, Elias trapped me while he undid the lock and granted us entry to what lay beyond. I had underestimated the size of the Sector. I carried on walking, expecting to get to the end again, but he stopped me.
“Stand still, don’t move. If you run, I kill you. It’s pretty simple.”
“This is my Sector, too.”
“Is it?” He turned to face me as he opened a door to the right of us. “Are you sure you want to remind me of that now?”
Elias stepped in, dragging me in after him and standing between me and the exit. We had electricity in this room. A dim light hung above us, just a bulb on a wire that swung in the draft from God knew where. I couldn’t feel one iota of air from outside. I felt claustrophobic and breathless. Elias stepped forward, running his finger along the edge of the table as he reached for the handle and pulled the desk top up. The table was no ordinary surface; it turned into an armoury ottoman when he lifted the lid and perused the items inside. From behind him I counted twenty-three weapons, some small handguns, some…not so small. I knew nothing about guns and I’d never seen my husband hold one before. Boxes after boxes of bullets were settled against the grey foam that held the guns with reverence they didn’t deserve. I rounded him to get a better view as he loaded the gun with casual calculation.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he shoved more loose bullets in his pocket.
“Showing you how we deal with things in my Sector.”
I chose to ignore him, because this man frightened me. I didn’t like the strange rigidity that had taken over where my softening husband had once been. I didn’t like that I could feel the pain pouring off him in thick waves that told me he needed me here. Despite what he was saying, how he’d shut me out and slammed his defences into place, Elias needed me to hold his hand through it.
“Hey,” I said, stepping next to him and taking a handful of bullets from the box. I stuffed them into my pocket and slipped my hand into Elias’. “We do this together. Always together.”
“Always so stupid, Ashford,” he said, shaking his head.
Should I have felt offended? Sure. Should I have felt unappreciated? Of course. Should I have felt like my husband was a bully, that he called me stupid whenever he wanted to hurt me, and that in itself wasn’t right? Absolutely. But I didn’t. Because Elias squeezed my hand in his and stroked his thumb over the back as he led me from the room and out into the passage.
With me held tightly in one hand and his gun in the other, Elias the assassin came out of hiding.
He stormed through the Sector, dragging me behind him as he opened fire on any living, breathing thing in front of him. He was on the rampage, the mastermind behind a massacre. He kicked the first door open, the wood splintering at the hinges and spitting shards up into the air as the flash of the gun filled the room before the shot rang out and the echo bounced off the stones around me to pierce my ears. I flinched, but stood still as Elias fired another shot, the second execution, then a third. Three bodies lay on the floor, lifeless and defaced as my husband pulled me to the next cell. The lights flickered around us as if the electricity had been possessed by the ghosts cheering him on and laughing with sick pride as another execution took place. A flash. A clap.
An echo. A painful low screech splitting my ears. Another, and another, until three more bodies pooled to the ground, laid to rest in their own blood. The third door, the fourth, the fifth…all the same. Three bodies, three shots, one between each of the eyes of a prisoner. I was numb, frozen, desensitised to the blood and death, and the man wreaking havoc with empty eyes and a blank expression as he took life after life after life. Blood splattered, flesh flew, pleas sounded out before they were muted with instant death. Still the lights flickered. Still the bangs bounced off the walls, the echo never ending as it reminded me what I was witnessing. What I was an accomplice to. I hadn’t tried to stop this.
“Elias.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. It didn’t sound like the woman I thought I was; one who possessed strength and determination and power. I sounded weak. I sounded broken. I sounded fucking terrified. “Elias, please.”
He surged from the latest room, slammed me against the cold wall opposite and I stared past him at another trio of bodies as his hips pinned mine to the stone and he shoved the end of the gun under my chin.
“You said you wanted in,” he growled, tipping my head back with the gun until I could feel the barrel dig into my tongue. “You wanted to know what we did in here and you wanted to be a part of it. Do you think you can wield a gun and shoot a man between the eyes?”
I swallowed hard and shook my head.
“I’m scared.”
“Of me?”
I nodded as his hand let go of mine, the blood rushing in to warm my fingers before it retracted again to centre between my legs as Elias dragged his nails up my thigh.
How could I be so turned on, sparking with dangerous electric lust and fuelled by the scent surrounding me, after watching Elias kill in cold blood? No, he hadn’t even done that. There had been no emotion in his actions; no anger or fear or a sense of righteousness. He hadn’t possessed an energy as he obliterated and ended. He’d just been…ruthless. What did it say about me? That my body ached for him, drew closer to him as if he’d physically tied me to him and his hold on me brought me closer to the body I wanted to own mine? It said a lot. I was sick. I was depraved. I was as evil as him because I’d been seduced by death and destruction. I’d been provoked by blood and murder. I’d been aroused by punishment and execution.
The Uprising (GRIT Sector 1 Book 2) Page 16
