Dark Love: Part Two

by JB Duvane

  Dark Love

  Part Two

  JB Duvane

  Contents

  1. Raymond

  2. Charlotte

  3. Raymond

  4. Charlotte

  5. Raymond

  6. Charlotte

  7. Raymond

  8. Charlotte

  9. Raymond

  10. Charlotte

  11. Raymond

  12. Charlotte

  13. Raymond - Fifteen Years Ago

  14. Charlotte

  15. Raymond - Fifteen Years Ago

  16. Manbo Coraline

  17. Raymond - Fifteen Years Ago

  18. Charlotte

  19. Raymond

  20. Charlotte - One Year Later

  About JB Duvane

  Also by JB Duvane

  © 2017 JB Duvane

  Cover by Kasmit Covers

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher .

  This book is a work of fiction and is intended only for adults over the age of 18.

  All characters are 18 or over.

  Kindle Edition

  Click here to subscribe to JB Duvane’s mailing list

  1

  Raymond

  “That was a very stupid thing for you to do.”

  I turned around and one of the servants was standing in the doorway of the library. After watching Charlotte drive off to her father, I wandered the halls a bit. I felt like I was completely lost in my own home. I finally decided to occupy myself with some reading of the handwritten books in the family library.

  I had gone through some of those old books years ago, but the details were a bit fuzzy now. My mother had told me some of the history, but none of it really made any sense to me. Or really mattered. But if I had some kind of mutiny on my hands I wanted to know exactly what the Beauchamp’s believed. To me this was a history that was woven with myth and superstition. But I was starting to realize that to them it was very real.

  “What do you want?” I asked the servant.

  “You shouldn’t have let her go.”

  “First the lot of you tell me that I can’t keep her here unless she agrees, now you tell me she shouldn’t have left? You need to get your stories straight.”

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “What? Will you people just tell me what you want? This house doesn’t belong to you!”

  “You’re very wrong there.”

  “Oh really? I’ve been going over these books for hours. It’s the same story I’ve heard for years. This house belongs to my family. It gets passed to the Beauchamp’s in the event that the Valice lineage has ended. That hasn’t happened! If you want to leave, then leave. No one’s stopping you. But get the hell out of my sight. I’m tired of all of this bullshit!”

  I turned my back on the servant and the next thing I knew I had a knife at my throat. “This is serious, Valice. One of my brothers went after your beloved Charlotte. Do you know what he’s going to do when he catches up with her? He’s going to kill her.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to figure out what I was going to do. Charlotte had been gone for hours. It was almost dawn and I had been sitting on this couch all night, reading about my ancestor’s fucked-up history while these animals were going behind my back to kill her. They were not going to get away with this.

  “Why? What the hell is your problem with her? And who the hell are you anyway? Every time I turn around there’s someone new walking through that goddamned door.” I could feel blood run down my throat as the blade of the knife cut through my skin.

  “I’m Geoffrey, Renard’s oldest son.”

  “Why haven’t I ever seen you before?” It was alarming to me that there were so many of them. And that they had access to this entire house when I had no idea where they were most of the time.

  “I’ve been in and out of the rooms of this house many times. You don’t seem to pay much attention to any of us, which is another mistake you have made. You are going to die, Valice.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I said as I reached up and behind my head with both hands, grabbing the collar of the man standing behind me and pulling him over my head. I leaned forward and threw his body onto the coffee table in front of me, splitting it in half.

  Geoffrey's body crashed through the table and landed on the floor. He jumped up and whipped around, his hands like claws ready to grab me. “I’m going to tear you apart, Valice.”

  The knife had flown out of his hand and was now on the floor in front of the fireplace. I moved so that I was inching closer to it but he knew it was there too. It was ultimately going to be a race to see who got to the knife first. “Why haven’t you just killed me? You seem to have had more than just a few chances by now. You could have easily killed me in my sleep hundreds of times.”

  “You weren’t as much of a threat.”

  “What makes me such a threat now? As far as I understand it, the will states that if any foul play is discovered—if a Beauchamp murders a Valice—then the contract is over. Your family doesn’t get the money. It doesn’t matter when you do it, you still won’t get your share of the estate if you kill me. How is it any different now?”

  “We both know there is no innocent party here. Plenty of blood has been spilt on both sides over the centuries.”

  “Yeah? So?” I shrugged. “I had nothing to do with any of that.”

  “That is of no consequence to us.”

  “Jesus Christ, you people.” I was exasperated with these constant interruptions. “I’ve had enough of this.”

  We were both eying each other as we made our way closer to the knife. In a split second Geoffrey ducked down to grab it and I reached for the fireplace poker. As he stood up, the knife pointed up at me and ready to slice into my gut, I brought the poker down on the side of his head. He staggered for a moment, then came at me. I fell backward, hitting my head on the broken coffee table but I still had the poker in my hands. As he fell onto me with the knife aimed at my face, I held the poker up and drove it into his stomach.

  The look on his face was nothing short of surprise as his body slid down the metal rod. I threw him off of me as his body convulsed in the last throes of his life. I lay there for a moment, covered in his blood and waiting for my head to stop throbbing.

  “Jesus, Raymond. What the hell happened?”

  My right hand man, Gerald, ran into the room and helped me up.

  “One of the servants. I don’t know what’s going on. He attacked me. He was going to kill me, Gerald.” I stood up and looked down at my bloodstained clothes.

  “Is any of that yours?” he asked.

  “No, he got me in the neck and I got a nasty blow on my head, but this is all his blood.”

  “We need to get out of here, Raymond.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Stephen called. He was run off the road. I’m not sure but I think he died while I was on the phone with him. It didn’t sound good.”

  “What?!” I ran out into the hall with Gerald right behind me.

  “That’s what that bastard in there told me! He said his brother drove off after Charlotte to kill her. Bring a car around.” I grabbed the handle on the front door and looked down at my blood covered hand. “Goddamnit! I can’t go out like this. I need to grab some clothes.”

  “I’ll meet you out front.”

  I ran to my room and washed the blood off of my hands and changed, then headed out to the car that Gerald had pulled up to the front of the house.

  “Have someone clean up that mess in the library.”

  “It’s already taken care of.”

  “Thank you, Gerald. I do
n’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “It’s my pleasure.”

  “Do you know what route they took?”

  “I’m tracking Stephen’s phone so I know where he is. Probably not far from the car. But Charlotte is a different story, if she’s alive, that is. Hopefully she stayed with the car, but there’s no way to know.”

  “Okay, just go. Just get me to her.”

  2

  Charlotte

  I could still smell the sweet scent of rotting paper, and see the light pouring in through the library window. The memory of the whip lashings still tingled across every inch of my skin as I thought about what Raymond did to me in that room. Everything was a blur. The pain and pleasure and the intense orgasm that ripped through my body with him inside me.

  Then that bizarre vision of my father. After that everything happened so fast. Saying goodbye to Raymond and watching him stand there as the car drover further away from that dark place and further into the darkness ahead. As I sat there in the car, hurdling toward my old life that I had been so desperate to escape from, all I could picture was him. Not my father. Raymond.

  He would be sitting in an armchair or pacing around the room. Most likely desperate to bring me back to him. It killed me to think of him like that. Again I wanted to comfort him, when I was the one that really needed to be soothed. What was it about him that made me want to take care of him? Why did I want to comfort someone who had taken my life away from me?

  But that’s not all he’d done. He also gave me the promise of a new life. One seemingly with love and appreciation. I wanted to believe that it was possible. That someone could love me that much. That I was the one for them. But now I was running away from that promise. I was running back to death.

  It made me wonder if I had done this to myself. If I was sabotaging my own happiness. It wouldn’t be unlike me, actually. It wouldn’t be unlike me at all to believe that all I was good for was singles stuffed into my thong as I strutted off the stage.

  The further I drove away from Raymond and his lonely life of solitude in that strange place the more I realized that I had the escape I had been praying for. I could ditch him and run far away. But the further I got away the more I missed his dark eyes and his touch.

  I had to stop thinking about him. I had to cut him out of my mind for at least a little while. Then decide if I was going to return once I had a fresh perspective. One that wasn’t marred by the feeling of his hot skin on mine and the marks that the whip made on every inch of my body ... and my soul.

  When I left the house with Raymond's driver, I assumed that we were only a few hours away from my home town. But we had been driving for quite a while when I noticed the landscape change. We had travelled from forest to desert, but it wasn’t like any desert I recognized. The terrain that surrounded the deserted highway was almost completely flat, save for the river beds, which were completely bare, not like the ones at home that were littered with scrub brush.

  I had no idea where we were and it made me uneasy, mostly because I knew that this was one of the men who had abducted me from my car and had thrown me in that beautiful cage that Raymond had created for me.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Stephen.”

  “Where are we, Stephen?”

  Stephen’s pale skin glowed in the light of the dashboard and contrasted against the car's black interior. “Northern Arizona. Just north of the Grand Canyon.”

  He turned the radio on and set the volume loud enough to drown out any further questions. I turned the volume down and continued to stare straight at the man who had been ordered to be my babysitter. “I need you to give me a little more information. Where are you taking me? Are you going to drop me off at my car?”

  “I'm here to watch over you.”

  “And make sure that I don’t run.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You seem really enthusiastic.”

  “I'm just doing my job,” he said as he hit the gas, racing down a patch of straight road into the blackness that stretched out in front of us.

  It felt like we had been in that car for hours as we sat there in silence and listened to the staticy radio stations that phased in and out of reach of the car’s antennae. There were small towns and a few lone gas stations on the way south but other than that there wasn’t much to see.

  We passed a wooden shack at the southern edge of a thin forest. Above the door somebody had painted Food and Gas, but now the faded white letters were barely visible. Like a ghost that had been seen so many times it didn’t scare anyone anymore.

  The store reminded me of the ramshackle road-side buildings that littered the secondary highways of the state, but for some reason this place didn't feel like a town in Arizona to me at all.

  Once again, I found myself thinking I'd been caught in a parallel universe where everything was similar, but not exactly the same. Just slightly different enough to create a sense of unease. A feeling I’d had ever since I’d been taken by Raymond. Something about him and that house felt so strange to me, and it colored the way I saw the world now.

  Just beyond the desolate shack I saw an old, white single-wide trailer running a generator like my father had. It must have been where the people who ran the store lived. The faint glow of blue light from a TV set emitted through the curtains of the tiny, dingy windows and looked incredibly sad. It reminded me of my old life so much it almost made me sick. Suddenly everything felt like that horrible prison of a life again and I wished more than anything that I wasn’t speeding through the dark night toward it.

  But so what if I hated my life? That didn't mean I had to be a part of Raymond's bizarre world to escape it. There were other worlds out there. I could find one just as easily as I had found Raymond. But really it was Raymond who had found me. From all the way up here in the middle of nowhere, he was drawn to me, almost as if a part of me had been calling to him. And a part of him had been calling to me.

  How had he found me? I wondered as I listened to the song on the radio slowly melt into a pool of static. Now I would be forced to be content with my thoughts and the view outside my window. But my thoughts were far from content. I still couldn’t understand what I was feeling. Everything seemed off kilter now.

  Raymond was a puzzle. His life was so foreign to me it almost seemed like it had been a dream or a movie. And the further I got away from him the less real it all seemed.

  Had he really walked me down dark corridors of long-unused rooms filled with ancient medical equipment? Had he really told me a story, the story of his own family’s legacy, that involved a voodoo priestess? Had I really been suspended in mid air while he whipped me? Had I really had that vision of my father dying in his trailer? None of it seemed real now. But this car and this driver were very real, and so was the fact that I was still a captive. This man wasn’t going to let me out of his sight. I was positive Raymond made sure of that.

  Everything about Raymond was mired in mysticism and darkness. I didn't understand him, but I couldn't stop trying to figure him out. He was too alluring, and that's what scared me the most. And I still didn't have enough information to make any kind of decision about him.

  Especially since every time I thought about the way he touched me and looked into my eyes, my body filled with a warm, fuzzy feeling of desire. When I closed my eyes and felt his hot lips on my neck and his teeth as they bit into my skin I had to clench my thighs together to stop the tingles that threatened to explode into a full-blown orgasm.

  I shook my head every few minutes, trying to get that image out of my head of him standing between my legs, his massive cock inches away from penetrating me and filling me up. But what I couldn’t shake was the feeling inside me. The tingling sensation that coursed through every vein in my body and wouldn’t let me be. It was almost as if I could feel Raymond running through my veins. As if he had projected himself into me and we were part of each other now.

  I knew that he wasn't going to stand b
y and wait either. Not someone as controlling as Raymond. I was surprised he wasn’t in a car right behind us. I was stuck. I couldn't leave. But I knew that it wasn’t just because he would come and find me—no matter where I was. He had already found me. I was already his.

  The radio station faded back in once we got past the mountains. I turned the volume up and found a station that came in clearly. “Why do you work for him?” I asked.

  He seemed almost startled that I was talking again, but his flat voice let me know that he didn’t see part of his job description as chatting with the captive girl.

  “Like I said, I’m here to protect you.”

  “And to take me back. I know he’s not going to let me go.”

  Silence. Not a word out of the ice man for more than five minutes.

  “You think it's right to keep a girl prisoner? You think it’s right to hurt people for money?” I was seeing how far I could push this well-dressed thug. I knew there was nothing I could do to fight him and that I was fooling myself if I thought I could really use this opportunity to make an escape. But I wanted to see if I could rile him up a little. “You think you’re a tough guy ‘cause you have a boss who has a lot of money and a girl in your car who you can throw around? I know you were one of the men who forced me off the highway and bashed in my car window. I know you were one of the men who dragged me back to that place. Is that how you get your kicks?”

  “Look, sweetheart, this isn’t personal. I’m doing a job. My job is to do what my employer asks. That’s all. I’m not going to throw you around or drag you anywhere. As far as I’m concerned I could just leave you on the side of the road. But my job is to make sure you get back to Mr. Valice safely and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “You don’t have anything to worry about. I’m sure you’ll do your job and get your damn check.” I stared out the window and watched the faint light of pre-dawn color the night sky off in the distance.