by Dori Lavelle
Till death do us part.
He didn’t really agree with that phrase, not anymore. He no longer believed death would part him and Haley. There was another world waiting for them on the other side. They would be together for eternity. Death would only be the beginning.
Chapter Twenty-One
Haley
As he tore me apart, every inch of my body screamed.
I tried to kick, but he was too strong for me. He always had been. I tried to bite his lip, but his mouth was too firmly pressed against mine. I screamed inside my throat, jerked my hands above my head. As usual, my pain only turned him on.
Exhausted and out of breath, I stopped moving and lay helpless, praying he would stop soon. That I would still be alive when he did.
As he pushed harder into me, I felt as if I was fading away, merging with the air around me, transforming into nothing but particles, and then into nothing at all.
I thought I had reclaimed my life. But Jude was showing me now that my life had never, ever belonged to me. It was his to take whenever he wanted.
I closed my eyes and cried so hard I almost couldn’t breathe. The kitchen towel inside my mouth didn’t help.
He shuddered and collapsed on top of me, breathing hard and sweating all over me. Bile rose in my throat but I swallowed it down again. When he rolled off me, I lay there lifeless, like a doll.
“Damn,” he said under his breath, “that was better than I imagined it would be after all this time. You still have it.” He pulled the rag out of my mouth and laid the palm of his hand on my cheek. “I wanted it to end here, tonight, to just kill us both and move on to another world, but I liked this. I think we should spend a little more time on Earth.”
“You won’t get away with this.” I wet my dry lips. I figured I might as well say what was on my mind. What did I have to lose? In this moment, some part of me wanted him to finish me off. At this point death would be better than what I had endured, what I might have to endure for the rest of my life. “Dustin.” I swallowed my tears. “Dustin is on his way. You will pay for this.”
“No one will come for you, sweetheart. I run your life, remember? As far as everyone is concerned, you’re out of town. You’ll be shooting a wedding in Texas tomorrow, one you had forgotten about. You won’t be back until Sunday evening. I sent all the necessary messages with your phone.”
I gasped and fresh tears filled my eyes. “You have my phone.” It was not a question.
“That’s right, my love. I needed to have you all to myself. I will be the last man you’ll ever be with—your husband, as it should be. Now let’s pretend we’re on our second honeymoon.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Haley
Jude raised himself onto his elbow and kissed my neck. I didn’t budge, simply stared up at the ceiling. He drew back and looked down at me.
“I don’t like you like this.” His voice was low and tortured. “I can smell him on you.” He meant Dustin.
I said nothing.
“Don’t you hear me?” His voice hardened.
I swallowed the sob inside my throat. “What do you want me to do?”
He got to his feet, towering over me as he zipped up his pants. “Get up.”
I stayed put and looked away. Angered by my disobedience, he grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to my feet. My legs had no strength so I sank back down. That didn’t deter him. He tightened his strong fingers around my arm and dragged me across the floor. I had a choice: be dragged around or force myself to stand.
Groaning with pain that raged everywhere in my body, I attempted to get to my feet, even if he was moving too fast and I kept stumbling. I gritted my teeth when the handcuffs rubbed against the skin of my wrists.
Before we reached the door to the kitchen, I spotted the maple block displaying its gleaming kitchen knives. If my hands hadn’t been handcuffed, it would have been within arm’s reach. A vision of myself reaching for one of the knives and jamming it into his neck flashed before me. The desire to stab him and watch him suffer a slow death burned like liquid fire through my veins. My hopes crashed when he pulled me through the door in the direction of my bedroom. He knew my place. He’d been here, God knew how many times.
In the moment my foot hit a standing vase and it crashed to the wooden floor and shattered, it all became clear to me. All those times I’d thought I was being paranoid—the weird things that had happened around me, the unmade bed, the panties inside the fridge—I was right. I had told myself I was being silly, but my instincts were correct.
He slammed the door of the room shut, pulled me to my feet, and shoved me onto the bed. My wrists screamed with pain. While I lay on the bed, he strode to the door and locked it, tossing the key into his pocket. He returned to me before I had a chance to collect myself, to think of a way to get away from him.
With a crease between his brows, he focused on the job at hand. He sliced off the rest of my clothes first. I cried out when the cold blade touched my boiling skin.
Once I was fully naked, I attempted to curl up into the fetal position as a way to protect myself, or maybe guard whatever was left of my dignity.
“I’m your husband. No need to be self-conscious.” He swept his gaze over my body. “You’re still so damn sexy. But you need to be washed. I don’t want any traces of him on you.”
I whimpered when he grabbed my hair, as he used to do in the life I had been trying to forget. It sent needle-like pain spreading across my scalp. A pain I remembered all too well.
He didn’t let go until we were in the bathroom. He opened the glass shower door and threw me inside. Tears flowed as I cowered on the floor, trying to back away from him as best I could. Even though I never could. Not as long as I was alive.
He reached for the showerhead and turned on the faucet. The shock of cool water hit my skin and I shrank back.
“Not good enough.” He fumbled with the faucet some more and then the jet of water changed from cool to warm, to hot, to scalding. He aimed it at my face.
“Stop,” I begged. “Jude… please don’t.” I writhed and kicked and rubbed myself against the shower floor as the water scalded my skin, the heat penetrating my body and driving me nuts with pain.
“See how it feels to be burned?” His lips spread into a wide grin. He pointed the shower at my head. Water poured over my hair and dripped into my eyes and mouth. I spit some of it out.
No matter how much I begged, how loud I screamed, he didn’t stop. My skin felt as if it were melting off my flesh. Jude laughed almost as loud as I screamed. When I reached the point when I could no longer bear it, the water suddenly turned off, leaving only steam rising from the floor and from my screaming skin.
“Perfect.” He hung up the shower head. “Now you’re all mine again.” He grabbed my arm and I winced. Every touch would hurt from now on.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m an expert at burns. The pain you feel right now will be gone in a few hours. But you deserve it, Haley. You deserve to be punished for everything you’ve done. I warned you so many times.”
He dragged me back into the room and dried my body with a towel. Thank God I had purchased extra soft towels. But still, the pain was excruciating. When I was dry, he produced a small white bottle from his back pocket and rubbed its contents over me. It looked like a lotion. Whatever it was gave me instant relief and I ached for it, every drop.
“Better, my love?” He placed the bottle next to the bed and looked at me, unexpected tenderness in his eyes.
I nodded, if only to protect myself.
“Good girl. Now you behave and we’ll have a wonderful weekend together. I have secrets I need to tell you. One secret, actually. A big one that will blow your mind.”
My eyes grew wide as my mind scrambled to find meaning in his words. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.
“Patience,” he said and unzipped his pants again. “Right now you look so sexy. I have to fuck you again.”
This
time he used one of my scarves to bind my ankles and another to stuff into my mouth. Given his weight, the handcuffs, and my bound ankles, I had no chance of moving. I did the only thing I could. I shriveled up inside.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Haley
My whole body was shaking by the time Jude finished with me and untied the scarf at my ankles. He dressed me in one of my strapless evening gowns. He said he wanted me to look good for him. Although the pain from the hot shower had diminished, my skin still ached when he touched me.
After he’d dressed me, he put makeup on me—he had experience from making up the corpses—and then led me down to the kitchen.
He pushed me down onto a stool and tied my ankles to its legs. He opened the handcuffs for a moment only to handcuff me again behind my back. He tied the scarf he had bound my ankles with earlier over my mouth.
Then he opened cupboards and drawers, removing pots and pans. He knew where everything was.
“I miss eating together. Remember the wonderful restaurants I used to take you to? I cannot believe you threw all that away.” He switched on the stove. “But that’s all in the past now.” He pulled out a cutting board and used his own knife to chop onions. As he worked with his back turned to me, I swept my gaze around the room in search of something to help me out of this situation.
The first thing I noticed was that the block of knives was gone, as well as other sharp objects that were normally in easy reach. My heart started to race. I was alone with this man, with no idea how long he was going to keep me handcuffed, and no way to hurt him. This time he was not underestimating me. He had taken every possible measure to make sure I wouldn’t fight him.
Dustin wouldn’t even come and save me now. Even if he did, he had no key. My instincts told me the key Jude had was the one Dustin had lost.
He scraped the onions into an oiled pan and the sizzle filled the room. He didn’t open the window to let the food smells out. Was he worried I would scream with my mouth covered? He didn’t want to take any chances, it seemed.
He was humming now as he used a wooden spoon to stir in the pan. He had the burned side of his face to me. If I’d seen him somewhere else from this angle, I would never have recognized him. He looked exactly like the monster he was.
“I like your apartment,” he said, and started boiling water in my spaghetti pot. I couldn’t help wondering how often he’d snuck in. Did he come when I was out? When I was in? While I slept? Was he watching when Dustin came over? Did he watch us making love? He was a sick bastard. I wouldn’t put it past him. The thought of him lurking around my apartment, in the shadows, made me sick to my stomach.
He washed his hands and turned to face me while he dried them with a kitchen towel. “This is boring. I feel like I’m talking to myself. Why won’t you say anything?”
I moved my eyes from side to side, trying to communicate to him that I would talk if he hadn’t covered my mouth with my damn scarf. But he knew that. He was just torturing me.
“Oh.” He smacked his forehead. “I guess the scarf isn’t needed. Let me remove it.” He stepped around the kitchen island to come to me. I started screaming from deep inside my throat and writhing, because I never knew what he would do to me when he came near. But he did what he said he was coming to do. He untied the scarf and folded it up, pushed it into his pocket. I stopped screaming.
“That’s better.” He returned to the pot and put spaghetti into the boiling water. Seeing him cook was a surprise. I’d never seen him cook even one meal before. He’d had the money to pay people to prepare food for him, but I had also suspected that maybe he didn’t know how to cook at all.
“Go on,” he said, “talk to me.” He looked at me from the corner of his bulging eye. “Unless you want me to shut your mouth again.”
“No.” I inhaled sharply. I had to talk to him. My mouth might be the only thing that could save me at this point, or at least help delay the inevitable. I was no fool. I had no doubt that this time Jude would do it. This time he wouldn’t let me live, and I was certain he would kill himself as well. His obsession consumed him so much that his life wouldn’t be worth living if I weren’t alive. “Your secret. You said you wanted to tell me—”
“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “It’s not a secret, really. More like a confession. But not yet. I’ll tell you after dinner. It will blow you away.”
He continued cooking as I watched. What was he still hiding inside his dark heart? What could be more shocking than all the things he had already revealed to me? I decided to change the subject. “Where were you the last two years?”
“I spent a year and a half in Germany undergoing treatment. The last six months here.” He turned to give me a smirk.
“Here? In Serendipity?” Six months? He was in town for six months and I didn’t even notice? Maybe by here he meant in the country.
“I was closer than you think. Just a few doors down.”
My blood went cold and I clasped my fingers together behind my back to hold on to something, I felt as if I was falling. Falling and falling and not hitting the ground. “You…”
He removed the pot from the stove. “That’s right, my love. I was here all along. Thanks to technology and online shopping, I never had to leave the apartment. I did have a bit of help from a friend.”
One question burned in my mind as I fixed my eyes on him. “Why didn’t you just come and get me earlier? Why wait?”
“I wanted to watch you suffer first. I saw you freak out when you found unexplainable things happening around you. Oh, and I wanted to surprise you, of course, to give you a false sense of security, and then bam!” He slammed his fist on the kitchen island, making me jump. “That’s what I’d hoped for. I wanted you to look as scared as you do right now.”
“You wanted to punish me.”
“You deserve to be punished. On occasion I even thought of just surprising you and putting a bullet straight into your head.” He shoved a hand through his hair. It was thinner than I remembered. “One thing you still don’t realize, Haley, is how much I love you. If I didn’t love you as much as I do, you would be dead already.”
I was too shocked to do anything but stare at him with my mouth open and my heart thumping. Here I thought I had started a life, unaware he was controlling that life even during the moments I thought I was healing. I was right when I told Dustin that Jude was immortal and I would never be rid of him.
“Don’t look so shocked. Try to enjoy yourself. Let’s pretend we’re back in our mansion.” He placed a steaming plate of spaghetti in front of me and poured red sauce over it. As I watched the thick liquid seep into the pasta, I thought of the blood he had lost when I stabbed him in the barn.
When he turned to get his own food, I asked the most important question. “How… How did you survive?”
“You’re really full of questions, aren’t you?” He filled his plate and came to put it in front of the second stool. He swiveled my stool to face his, then picked up my fork and started to feed me, not caring that the spaghetti was hot as hell. When it burned my tongue, I spat it out, straight at him.
“Don’t make this difficult. I could make you suffer so much more than this.”
My stomach clenched, but my gaze met his with determination. “I’m not hungry.”
“Fine.” He took away my plate. “If the last thing you want to feel before you die is hunger, it’s fine by me.”
I realized my mistake when he poured the spaghetti and sauce back into the pot. What if this was the only meal I would be getting this weekend? What if he kept me here for days and gave me nothing more to eat?
He returned to the island, his face expressionless. “Nolan ran into the barn to get me out, but I was already at the door about to escape. I decided then that he would be my sacrifice. I pushed him in.” He took a forkful of spaghetti, blew on it, and shoved it into his mouth. “I got into his car and escaped through a different gate that no one knew about. Because I had put it there.”
“You were hurt… you couldn’t have gotten far.”
“And I didn’t. I parked the car as soon as I got into town. I thought you’d be getting what you wanted. I thought I’d bleed out and die.” He chewed. “An old couple found me leaning against the steering wheel. They asked if I was alright. I asked them to treat me in private after offering them more money than they had ever seen.” He scooped up more spaghetti with his fork. “I stayed with them for one month, told them I was in danger.” He shrugged. “Then it got complicated. They started asking too many questions, so I sent them to heaven. I left the country the same day.”
My heart ached. How could he eat and confess to killing two innocent people who had helped him? How could he do it while enjoying his dinner? How many layers were there to such a monster?
“What’s your secret?” I asked, not only because I wanted to change the subject, but because I really wanted to know. Would anything he did ever shock me again?
“I said after dinner,” he said, a hint of impatience in his voice.
After that I kept my mouth shut while he ate as if he hadn’t had a meal in days. When he was done, he cleared the table and even washed up.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said when he returned to his stool. I craved a moment alone to think and digest everything that had happened. Maybe he would even open the handcuffs for a bit, give me time to stretch my arms.
“Sure,” he said, as if we were having a normal conversation. He opened the cuffs until I was standing. He cuffed me again, tied my scarf around my mouth, and led me to the front door.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Say goodbye to your pathetic apartment. We’re going home, baby.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Haley
He grabbed the back of my head with an iron grip that sent pain shooting to my scalp. Black spots clouded my vision.
