by H. A. Kotys
He knew in that moment that the danger she held was not the danger he had thought. He knew she was violent, sadistic even and could bring all manner of pain to anyone who crossed her. But he now knew she represented a deeper danger, a danger that he had killed for, a danger fuelled from nothing but desire.
== ~ ==
A blow to his shoulder broke into Alexei’s thoughts and he tore himself away from his trophy to look his sister squarely in the eyes. Words tumbled from her; questioning words, aggressive words, challenging words but they merely cascaded around him like autumn leaves whipped by a pre-winter wind as the seasons changed.
He was that changing season. Where there had been such clarity, he was now less sure. The woman was still American and still had to hurt but now, now that clarity had blurred edges, softening his focus as it softened his heart.
Alexei watched without seeing as his sister walked around him, still talking, before she stopped by Raven’s side and fiddled around her ankle to free it from its shackles.
Raven’s leg flopped heavily down, Natalia side-stepping it rather than catching it - a test to see if Alexei would. Her fears were confirmed. Bearing Raven’s limp weight Alexei hooked his finger into the torn latex around her mouth and ripped it larger – another threat to her removed. Tearing further at the latex, he hurriedly fashioned a ragged oval to expose Raven’s nose and lips.
Despite the resistance of the stretchy material that clung doggedly to her face, he wasn’t going to stop until he could see her with nothing to blur the vision. This was their moment. He turned, snapping his head toward to the assembled watchers and screamed at them, “Get out!”
Chest pounding with the surge of adrenalin, Alexei gulped down a breath. He no longer cared what others saw or what they thought. Plunging his lips down to hers for the first time, he pressed home a kiss. She wouldn’t feel it, wouldn’t register it but it was a kiss to sate a need she had relentlessly built.
CHAPTER XXIX – Rolling Deep
With a groan, Red drew her knees up to her chest, balling herself in an attempt to deal with the pain that wracked both her body and soul. It had been a hard day, one of the hardest and to the perennial pulse of pain, she just wanted it to end; wanted it all to end.
It wasn’t often the mists in her mind parted to be able to summon up much of the past but for once she could look back clearly. It had been just under three weeks, that was all, since the cataclysmic events on that final day in the mansion, but she thought it was many more and indeed it could have been six centuries; certainly felt like that at least. Before then, all had been going so well.
Those days of constant progress. Those nights of wild and sometimes brutal passion as she increasingly dominated the sex with her partner, Amber. But when that girl had entered the house, things had moved on apace and spurred off in an unexpected direction. Amber had been outgrown, she remembered that now and the girl had been a catalyst. Katarina was her name. She had offered the necessary clarity to see that the relationship with Amber lingered only through habit. Habit was no good to her though when hedonism was all around.
Katarina had sparked a chain of events that had led to that day and had ultimately led her to where she now lay, shivering with cold and still shuddering with shock. Weak, the fog crept back to try to squeeze out Red’s memories.
Drifting in and out of full consciousness, her mind hesitatingly reconstructed a past it had almost let go of. The fight that had ended a relationship that had once saved her; the crescendo of hope before the crack of despair; the fight that hurled her into the abyss; all were inexorable steps on the road that then took a turn for much worse.
Those had been nothing but a precursor to what had happened next and Red physically retched again, though this time her stomach was empty. She had coped okay during the first night on the streets, staying awake, staying alert.
Nowhere to go, she had hung around a bar on the second night and swapped what passed for her morals for a meal and somewhere to sleep. Raven would have been proud.
With no ID and without a cent to her name, as hunger had started to gnaw she had had no choice but to steal. She had done it before, a wayward teen taking a tank top she just had to have. Different priorities now, different times. On the afternoon of the third day, fate determined that she had tried to steal from the wrong shop, at the wrong time, driven inside that particular one by the nagging feeling she was being followed joining the nagging need to eat.
Desperation had dulled her judgement and karma had conjured a payback that was as brutal as it was poetic. She couldn’t help but stand out with a tiny skirt topping her long legs and the North African man tucked away in the back of the shop had watched via CCTV with increasing interest.
Touching himself, he was reassured she would fit his purposes perfectly. Rising from his chair, he had quickly gathered a bottle and cotton gauze while he watched her look left and right before tucking a health bar into the waistband of her delightfully short skirt.
The man nodded. Yes, now he also had justification, a sign sent to him from above and with a predatory silence, he had slipped out of the back room of his cluttered shop. With utmost stealth, he had stalked his prey down the aisle just as a burly, athletic man paused and stepped back into the shadow to watch. He had been under instructions but they were vague so instead Tomas had waited, slipping a business card into his pocket from a small plastic stand on the counter. He would brief Natalia and contact the man later.
== ~ ==
Convulsing, Red’s eyes shot open, punctuating the re-enactment in her mind. She needed a fix, needed it just to get by and yet, opening her eyes, she saw only blackness. Her ears rang and a hand ran down her ribs to trace a body that was becoming increasingly unfamiliar. This wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. She hated herself for what she had become but was reassured that she had had no real choice. And so she screwed her eyes shut again as if trying to deny who she now was and drifted back into the tormented dreams she had only just left.
== ~ ==
In her mind’s eye, Red saw herself look around. She was still toned then. Her hair still had a deep lustre that could stop a man dead in his tracks and give a woman cause to bitch. That alone should have told her that her memory was starting to muddle.
She had paused, careful not to raise suspicion being a tall, cheaply dressed white girl alone in very much the wrong part of town. It all happened so fast though from there.
One second she was closing on the door, a meal bar secreted in the waistband of her skirt, the next a slight movement seen out of the corner of her eye. Before she knew it there was a smell of putrid spices rapidly followed by an arm around her waist and a sweet smelling cloth clamped roughly over her nose and mouth.
She had tried to struggle and kick back but the scar on her newly scrawled tattoo had pulled, causing her to gasp with the sudden shot of pain. That in turn had made her gulp deeply on the pungent fumes. Her head had already started to spin her into oblivion, her fate already sealed.
Even waking with the man on top of her, Red had known something deeper was wrong. Something inside had changed. As frenzied hands roamed unchecked over her body and she felt herself impaled by the man, her fight was only cursory and the clouds veiling her mind wouldn’t part to reveal why.
It hadn’t taken long - she could barely feel his small presence anyway, before the man rolled away with a grunt, taking his nauseating smell with him. Her mouth was so dry but it had not really been a care to Red as her mind had formed strange shapes before her then open eyes. The shapes had merged with her memories, annotating them, adjusting them, making them and it, one.
The old faltering light bulb had cast strange shadows that flickered above her. The shadows though had taken form, gained flight and merged into demonic birds. They had then reared at her, forcing her to press herself hard down onto the bared rusty bed springs. From that point on they been her constant torment, always there, always calling out ‘murderer’.
Dread had
flared inside her and Red now relived it as she slipped into a horrific dream.
One shadow, larger than the rest, swooped down, fangs bared, beak snapping and Red screamed, flinging her head to one side. The adrenalin inside her surged. Fight or flight. The sedative she had already been injected with ensured she was fit to do neither. When a second pitch black bird shrieked and dived at her head to the wail of North African music she couldn’t know the sound was nothing more threatening than a ringtone of the cell phone of the man who had just raped her.
Her wild scream of panic cracked her parched lip but the slap that swiftly followed split it wider before a thick gag was wrestled into her mouth and secured.
Looking down at the tormented woman with the athletic body, the man zipped up his fly. He had sampled his new merchandise, a perk of his job, and was satisfied the drugs he had injected had already taken hold. There would be no problem controlling her now.
If Red could have heard it over the demonic shrieks and wails that filled her head, the heavily accented voice of the Algerian man gabbling into his cell phone still would have made no sense. Even as he squeezed and pummelled her enhanced breasts while he spoke, all she could see was a feathered black shadow with piercing black eyes pecking at her chest, cackling with abandon.
The argument had raged around her as Red lay oblivious to it in her own privately projected hell. “Give me ten days to earn from her and then you can have her,” offered the man, covering his phone in spittle as he spoke. “Okay, seven, a week, I can’t say less.” He was negotiating hard for more time to make the money he urgently needed.
“Five, final offer and make it fifty thousand.” The Algerian was already banking the profits in his head. He wouldn’t have much – the shop needed money but that was trifling compared to the threat of where his other debts lay. Quickly running the calculations to his satisfaction, he nodded to himself as the woman at the other end of the line accepted.
Oblivious to the transaction under negotiation, Red had sunk back into the browning, thin mattress, the bed springs underneath pricking her skin. Ten? There were at least that. Demons flew around her, darting and diving and she had shaken in panic, tossing her head left and right, thrashing hard against the chains that held her in place.
== ~ ==
Several thousand miles away, the transaction had been similarly satisfying. “Fifty thousand, delivered soon. We have what we need, brother. We have the next.”
The small woman explained the deal to the thickset man as she massaged his prematurely greying temples. She had sourced local women first but they were too close, especially when they permanently disappeared. Alexei didn’t need those kind of complications. Finding the Algerian man was hard but not impossible and he had been eager to conclude the deal.
Inhaling deeply in satisfaction of body and mind, Alexei had smiled, knowing the wheels were now fully in motion. Tomas had done well in tracking the man and what fortune in seeing him at work – he could use that if he needed to. Tomas had been able to slip away, the Algerian would never know that he had been watched.
== ~ ==
Another cramping of her emptied stomach hauled Red back out of the trawl of a memory that had long since started to fray. But this time when her eyes shot open, even the blackness of the room paled against the return of another shadowed demon. It crouched over her and she felt another peck of pain. She hadn’t the senses remaining to distinguish it as, in reality, the latest injection spearing into her buttock before the liquid from the syringe was plunged inside.
A silent scream prized opened her mouth, causing saliva to string between her lips. Her body seemed to buzz back to life and unfurling her legs, Red stretched to speed the flow of the narcotics she craved.
Racing the precious drug, a cocktail of adrenalin and stimulants hurtled inside her. For the first time Yuri slunk away from the woman to leave the room without taking his own pleasure – he had taken it already with the other American and this one’s time was passing.
Part 3
The Games Begin
CHAPTER XXX – Readiness
She rolled over in that sumptuous state somewhere on the edge of sleep and immediately regretted it. God it hurt and with a groan, Raven rolled back, wrapping herself tighter in the scratchy sheet. Murphy’s Law dictated that any time she had rolled into the wall, she had rolled right against her damaged shoulder. Clutching it to try to stem the throb, Raven cried out her opinion of her in defiance, “Bitch!” before wincing again and gripping still tighter as if to hold herself together.
It was difficult to get comfortable. Burrowing her head into the flat pillow, she slipped her hand underneath to try to gather what there was of it but the ridge of the thick metal cuff around her wrist soon had her discard that bad idea.
A moan of disapproval passed her lips in her semi-waking state. Raven smoothed a leg lower, searching for a refreshing cold spot in the bed to cool her sweating body on a hot night, while the cuff locked around her ankle snagged and entwined the sheet.
In sleepy frustration, she rolled onto her back, first flailing an arm to beat the useless pillow into shape, then gathering it in a bunch on which to cradle her head. It still throbbed from when it had struck the floor and growling, she pressed the pillow tighter to try to stem the pulses of pain which threatened to fully wake her up.
It was the first time in what seemed like forever that she had been allowed the luxury of a night in a bed though, crude as it was. Another change to routine. Yet try as she might, there was no way to get comfortable. The chain locking ankle to bedpost saw to that and replays of the day churned as she tried to understand just what had happened to her.
She had called Alexei ‘Master’ before but things felt different now. Initially said in desperation, something to tick a box of expectation, now it felt somehow connected to her, somehow real. Raven recalled how she had mentally reached out to him in that fleeting moment when their eyes had met through yellow smoky latex. It was then that she had felt something rise within her even as shame had tried to wash away the last remnants of a persona so carefully constructed.
Raven. It was a name she had gladly adopted, seemingly encapsulating all she aspired to be. Intelligent, sinister, on constant watch. Free to fly at will. It had fit so perfectly and, in due course, had resonated in the world through which she had risen. A name to be shouted, a name to be feared but more than anything, a name to be respected.
Respect. It had been all about respect. As her mind trawled deeper into her past, the pieces of the puzzle slid into place. The usually unshakeable bond between mother and daughter had been shattered but not by her hand – that had been the first displacement of her sense of self-worth. Fragile though it had been, some had lingered on, ever hopeful, ever optimistic. Lingered that is until that day when the man she since tried to forget had walked out with all her possessions and any hope she had left.
Her sleep-slowed mind tiptoed through a minefield of memories, calling up evidence and examining it, before placing it carefully back where it belonged. Raven had been necessary. After all she had had no other choice but to weld a hard shell around her damaged heart.
Now though, here, with him, she wasn’t enough. There was a new way, perhaps even a better way.
He was strong enough for both of them. ‘Strong but vengeful, dangerous and intolerant,’ interjected her voice of reason. Drifting back and forth on the edge of sleep, Raven threw herself over onto her pain-free side, cocooning in the sheet in the process.
A growl escaped her lips, an outward sign of her inner turmoil and she kicked at the clinging sheet only for her ankle to be snapped back by the chain.
His legs appeared beside her in her head as she drifted again. Muscular and tanned, they were the very embodiment of his strength. She was looking up at them. Looking up. The realisation dawned that in her head, she was always looking up. Looking up from her knees, looking up as she hung from the pier, looking up to his antique chair. Her mind wandered closer
to the present and she paused with the one time she had looked down. From her perch she had looked down on him and looked into his eyes. Was that significant? Had he placed her high to pour scorn or pore over? That feeling she had had been so real, so intense, so…
A moan passed her cracked lips as she pictured him again, thoughts frozen in that moment when their eyes had met and reached for each other, then fast forwarding to a tender kiss, but it was more dream than memory.
This was not some silly Stockholm Syndrome. It couldn’t be, she was Raven after all. She knew all about the condition. Shit, she had even used it to try to break Katarina. That had shown it was nothing more than a load of psychocrap. After all, Katarina had been the one who had hammered the nails into her crate, readying her for shipment to this incarnation of hell.
What if it was real though? What if those endless days had dulled her usual sharpness and warped her reality? Raven had been manufactured. She had been a lifeline. Strong, sassy, sexual and with an overarching sense of self-preservation, Raven had risen inexorably.
