“No, no I didn’t,” I replied. “Kyle was a monster. He deserved what he got.”
“And what about the rest?” he asked as he eyed me suspiciously. “Did you show them any mercy?”
“No,” I sobbed, “no.” I kept repeating the word over and over, weeping uncontrollably. Mitch won. He broke me, and he knew he had, but that wasn’t going to stop him from finishing out him and Johan’s plan.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear.”
“Does this feel right to you now? Is this justified now?”
“Oh, dear, I didn’t need the validation for this to feel right. This,” he pointed at my ruined body with the syringe, “always seems right.” He admired the red liquid one more time, tapping the syringe lightly to rid it of air bubbles. “This is my favorite weapon though I’ll admit the electric knife was a lot of fun. I see why you like it.”
He jabbed the needle into my ribs without warning, pushing on the plunger and injecting me with the clear crimson liquid that had been filling it. The pain was instant, flowing through my veins with a searing agony that made it feel as if my veins were on fire. Screams ripped through the air as the pain intensified, slowly dissipating as whatever it was began to numb my nerves at the injection site.
“Liquid capsaicin. The perfect tool for torture. It’s not lethal and doesn’t cause any damage so it can be used an infinite number of times. Granted, it does numb the area for a little while, but there are many more places to use it on until the feeling comes back.” He chuckled, walking away and back into the black, returning with another syringe filled with the stuff.
I cringed and attempted to move away. It didn’t seem to matter how many times trying to escape him didn’t work, I always tried. Human instinct at its best and I couldn’t bite back the urge for a sarcastic comment despite the fact that I was sobbing. “I’m going to kill you when I get out of here.”
“I don’t think so. Plus, there’s plenty more where that came from. I always keep liquid capsaicin on hand because, well, you never know when you’ll need to torture someone. And you have been the most enjoyable. It’s a shame we’ll have to kill you soon.” Mitch then leaned down towards me, the needle down at his side, and pushed my hair away from my face. He took a deep breath in, closing his eyes like he was attempting to memorize what I smelled like. “It’s really a shame.”
I froze even though I knew what was coming next. Even though I knew that that syringe filled with what I could only describe as liquid fire was meant to flow through me once again.
“You don’t have to do this,” I whispered, hoping that he would see reason for once in all of this and realize that murdering me wouldn’t fix a thing. I wanted to bide my time to find a way out. To find the way to retaliate through the haze of pain and drugs that Hyde promised was there.
“Oh, but I do. A monster can’t be allowed to live out its life maiming and killing innocent men. And that’s what you do.”
“Kyle wasn’t an innocent man. Kyle was a sick man. Kyle was a monster, too.”
“No,” Mitch said as he shook his head. “Kyle was a human being that couldn’t control his urges. There is a difference between what he was and what you are.” He reached up and touched my face, tracing my jawline with just the tips of his fingers. “He could be saved. You can’t. And you know what the sad part is?”
I shook my head no in response to his question.
“You’re so beautiful. I almost can’t stand the thought of killing you.” His expression changed in that instant, and I knew that there wasn’t any way I could talk him out of his present course of action. “But that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change what we have to do.”
He jabbed the needle into my thigh and pushed the plunger down, injecting me with the liquid capsaicin that would turn my blood into fire within seconds. I screamed in agony as the burning sensation hit like a ton of bricks, surging through my muscle like an unstoppable force. Then something else moved through me, and Hyde unfurled just barely from her dark cocoon the drugs had forced her into. She was there, but barely. Just underneath the surface, but strong enough to use me as a conduit to speak. Heat moved into my eyes as the burn in my thigh ebbed and faded, going numb. That’s it, Blythe. Almost there. I heard Hyde speak into my mind as my mouth opened so she could vocalize to the man in front of me just like she had before. Mitch’s eyes went wide as he registered the change.
“You’re going to die here, Mitch. You and your little crony,” Hyde spat as I felt my vocal chords vibrate with her words.
“That’s impossible. How are you speaking right now?” I could see the panic setting in. “I’ve given you enough Liquid X to kill a horse.”
“There are things you don’t know about us. Things you can’t predict. Things you wouldn’t expect. And you’re going to have to learn to accept the fact that you and your boss don’t know everything there is to know about what we are.” She paused for dramatic effect, our eyes meeting his. “Things that will get you all killed.”
“No,” he chanted, “no, no, no, no.” He paced back into the darkness, emerging with yet another syringe. This one was filled with the clear, water-like Liquid X I had come to expect to get out of those now. And there was much more of it than usual. Hyde began to laugh as he fumbled with the plastic cap that was over the needle, letting it fall to the floor once he finally removed it.
“Is someone scared of little old me?” Hyde said. My voice was no longer my own. I could hear an edge to it that let you know it was the monster inside speaking and not me. What let you know you were in the presence of evil. “I’m just a small, defenseless woman. What is there to be afraid of?” She was taunting him.
“Shut up. Just shut up,” he croaked past the anxiety rising in his throat. We could hear it perfectly, and Hyde planned to use it against him. He walked up to me and hovered there, not wanting to come too close just in case. I could tell him Hyde wasn’t strong enough yet because of the drugs to do him any real harm. She could only use her words to break him right now.
“Oh, there it is. The scared little boy who took on way too much too soon. I’ve been waiting for him to show up,” she taunted. A fist slammed into my face, but it didn’t do anything to stop her laughter.
“Shut the fuck up,” he yelled.
She continued to laugh, making him aware that she was not afraid of him in the slightest.
“You will come to regret what you’ve done,” she said as he pushed the needle underneath my skin, our skin, and injected the Liquid X into our veins. She was able to say one more thing before she was pushed back into the darkness, dizziness taking over within seconds of the injection. “I don’t break promises, Mitch. And I can promise you that you will die here.”
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.” He took my face in his hand and looked deep into my eyes, the fear in them gone as the heat Hyde brought to my own faded. “You may be beautiful, but remember this. Evil always wears the mask of the beautiful to tempt us.”
He pushed my face away roughly and threw the used syringe onto the floor, turning to walk out of the room. To leave me in the darkness with the spinning walls and black corners. Then the light above me faded into nothingness, and I was left alone again with not even Hyde to keep me company.
Chapter 9
I was alone in the cold streets of New York City. They were empty. That was the only way I knew it was a dream. Even at night, there were always cars passing by, honking horns and swerving to miss any drunken pedestrians that had wandered into the middle of the road. There was nothing. Nothing. And I wasn’t dressed in the crude remains of what Mitch and Johan had changed me into to exact their torture. I was now in a red, flowing dress that whipped in the breeze. There was a chill in the air that signaled the coming of winter. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold onto whatever warmth that I could, but there was none.
My legs propelled me forward, but to what? I was utterly alone. There were no people, no animals. All ther
e were were the empty cars and deserted streets of the city I adored. Then I heard the screams. They were quiet at first, almost like a whisper, and grew louder. I began to run, my heart pounding with the anxiety and dread that filled me. What was I running towards? The screams? But where were they coming from? Nowhere and everywhere. They were coming from all around me. I stopped and turned, trying to find its source, but there was nothing to be seen and the cold around me was growing. It was like all the air had been sucked out of the atmosphere, only leaving a cold darkness in its wake.
The cries stopped, and that was when I saw her. She was in a black dress much like my own with long, flowing red locks like my own, but it wasn’t me. Her blue eyes stood out in the darkness surrounding us. It was my mother. I didn’t remember much about what had happened when she and my father died. Just that something had happened, and then they were gone, leaving me alone to fend for myself with what they left behind for me. Every time I had attempted to remember the events that led up to their deaths I was met with resistance like a brick wall had been erected to keep the truth away from me. Once she was directly in front of me, I tried to reach out to her, but she took a step back and shook her head, letting me know that it wasn’t okay for me to touch her. Or even try. Not yet, anyways. Her eyes were shining with what little light there was with unshed tears, her chin quivering ever so slightly as she looked at me.
“Mom?” I couldn’t stop myself from saying the word. I had to be sure this wasn’t one of Hyde’s tricks and once she smiled weakly at me and nodded I knew it wasn’t a facade. She was here. “What happened to you?” I asked.
The smile fell from her face, making way for a somber expression as a silent and solitary tear rolled down her cheek.
“What am I?” That was the next logical question I could think of. If anyone would know, she would. Right? She confirmed my suspicion when her eyes met mine, the flicker of something unseen moving under the surface. We looked nearly alike, except for the brown eyes my father had given me. Even that flicker.
She reached up with one of her hands and rested her palm on my cheek, the warmth leeching into my frigid bones and nearly turning me into a puddle on the ground as my muscles sagged. The fear had left me as soon as her skin met mine.
“My darling girl,” she whispered, a dark tone in her voice that was unmistakable. “We should have told you.”
“Told me what?” I asked.
Her eyes went dark then, turning from the bright blue I remembered to a dark amber that held a fire inside of them. Something shifted behind her eyes again, and her hand dropped to her side.
“You need to remember. Only then will you understand.”
Confusion flooded me, and I felt my eyebrows furrow as I looked at my mother’s beautiful face. It was almost the same face I saw in the mirror every day. All except for those eyes. A warm hand landed on my shoulder, and I turned to find my father standing behind me, his rugged features twisted in silent agony as if he had to do something he would come to regret. The same shift I saw in my mother’s eyes and that I saw in my own when Hyde surfaced happened behind his beautiful brown orbs, and the fear returned even stronger than before. The expressions on my parent’s faces changed into that of a sadistic killer, waiting in the wings to take down its prey and as I backed away from them, they began their advance. Knives appeared in both of their hands, and they slashed in my direction, the blades biting into the flesh of my arms as I tried to defend myself from them.
“Get away,” I screamed, tripping over the gown I was dressed in and falling to the ground. They were on me within seconds. My mother gripped the knife in both hands and raised it above her head, her eyes murderous as were my father’s. I cried out, and she slashed down with the blade, but then they were gone and so were the empty streets and the cold wind.
I was in the home I was raised in until the death of my parents, and I wasn’t alone. I was standing above the broken, and bloody bodies of my mother and father, blood soaked into the bottoms of the jeans I was wearing and my feet slipped in the warm fluid. Their warm blood covered my hands, and I could feel warm flecks of it on my face and neck, the blood coating my arms all the way up to my elbows. My parent’s ribs were splayed open, their hearts missing and nowhere to be found. At least, that’s what I thought until I felt a piece of warm, raw meat rolling over my tongue and warm blood running down my chin. Screams ripped through the air, bouncing off of the walls and down the halls of my childhood home. Then everything went black.
Chapter 10
I awoke with a start, choking down sobs as extremely heavy music poured into the atmosphere around me, the woman’s vocals filled with anger. The only light in the room was still the weak one above me, and I wasn’t in the room alone. My heart hammered in my chest as I took in Johan, standing at the end of the bed as Mitch worked behind him. Doing what, I had no idea. But I was sure I would find out soon enough. The woman’s blaring voice and shattering screams overtook my senses as the heavy guitar caused my soul to shake and my bones to vibrate. I could feel it moving within me as I ground my teeth; jaw clenched in fear. I jerked against the handcuffs again, nearly forgetting where I was, but it all came crashing down on me like a substantial weight on my chest. Not only was I responsible for the deaths of so many men and Kyle, but I was also the one who had caused the demise of my own parents, chewing on their hearts just like I had everyone else up to this point.
Johan moved to a stereo somewhere in the darkness and turned the music down until I could barely hear it as it bounced off of the walls surrounding us, the emptiness in the air now causing me to shudder. When he came back he had a large knife in his hand that glittered in the dim light, Johan’s image spinning as the dizziness of the drug still took hold. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to stop the room from spinning. It didn’t work. My eyes opened when I heard the metal on metal sound of the knife scratching against the rail of the bed.
“Look who’s finally awake,” Johan said as he tapped Mitch on the shoulder, Mitch turning with a wicked smile on his face when his eyes met mine. “We’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
“You couldn’t have just killed me already?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer was. If anything, I wanted to end it myself because of what I had done. It may have taken ten years for the memory of it to surface, but time didn’t matter. I could stomach killing men who may deserve it, but I couldn’t forgive myself for killing those that gave me life. At the same time, they were both like me according to the dream. How true could that have been, though?
“Where’s the fun in that when you’re asleep?” Johan said as he walked up to me, practically giddy that he was about to spill some well-deserved blood. Maybe even rip out my heart too.
“Trust me, we’re just sadistic enough to want to see the look on your face when we take your heart out of your chest,” Mitch shrugged and shone a new syringe in the light, “Even sadistic enough to want to hear you scream as we do it.”
“I can say I’ll be disappointed that I can’t have another turn on that body,” Johan said as he reached out to run a finger down the center of my chest right over the breastbone, stopping just before the long incision he had inflicted on my abdomen.
I closed my eyes and shut them as tight as I could, trying to hold back the terror filled tears that threatened to spill over at the thought of being violated again. That was a torture I couldn’t take again. I could handle the rest, but that? Not ever again if I could help it. Even my own death was welcome compared.
“As tempting as it is to let you at her again, we don’t have time for that. We hold onto her too much longer we may not be able to keep the bitch down, so we need to get this over with,” Mitch explained to Johan.
I looked from one to the other, the regret in the room palpable as it caressed my bare and tender flesh. Johan’s face fell in disappointment, but then a sly grin spread across his face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life no matter how short it would be. They were getting t
hings ready to kill me and, even though I didn’t actually want to die, it was welcome considering the torture I had endured at their hands already. Not to mention what else may happen if they changed their minds and kept me around a little while longer. I turned my attention to Mitch, who moved to the stereo. My heart hammered even harder behind my ribcage and sweat began to pour over my flesh as the volume increased, the harsh female vocals doing nothing to stop the adrenaline pushing its way through my veins. While I had thought death would be welcome in comparison to everything else they had done, I did not want to die. I wasn’t ready to die. Panic took over, and I began to pull against my restraints as Johan’s smile spread even further across his face, making him look even more menacing than he had before now.
Johan placed the knife in his hand at my breastbone, making sure I felt the cold metal against my skin for maximum impact. I screamed even though I knew no one could hear me, pulling against the handcuffs like a rabid animal that had been chained up for far too long. Mitch moved to my other side, nodding at Johan to let him know that the time had come. Johan raised the knife above his head with both hands, and that was when I felt a dam break inside of me.
Heat rushed through my body, filling my eyes with a fire so strong that I couldn’t contain it. The threat of my death was what I had needed to let Hyde push out of the darkened haze of the drugs that had been forced on me since my abduction. Now there was no holding her back and she would wreak havoc on the men who sought to snuff out her existence. Our existence. Before I knew it, Johan was bringing the knife down, and the metal of the handcuffs snapped, freeing me from my prison. My hands were now free, and I could defend the body that housed the both of us, and I no longer had control over it, but I could see and feel everything.
Big Bad Wolf (A Miss Hyde Novella Book 3) Page 6
