Fuck them.
Finally, after eons had passed, I croaked out a few words. “They will be sorry.”
Red snuggled into me even closer. I felt her trembling. “What can you do?”
I eyed the damn camera with its blinking red light. “Something.”
I ground my teeth, set my jaw. I stared at Red, my beautiful red-haired maiden now bloodied and maimed and torn by other men.
Then I activated these new, stronger powers. I reawakened them.
I reached again as I had done several times, down through the floors, down. The strength of my anger, and perhaps the lack of Keppra, let me invade the fifth floor with my seeking tendrils, twisting like vines of black smoke through walls and doors.
Nothing. Yet.
I grimaced and imagined myself as a gigantic octopus with a thousand tentacles.
It helped. I poked through doors and walls, and prodded girls awake. I saw their eyes open and blaze with the knowledge I fed them, Suck from me, take my ire, my vast cruel rage. Feed from me.
Or maybe I was a spider? The analogy was evil. That much I recognized. Which nicely suited my intentions.
Tomorrow would be too late. I needed this finished now.
Arise and come to me.
Female after female woke to my call and sat up in bed, or from sofas and chairs. A few had to kill their companions before they could come to me. They came to the stairs and gathered there in silent, swaying ranks. The doors between us were blocked. The elevators ditto. I had an army, and the way was blocked.
I’d never tried to hold so many to one task, never orchestrated females in such huge numbers. More than ten… My eyelids flickered as I counted them. When past thirty in number, I gave in. Enough.
Only Ted was left to be discovered. He was no longer up here with me. I sent a squad searching for him.
My solution to the blocked doors? Go around. Crawl. Climb.
This tower had opening windows. If any fell, the cops would come. Do not fall. This must be swift and irresistible, and precise.
As they opened windows and stepped out onto balconies some of them joined with others and they began to climb, helping each other to reach what would otherwise be unreachable. The floors were scalable, with care.
Do not fall. Be silent.
It was amazing what female muscles could do when there was no great aversion to pain or injury. A torn muscle here, a bruise there. These sensations were nothing to my collectables.
The time was past midnight. The Witching Hour. I smiled.
My puppets would soon be killing and ripping apart men to my and their dark soul’s content. I licked my tongue across the join of my lips.
“What is happening?” In the light that constantly flooded our room, I could see Red’s eyes flickering, searching my face for clues.
“Shhh. I told you I would fix things.”
They thought that depriving me of Keppra took away my powers because I had told them this was the way I worked. Fools. It was the opposite.
And now I had evidence that purity of anger and a body clean of Keppra gave me abilities I had never dreamed I possessed.
I scrunched my hand into Red’s hair and smiled inside as she stirred and shot me a worried look.
Soon they would be dead fools.
CHAPTER 21
ISAK
In my mind’s eye, I watched them climbing the outside of the tower, fingers finding holds as they clung to the façade, arms reaching higher, toes digging in. Most had shed their shoes and in places there were so many clinging to the tower that they resembled a horde of mindless zombies. They were not mindless of course. It was only that I had overridden their natural control of their selves.
My control did not need to be constant, fleeting touches would succeed, and this was what saved me from overload.
Once commanded I need only to, now and then… nudge them.
To re-enter the tower, they sought open windows and they found them – the sea breeze must have tempted the men. They climbed onto balconies in a pretty tide. Some gained entry via the lower three floors. Though the elevators would not ascend past the obstructed floor without some sort of authority, the fire exit stairways then allowed them to ascend from floor to floor.
As they cleared the levels, gunshots began to occur, but I heard them through the women and not through my own ears. Silenced weapons, I assumed. Ted would not want the police called if he had to shoot me. His precaution was my advantage.
By numbers, by stealth, by their very unexpected appearance, my private army swarmed into the bedrooms and killed sleeping men – sometimes by weight alone. A few of my females died, but most lived and came onward, sneaking down the corridors until the only room unconquered was the one outside my own.
“Enter!” I said aloud, as well as mentally. I pulled Red to the floor and lay flat beside her with my arm over her back.
My rage had not ceased, it seethed, and my dick hardened at the prospect of death, destruction, and vengeance.
The outside door to the corridor flew inward, banging into the wall and bouncing. The three guards drew guns. By then, my army of women was armed, and bullets found as many guards as it did women.
Red had sat up and gasped at the gunfire. When she spotted the milling figures in the outer room, when the first hand turned our door’s handle, she swiveled to look at me.
“Isak?”
“They are ours.” I drew her to her feet. “Our help is here.”
“This easily?”
“You lost a finger.” Muscles twisted at my jaw. “Not so easily.”
Women stepped away from our glass door, parting to clear a ragged road to the door that led to the corridor – like the parting of the Red Sea. I smirked and pulled Red with me, stepping from our little internal room.
My assembled army was silent, except for their breathing. They waited.
“I…” She shook her head. “This scares me.”
I knew that already. Her heart thundered. I stared at the bloody bandage on her hand.
I looked around the room. So many nubile females, and all of them in my thrall.
A dead guard lay on the floor, blood spilling from his chest and mouth onto the white tiles. Another curled in a corner, sorely injured, judging by widening splashes of red on his shirt. A third cowered, also wounded but alert. Pistols were aimed at him from above.
I felt Red’s fear relocate from being for her own safety to a fear of something else.
A fear of me.
I ignored it. Later, I would deal with her. My hate needed an outlet. I strode to the least hurt guard and delivered a kick to his side where the blood showed.
His scream took a few seconds to die to a whimper, but his gaze showed defiance. Good. I cracked my knuckles and smiled down at him.
“You will communicate with your boss as you label him. Tell him he is needed, using convincing words. Disobey me or lie and this will happen to you.” I pointed sideways at the other guard. Though almost dead, his sudden cries still made this one’s eyes fix on him and widen.
I listened to the soft sounds and his blubbers and weeping as my girls removed his eyes then cut open his belly without bothering to strip him. The slop of his intestines hitting the floor was a nice punctuation to his final whistling wail. The blood caught my eye as it spread nearer but I focused on this one below me.
“Now do you see?”
He nodded and pointed to a pocket.
“Do it.”
He pulled out a cellphone, showed me the person he called, then connected to Ted.
It rang a while then was picked up. “Sir, we have a problem with our guest. Can you come now, please?”
Ted said something that sounded like now?
“Yes, sir. Now.”
“You can’t say?”
“Protocol, sir. It’s unsafe to say on this line.”
It was three AM, or thereabouts. I guessed he’d been woken. Which only spoke to the silent advance of my beautiful arm
y. And the soundproofing. What a good man he’d been to make this eagle’s nest penthouse so lovely and quiet. I looked around at the girls. They were so very pretty, and bloody.
The guard hung up. I took the cellphone then spun it across the floor.
Girls, I sent to the ones nearest the elevator. Bring him to me.
The only flaw in this would be if he went to one of the other floors. Or had a ton of guards. I sent some more females.
There’d been no need. He came to this floor in the elevator, and he stepped out. Clueless.
The shots fired were only his. I bade them sacrifice themselves rather than kill him outright. By chance, earlier I had noticed one of the females greatly resembled his daughter.
As he was dragged into the room, stunned but intact, I brought her to my side.
“Hello, Ted. Time to learn what happens when you fuck with me.” I questioned him as the women stripped him, then began to nail him to the wall with knives they had rescued from kitchens and sheaths.
“You scream well. Where are the tissue samples and my blood?”
The young woman who was related to him walked forward with a knife and drove it home into his right palm. His face writhed, and he choked and babbled.
Blood already marred the wall.
Red shook my shoulder. I looked to her.
“Please. Listen to me. Isak. Kill him, I guess that has to be done. But please…” She shook me again. “No more torture.”
I stared at her.
“Please!”
Choices, remember. My mind had butted in.
I massaged her shoulder. The touch of her body ran into me like a shock.
I recognized the wrongness of what I did, and I swallowed. Why? This felt so incredibly good.
“I need some retribution.” A lot of it.
“You have it. You have it, Isak.”
“The fridge down the hallway. Two doors down!” Ted shrieked then mumbled, his breaths sharp gasps. Which would be due to the pain of two… no, it was now three knives in his body. Both hands, one ankle.
The girl, who was his niece, I realized, was poised with knife four.
“And the footage of me controlling your daughter? That video, you mentioned. Is that elsewhere? I can tell if you lie to me.”
“It’s…” He hung in the spreadeagled position, his last free leg scrambling to touch floor and take his bodyweight. The girls had hoisted him high before knifing him. He burbled out more info like a leaky sieve, “It’s here. On a USB stick. Nowhere else. It’s too valuable. My patron lives somewhere else. We found the trail you left, even though you swop cars, use new women. Without knowing what you can do, it looks normal.”
“Of course it does.” I’d left a fucking trail. In the future I would be more careful. “Good.” What to do? I eyed him. He had not begged. A tough man. Not a single, please don’t hurt me.
Fuck this. I stepped back, having identified another of the women as the niece’s mother. Two relatives. Messy. But apt.
I drew Red to my chest and buried her face in my shirt. “Don’t look. Shhh.” Then I did what I should have already done.
Cut him up. Slowly. Skin him. Take your fucking time.
Then burn this place down.
It had to happen. It was the best way to remove the evidence.
I made sure we were long gone before the burning started and only watched from afar. Sirens had been screaming through the streets for ten minutes plus before I managed to tear myself away from the sight.
What a light show – pieces peeled off the outside as the façade roared with the climbing flames. This was a conflagration worthy of Hell. Window glass shattered and fell like lethal confetti. I’d lit an enormous candle to celebrate my revenge.
The embers drifted a long way on the sea winds since they came from ten stories up. I held my hand in the air as if to catch them and watched a few wander by, singeing my arm hair.
I had brought out Red and myself while ensuring she acted normally and shielding us from CCTV. However, I’d let my calming influence stop, and here she stood, face shining with tears and contorted by utter grief. I should have been watching her. That pulsing pain from her wound surged, and I did what I’d been doing since it happened – I suppressed the pain.
She trembled when I touched her arm.
“What have you done, Isak?”
I looked to the burning tower. This was a rhetorical question, obviously. I waited.
“Were you merciful?”
To which ones? “I was.”
No, I hadn’t been merciful. I’d watched him die through the eyes of the women. It had been an agonizing death of a thousand, cuts with most of them delivered by his niece.
Red didn’t know.
I opened my palm and studied the Keppra pill in my palm.
Going onward to kill the patron would be eminently doable and fucking amazing, but if I did… if I did that, I doubted I would ever find peace with Red. I would use her up until she was a husk.
“Though it would be the most awesome fucking using,” I muttered to myself.
“What?” Red looked up at me. Her mouth wobbled. Then she looked back to the tower and whispered. “Make it go away.”
I wasn’t a wizard. Her sadness though, strangely it tore at me inside my chest. I came up behind her and pulled her back into my body, then rearranged her hair where it fell over her shoulders. “I am never letting you go, Red, but I don’t want to see you like this.”
She sniffled, wiped at her tears with her uninjured hand. “I figured it was so.”
“I can make this memory go away. All the bad ones. Just give me permission, and I can.”
“Permission?” She had blurted that, with disbelief in every syllable.
Still, I waited, stroking her hair.
“I can never ever forgive this. Jesus. Never…” She shook, then said in a hoarse whisper with her voice cracking, “Yes, I give you permission. I want to forget this, but you have to promise you’ll keep taking the drug. You must.”
I turned her around, threw the pill into my mouth and swallowed. “There. I meant to anyway.” Then I drew her to me again and wrapped my arms about her with a sigh. “I will, and it will be done. I’ll make you forget this, soon.”
It would be a while before the drug affected me.
“I saw a meme the other day on the ’net. It said: If Beauty and the Beast teaches us one thing, it’s that looks don’t matter if you keep her locked up long enough.”
She grumbled something, and I bent my neck to hear. “Was that meant to cheer me up? Because you get a Z minus.”
“Damn. It was. Let’s walk.”
The sea was close by, off to the right, so I took us in that direction, strolling as if nothing much had happened.
But inside, I was thrilled.
I had it. She’d given me permission. And it counted. I was sure it did.
The excitement her gift of trust had blessed me with me had lifted me so high I was almost floating. I could do what I wanted to, within certain boundaries. Red had said yes.
I must think this through. It would have to be perfect before I tried messing about with her head this much, because I was not going to stop at today. I would erase all those other things I had done and give her a happy past, with me.
After a long, peaceful walk on a seaside path where sand crunched underfoot, I turned us away, and with Red’s unwounded hand clasped in mine, we headed toward the main streets. There I would find someone to drive us away.
Before we went where I wanted to go, I had to figure out how to collect Banjo. I wasn’t sure where our final destination would be, yet.
CHAPTER 22
ISAK
“Hark what light through yonder window breaks.” I struck what I judged to be a dramatic Shakespearian pose, and Red laughed at me and threw the dish cloth at my face.
She carried on locking up the front doors to the Red Posy, our boutique winery in the best part of Tasmania. The light through th
e stained-glass upper door panels was indeed beautiful and coated the timber floor in specks of gold, scarlet, and blue.
I walked forward and hugged her and received one from Red. When she leaned over, I delivered a pinch to her butt. “This little black dress… is way too little.”
“Shoo. If you want us to get going before it rains…”
The last patron had left. There remained only us, Bethany the cook, and Annabelle who doubled as cashier, function manager, and person of all trades.
“I’m off!” came from the back in the kitchen. That was Bethany. “Annabelle carpooled with me, so she is leaving, too.”
“See you both, Tuesday!” Red sang as she shot the floor bolts to do the final locking.
We pulled out of the graveled car park with the BMW smoothly purring like the beast it was, and the gravel cracking under the tires. The cows grazing on the paddocks to either side of the road brought back fond memories – though Tasmania was generally greener than a child’s green crayon. Kermit the Frog would blend in instantly.
“We will get showered and change and head for the kink party at Jeremy’s house. You have, ohhh…” I mock-checked my watch. “Thirty minutes tops or I put you in the suitcase and roll you up that awful driveway of his.”
“No! You promised not to use that. You know it’s a hard limit.”
I only grinned. “Thirty.”
I wouldn’t, though my dick told me to do it anyway. She would have been both terrified and turned on, I would have made sure of it.
And then – with Jeremy’s kink parties being as loose and carefree as they were – I’d have fucked her while she was inside the suitcase and pretended I’d invited a stranger to do it. I would have kept her guessing: did he or did he not tell the truth?
I sighed and sent her a glancing smile. “You know I will honor that.”
“Good.” Her swallow was one of relief.
Maybe I should retire the suitcase?
As we merged onto the small highway, I added, “I will however take it out on your ass later.”
“Hmmm.”
One aroused woman. Perfect. Though it lacked that zing of true fear I remembered and often pined after.
ISAK & Red: An enemies-to-lovers Dark Romance Page 15
