Chapter Thirteen
Harley
Present Day
Stop. Please stop, please stop, please stop…
Harley curled into a ball on her side on the hard cot, covering her head with her pillow and smashing her hands down on top. But the song was still there, droning faintly on and on, endlessly repeating, unraveling her sanity a little more each time it ended only to start all over again.
Sexy as the devil and twice as sweet, innocence died howling my name.
Howling, howling, never the same…
The lyrics taunted her, wrapping around her head and squeezing until she whimpered.
She wasn’t going to die howling. She didn’t have the strength left to howl.
She had no idea how long she’d been in this torture chamber, but it had to have been at least a week. She’d started her period the day after she was locked away—thank God for his ugly little favors—and bled for the usual three days. After that, she had tried counting the meal trays to keep up with the passage of time but had lost track after the fifth tray shoved through the slot in the door.
But there had been more trays after that. A lot more. Simple, but perfectly acceptable meals that she’d left mostly untouched. Not because she was deliberately trying to starve herself; her body was simply too fucked up to recognize hunger or exhaustion or much of anything else.
The torment had started slowly at first—hours of it being slightly too cold in the cell, followed by hours of it being slightly too hot. She’d dealt with the extremes by taking too-frequent showers in the tiny stall near the toilet in the corner of her cell, warming up in the hot spray or cooling down with a lukewarm mist she allowed to air dry on her skin. But gradually the hot and cold had grown more extreme until she was vacillating between shivering and sweating and the temperature contrasts could no longer be explained away by an antiquated cooling system.
She’d realized that Clay was deliberately manipulating the conditions in the cell to torture her into giving him what he wanted and gone to bed that night sweating furiously, her rage burning as fiery as the heat in the room.
The suffering continued on day two when hot and cold were replaced by light and dark. Not long after her breakfast tray was delivered the lights abruptly shut off, plunging her into blackness that stretched on for far longer than an average night—or at least she suspected it had. She had no way to track the passing hours, but by the time the lights finally flickered back on, stinging her widely dilated pupils, she had been silently praying for an end to the darkness for what felt like an eternity.
But she hadn’t said a word aloud, hadn’t made the slightest sound. Her lips remained closed and her features as impassive as she could make them. She refused to grant Clay the satisfaction of knowing how miserable he was making her or give him any hope that his methods were going to succeed.
He never visited her in her cell or spoke when he slipped her meal trays and other supplies through the slot in the door, but there were cameras on the ceiling. She knew he was watching, listening, waiting for her to break. But she wouldn’t betray her son. She would die before she helped Clay find him.
If she couldn’t be there for Jasper, the very least she could do was spare him the torture of being raised by a madman.
As the days stretched on, Harley withdrew from the outside world, divorcing herself from her suffering, confused body as much as possible. In the happier corners of her mind, she relived beautiful moments with Jasper, long summer days with Hannah, and any other sweet memory she could hold onto long enough to get lost inside of it. She was holding together fairly well—especially considering how messed up she’d been when Clay had tossed her into the cell, still bruised and aching and hating herself for fucking a man who’d nearly killed her—until The Day the Music Died.
“The day the music died,” Harley muttered softly, beneath her pillow.
No, the music wasn’t dying. Something inside of her was dying, being slowly eroded by a beautiful thing put to an ugly purpose.
She’d never imagined music could be used as a weapon, but this…
Sexy as the devil and twice as sweet, twice as sweet…
It was horrible, worms crawling into her ears and squirming through her brain, making her wish she could stab holes in her eardrums.
Innocence died howling, howling my name…
If only he would play something else, anything else, just for a few minutes, maybe she would be able to pull her shit together. But it was only this song—the one she’d once told him haunted her—over and over again. Sometimes played so softly it was like mice gnawing away inside the walls, making her itch in unreachable places, sometimes so loud it made her head throb as she prowled back and forth in her cell, fighting to keep from hurling her body against the door and screaming for Clay to come let her out.
But she wouldn’t scream. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
No more satisfaction for him. No. Fucking. More.
She’d sworn that to herself when she’d forced that morning-after pill down her bruised throat, hating herself for needing one.
But she hadn’t been able to control herself. Even as every spark of love she’d felt for Clay had transformed into hate so sharp it sliced at the sensitive places inside of her, she still craved his hands on her, his taste in her mouth, his cock working between her legs, fucking her until she fell to pieces. She’d always heard that love and hate were better friends than most people realized, but now she knew it with a certainty that thrummed through what was left of her mind.
Even as she plotted painful, terrifying ways for Clay to die—infected with some exotic disease and left to rot on this island alone, tied to the same cot she’d been bound to and slowly carved to pieces with the rusty knife she’d found in the drawer—her mind drifted to those moments when he’d brought her back to life.
That’s what it had felt like, being brought back to life after centuries of numb, dreamless sleep.
But Sleeping Beauty hadn’t been awakened by a kiss.
She had been awakened by cruel hands squeezing her breasts, hateful words whispered in her ear, and fingers curling roughly inside her, forcing her into an orgasm she hadn’t wanted to give. The pleasure had come from cruelty and should have been repulsive. But she’d been waiting so long to feel something with her entire self, waiting so long for the frozen place inside her to thaw, that she had relished every ugly, beautiful second of the bliss Clay had given her and come so hard she’d seen stars.
It was sick, but even after these long, miserable days as his prisoner, if he came into the cell and slipped his hand up the white tee shirt he’d given her to wear and cupped her breast in his warm, rough hand, she knew she would fuck him again. She would bite and scratch and bleed another orgasm from his body just for the pleasure of watching his face twist as he tumbled over, proving she wasn’t the only one powerless against the chemistry that seethed between them, ready to explode at the slightest provocation.
As she lay on her cot, listening to the singer’s smoky voice keen about killing every sweet thing he touched, she couldn’t keep her thoughts from drifting to that moment when Clay had pinned her beneath him. Her skin flushed hot beneath the covers as she recalled the exact moment she’d realized that he was going to fuck her on the ground, like an animal, the rush of shock and lust that had sent her blood rocketing through her veins.
If she concentrated, she could almost feel the dull pain of his teeth biting into the muscled flesh on her shoulder and the rush of heat between her legs as her body responded to the hunger he awakened within her. She had wanted it, wanted him. Even as she’d cursed him, she’d relished the feel of his thick cock tunneling into her, demanding that she take every inch of him. He’d fucked her with complete possession, staking a claim on her body that some primitive part of her had responded to with abandon.
Just thinking about it was enough to make her nipples tighten and the crotch of the boxers she wore—Clay’s; he had torn her own clothes to shreds—grow damp. She longed to slip her hand below the too big waistband of the boxers and find her clit, to slide her fingers through her slick folds, bringing herself to completion while she imagined Clay’s cock inside her, his mouth hot on her nipples as he licked and sucked her sensitive flesh.
But she couldn’t. He was watching.
There were two fish-eye cameras in the corners of the room that took in the entire space. If she touched herself, Clay would see and know that she was weak, needy, desperate for something to take her mind off the torture of these four walls and the misery he was inflicting.
Sank into you soft and deep. Innocence died howling my name…
She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, letting the song grate against her already raw nerves, hoping it would banish the lust heating her skin. But her nipples only pebbled tighter, poking through the thin fabric of her shirt. She closed her eyes and bit down hard on the inside of her lip, fighting the urge to shift her thighs, willing herself to think of anything else.
She tried thinking of Marlowe and what would happen if his people got to her house before she did and discovered the evidence of Jasper’s existence that she hadn’t had the chance to erase. She was scheduled to have shipped the drugs last Friday. When the sculptures hadn’t reached their destinations by Wednesday or Thursday—which could be any day now—Marlowe would send a team to her bungalow on the beach.
He might even come himself. She’d never missed a shipment and Marlowe would be worried about her safety. He would never suspect that she’d crossed him, a fact she’d counted on when she’d planned to fake her own death. But now that plan had gone to shit, and if she didn’t do something soon, Marlowe would realize that she’d been hiding her son from him for years.
Even a day ago, that knowledge had been enough to clear her thoughts of anything but the need for escape. But that was before a song had carried her down to hell and made her twist there.
Now, she couldn’t hold on to logical thought long enough for it to have any power over her. Now, she was weakening, weakening…
Innocence died howling…
Howling my name…
She wasn’t innocent, hadn’t been since she was thirteen years old and getting fingered by college boys behind the canoe rentals as the summer wound to a close and the last of her childhood went up in flames.
And she didn’t want to die howling or any other way.
She wanted to live, but she couldn’t survive another day in this chamber of horrors without something to ease the pain. She needed relief, respite, just a few moments of pleasure to remind her that there was a world beyond the hell Clay had created just for her.
Closing her eyes, Harley let her walls crumble and the brutal fantasy come rushing in.