Nineteen
Kyle
The lights flipped on. I could almost feel the electricity running through the wires and into the bulbs. It was like the current was running through me. It drove my eyes open, made my head thrash back and forth; it forced me to scream. It felt like I’d been electrocuted—not just pain, but an excruciating amount of agony pounded in every part of me.
And I was still here…in the torture chamber. Still tied to the chair. Still naked.
When I tried to speak, my tongue ached from where I had bitten into it, where Breath had chomped on it. My cheeks hurt from where he had squeezed and slapped. My toes…
I looked down, and the ends of my toes were raw. The tops of my feet looked like a dog’s chew toy. My ankles looked like they had been painted red. The babies hadn’t just bitten me; they had fed on me. And the blood wasn’t just on my body; it was all over the floor.
It reminded me so much of…
“I thought you’d find this scene familiar.”
I jumped at the sound of Breath’s voice, which came from behind me. I didn’t know how, but he’d read my thoughts without even seeing my face. There was only one other time I’d seen so much blood. Breath knew that. He’d done this on purpose.
He wanted me to relive it.
He moved in front of me and knelt in the red puddle. This was the first time I’d seen him in the light. He was thinner than I’d imagined. Not scrawny, but not fit. He had a patchy beard and small eyes and an evil dimple on his left cheek.
“All this blood came from your feet,” he said. “There’d be so much more if I put a bullet in your chest.”
I could picture it because I’d seen all the blood that surrounded Paulie when he’d been shot in the chest.
Breath wanted me to picture it.
He stared at me as he dragged his hand through the pool of blood. “Was it hard lying to Garin? Pushing him away because you couldn’t stand yourself? Or watching Billy shoot up, knowing you could help him, but you were too selfish to tell him the truth?”
How did he know? How had he gotten inside my head?
“The truth hurts worse than your feet do right now, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t have to tell him; he knew. He seemed to know almost everything already…everything but the identity of the killer. His accuracy was as terrifying as the torture.
“You saw Paulie’s murderer…” He pressed his finger into the blood and used it to draw over the cement.
It took a minute before I realized he was drawing the outline of a body. Paulie’s body.
“I want to know who it is.”
Paulie…his arm had been bent slightly inward. His face fully pressed into the pavement. His right leg was straight, his left turned outward at the knee.
I saw it in my head. Over and over.
And Breath captured it all perfectly.
Too perfectly.
“Let me out!” I cried.
“You want out? Then, start talking. I’ll even let Garin out. I’ll put you both in a boat and ship you back to the mainland where Garin’s plane can take you to the States.”
My eyes were burning from the light. Our cell had been so dimly lit that it felt like I’d been in the dark for…weeks? Months? My hair dripped down my back, keeping me constantly freezing. The temperature in here didn’t help. And the cold seemed to make my wounds hurt even more. Even my brain ached, making it hard to process what he was saying.
“What do you mean, take us back to the States?”
“Where do you think you are, puta? Fucking Miami? Rhode Island? West Virginia?”
I looked around the chamber, as if the answer were somewhere inside here. But there were no windows, no maps, no signs telling me anything. “Where are we?”
“Margarita Island.” His accent suddenly became thicker, rolling the Rs, something he hadn’t done before.
“Where is that?”
“Venezuela, baby. So, if you’re a good girl, I’ll have the boat take you to Caracas where Garin’s plane will be. You’ll never have to return, never have to see this cell again. Never have to get any more love from my little babies.” He got up and leaned into my ear. “Never get gang-raped by my boys.” His tongue wiggled around my earlobe, and I could smell the coppery tang of blood. “Never get to feel more of my cum on you.”
I shook my head, but his tongue didn’t move. He didn’t move.
“I can’t.”
“It’s simple.”
“It’s not fucking simple!” I gasped as I felt something solid against the bottom of my throat. It was freezing, sharp.
He held it in place but pushed it deeper into my skin. When I felt the slice, I knew it was a knife.
“Like I said, it’s simple. You tell me what I want to know, or I’ll slit your throat.”
I tried to calm my mind, my breathing, my heart that throbbed out of my chest. Every time I filled my lungs, the knife pushed deeper into me. I didn’t know how I was going to stay calm, but I needed to.
Garin.
I had to pull out one of those memories that I had saved. His face, his touch. The way he made me feel. Garin would tell me not to panic. He would tell me to breathe. He would get my mind off the knife, off this chamber, off all the pain in my body. Garin would tell me Breath couldn’t kill me because I was the only person who knew the truth.
If I died, the secret died with me.
“What’s happening on the first?” Breath asked.
The first, I repeated in my head.
He’d heard my conversation with Garin.
“They have until the first. Then, things will get interesting.”
At least that was a question I could answer. But, now, I knew he could hear everything that had been said inside our cell…everything that had been moaned.
Or had Garin told Breath what I had said?
The thought left as quickly as it came. Garin wouldn’t have told him anything. Garin wouldn’t do that to me. He’d take torture before he betrayed my trust.
“My brother,” I said. “He’s coming on the first.”
“Why?”
“He comes to Florida once a month…to visit my mother.”
“That’s a long trip from New Jersey. Why does he come so often?”
“They’re really close, like best friends. Mom doesn’t like to travel, so he comes to her.”
They were close, but that wasn’t the reason he came to Florida every month.
“Tell me why things will get interesting.”
The blood oozed out of the cut on my throat and dripped between my breasts. My chest was covered.
More red. More…
Breathe, Kyle.
“He’ll come to my house,” I finally said, “and when he realizes I’m not home and I haven’t been to work, he’ll come looking for me.”
As Breath laughed, the knife wiggled on my neck. “Puta, your brother isn’t going to find you. We left no trace of your kidnapping. He can dig and search every fucking crevice of North America, but you and Garin simply”—he breathed a puff of air into my ear—“vanished.” He walked around to the front of me and straddled my legs. “Do you know what my boys do to punks like your brother?”
“He’ll know I’m missing. That was all I was trying to say—”
“We gut them.” He pointed the knife to the middle of my forehead. “We start here, stabbing right through the sinuses. Not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to paralyze with pain. Then, we use a chainsaw and run it down the middle of his face and cut off his nose.” He smiled, showing me his rotted teeth. “Who needs a nose anyway, right?” He licked mine, slowly rimming and flicking each nostril. “We skip down to the legs, tearing through the muscle, shredding the tendons, snapping the bones. Do you know why we skip the chest?”
I shook my head as his erection pushed against my stomach. Death got him hard; gutting innocent victims turned him on. He was a monster—much worse than I’d thought.
And I was at his mercy.
“Because slashing through his chest would kill him right away,” Breath said, unbuttoning his pants, his dick falling through the hole of his boxers. “We want him to feel the sharpness of the blade as it rips him apart. Then, we let him scream until he dies. Once his heart finally stops beating, we slice open his chest.” He shifted on top of me, pushing his dick up toward my ribs, holding the back of my neck so that I couldn’t move. “Maybe I’ll have one of my boys go to Florida on the first and bring your brother here.” He moaned as he rubbed his dick over my stomach, pushing hard enough that my skin gave him friction. “Because I want to gut him. I want to gut anyone that tries to save you. And I want you to watch while I do it.” The way he rocked his hips and groaned reminded me of a rabid raccoon. Spit shone across his blackened smile. His eyes spread wide and his pupils dilated. “Look down, puta. I want you to see what you do to me.”
I didn’t want to look down. I knew what would happen if I did…and I knew what would happen if I didn’t. Just as I glanced at my lap, thick streams of cum shot over my stomach, reaching as high as my breasts.
He grunted my name, “Kyle, Kyle, Kyle,” with every pump of his hips. His seed smelled worse than his breath.
“You’re sick, you know that? You’re fucking sick and twisted, and I—”
“And you love it. That’s why you’re not telling me the killer’s name. You want more of my sickness. More of my cum. And I’m going to give it to you…”
“No!” My eyes caught the white glob that was slowly running down the top of my breast. I couldn’t take any more of his cum. His breath. I had to get out of here. I had to grab Garin and flee somehow. “I don’t want this—”
The knife was back. He belted me across the face with the handle. I screamed as blood squirted from my nose and sprayed across his chest. It dripped to my lips. When I opened my mouth to take a breath, I tasted the coppery flavor. And plastic.
There was always plastic.
He wiped the blood off my cheek and smeared it all over his. Then, he scooped up more and smiled as he painted it across his neck. “I’m going to cover myself in your blood as I cover you in my cum.”
“No!” I screamed as he shoved the tip of the knife into my bicep. “You just stabbed me.”
As blood poured from the hole, he leaned forward and rubbed his face in it. “Mmm,” he moaned. “And I’m going to stab you again.”
The roughness of his whiskers scraped across the wound, and I shouted from all the pain. I shouted as his tongue lapped my skin. I shouted from the burning I still felt in my feet. And I shouted from the look in his eyes. It was one I’d seen only once before, but it hadn’t been this intense…this delusional.
“Blood gets me all”—he glanced down as he jerked his erection against my stomach—“hard and fucking horny.”
When he smiled again, I shivered.
“Stick out your tongue.”
I knew this was only going to cause more pain since he’d grabbed ahold of my tongue before, but I didn’t think I had another choice. There was a knife in his hand, and he got off on the sound of my cries.
I slowly parted my lips, and as my tongue came through, he clamped his fingers around it. My eyes watered, and my stomach churned from the gagging.
“I want you to ask yourself how much your tongue means to you. Because there’s a good chance you’re going to wake up, and it’s going to be gone. I’m going to rip it from your mouth and use it to paint your blood all over my body, and then I’m going to use it to jerk off.”
He finally released my tongue, and I sucked in as much air as I could.
“You must be hungry by now. I could feed it to you.” He bit into my cheek so hard that I thought he was going to take a chunk out of it. “Your cum-covered tongue, piece by piece. I’ll even cut it up for you, so you don’t have to swallow it all at once. You can take your time with it. Really chew it.”
I couldn’t hide the emotion on my face, the anxiety that caused my whole body to shake, the fear that was gnawing as deeply as the babies had chewed my feet. He was getting what he wanted, and I was sure he could see it all over me.
How long could I endure this?
Was it even worth it?
Not if I didn’t get out of here alive.
“I have work to do.” He reached behind him, his hand returning with a syringe.
“What kind of work? What are you going to do to me? Are you going to take my tongue…” My voice drifted off as he shot the liquid into my body. I no longer felt my mouth. Or my tongue.
I felt heat.
I felt each ray wrap its toasty light around me.
And then all I saw was black.