Hm.
The next time Adrian opened the box, he proceeded to poke a needle into my neck. He didn’t say anything, didn’t cast a glance at me. I think less than an hour hadpassed, but it was impossible to know in here. I’d let my mind wander to wherever it wanted, no guidance. His demeanor had shifted; walls built high. I kept my mouth shut. Not least because whatever the hell he’d injected me with made it hard to move any muscles, including my face.
It was the isolation cells, only worse. But I was prepared, well-versed in sitting in my own head, living a whole life in my skull. Memories, fantasies, I let it all wash over me, and before I knew it; the light came back. His eyes came back.
I grunted at the sting from the needle, expecting to fall into unconsciousness again, but I didn’t. Instead, my limbs stopped working. I couldn’t twitch my toes or wiggle my fingers. And that itch on my nose had gone nowhere. Even more now that my face hung numb and loose.
“Wha…” I tried to say, but as he started undoing the ropes that restrained me, all function left. I think I pissed myself, too, but I lacked the ability to check. Everything just went lax. Not my mind, though. She was on fire.
Adrian lifted me from the box once I was loose, floppy and wide awake, taking no care not to bash my body into the sharp edges. He carried me across the room, and from my position hanging upside down over his shoulder, while I could only really see his ass, there was an occasional glimpse of more, of what looked to be a workshop.
I couldn’t work out what kind of workshop though, only that there were tools, piles of wood, benches, dust and dirt. It was dark, a low ceilinged, sweeping sort of space that appeared decades untouched. But Adrian moved through, knowing it well.
“When I was planning this,” he said, placing me on a splinter-filled table, not delicately, “I couldn’t decide what to do. What would feel satisfactory.”
He turned my head to the side, tipped just a little, so I had no choice but to look at him. I couldn’t even blink; my eyeballs already drying out and stinging. My brain screamed at them to shut, to moisten, but nothing. It was infuriating. Interesting.
Adrian pulled a large leather bag onto his lap and started rummaging through, while still talking to me. “I thought about Jake, about what he would want.”Adrian laughed, bitter and icy. “And it for sure wasn’t this. He would hate me for this, despise my actions. But that’s why I decided to do it. It’s what he wouldn’t have the balls to want.”
My heart pounded as Adrian started laying instruments out beside me, lining them up along my body. Some parts were cold, like metal; others rough, wood maybe. I failed to figure it out. I was so locked in on what Adrian was trying to say.
“I read the police report, you know? And his autopsy. I know exactly what you did to him. Every single little step of your sickness and how it leached out into my baby brother.” Adrian’s voice sounded thick with emotion, but rough with anger too. “I was familiar with your crimes beforehand, adjacent to your case. Had helped work through some of the evidence with the lead detective.”
Adrian leaned forward, almost nose to nose with me, like he was studying my reaction as he brought what looked like a long, thin screwdriver to my eye. “The idea of you laying a finger on any of my loved ones used to give me nightmares,” he growled.
He froze, as still as me, the metal of the tool in his hand stinging my cornea. His breathing picked up, and for a second, I was sure this was it. The moment he did it. Killed me, took me from the world like he so craved.
But almost as fast as he came in with the tool, he sighed and leaned back, returning it to my side.
When I’d killed Jake, I’d been buried in my psychosis. Every man I saw became a demon; all of them needed to die. I believed that deep in the pit of me, that it was best for the world. Any man that wanted me, or any woman, in any capacity, must have been willing to snatch from her. Steal and rape and plunder.
So when I’d overheard a guy in a bar discussing how proud he was of his big brother for working on my case, gossiping about how close they reached to catching me, I saw red. And when I turned to him, spoke to him, and realized he would follow me anywhere, it sang like fate.
Revenge for something that hadn’t even happened yet. This detective would be the one to capture me, and for that, he needed to suffer.
And Jake came along with such naïve ease. A shy drag of my fingers down his arm, a wicked smile and a suggestive line or two about what I wanted to do to him, and he followed me like a little lamb.
To think Adrian was in that bar too, all those years ago, and that it was the last time he saw his brother alive… I didn’t know how to feel. Jake was still a man who wandered into a dark alley with a woman he’d just met to do evil things to her, he had to be.
“You cut him.” Adrian laid a knife on my stomach, showing it to me first and holding it there long enough that I had no choice but to take it in, to study the way the metal glinted in the dull yellow light. “You hit him.” This time, it was a hammer Adrian presented to me. “You sliced his throat.” A razor. “And you killed him, took his life away.” A syringe, a see-through liquid inside.
Adrian sighed and sat back, surveying me, and all I could do was stare. Not even twitch a fucking muscle.
“And now you’re going to feel every single thing he did.”
Twenty-Three
Adrian
While she lay there, just staring at me all blank, unable to even glare, I pulled her clothes off. Her soiled leggings, the shirt off her back. It all came away with precision, without a glance at the body beneath the fabric. I had no desire to see her in that way, as the sexual being she’d tried to be for me.
But whenever I caught her vacant eyes, I swore I could see the emotion behind them. It wasn’t possible. The muscle relaxant was strong enough to knock down a man twice her size, but there was something there. I didn’t even think it was anger or hatred. It was like she was being fucking nosy. I resisted the urge to shut her eyes so I could work without her silent judgment.
She needed to see everything.
I had to move the tools back onto her body after I was done, hoping each one made her wince in her twisted mind, made her curious about what might happen to her next. I hoped she was sick with it.
But her dead eyes told me otherwise.
