Too many years of planning had gone into this to rush things. I was going to take my time. Over the course of days or weeks, I was going to ruin this bitch. The drug running through her body made her my doll, my marionette. Something I could play with, string along, manipulate and twist up.
All the ideas I had planned moved through my mind like a disgusting slide show, heating up my veins.
When my eyes snagged on hers again, I was sure she knew.
I brought her here, to this theater I’d purchased months ago, given up my dog for, because it just seemed so fitting. Old, abandoned, a place of good memories, tarnished and wrecked. Forgotten. I glanced around the room, the dusty workshop where old puppeteers created their masterpieces once upon a time.
I was going to create mine in the same place. For him. For Jake. For all the lives she’d ruined with her insanity.
“I don’t know why you’re smirking,” I said to Penny’s blank face. “You used to think you had some kind of fucking upper hand on me, but now you know you never did. So wipe that smugness away.”
When her face didn’t shift, I grabbed her chin and squeezed, making her cheeks smush together, her teeth clack. Her expression remained unchanged. Anger pouring through me, I backhanded her across the cheek and turned away, steadying my breathing before I did anything stupid, anything rushed.
My heart pounded as I let my gaze linger over the old equipment. Most of it was still here, which was a nice surprise, and my mind wandered to all the ways I could use it all to fulfill the burning need inside me. When I’d discovered this venue was on the market, everything snapped right into place. How I would heal the hell up.
When I figured out what I needed to do, what path to take, it started making more sense. I handed the keys back to my old apartment, left Boba with my motherand began working here. Building, plotting, digging myself deeper and deeper into this deranged vengeance hole.
And it was sick. Disgusting. Jake would disown me. But I had to. She had me broken, diseased. She needed to die for it. Suffer for it.
“You’re so pathetic,” I heard Penny say from behind me, but when I turned back to her with a scowl, nothing. Her cheeks were red from my fingers and knuckles, but her face was slack. I ran my hands through my hair and growled, trying to push the damned frustration out.
Shit. I was losing my fucking mind already.
I marched across the dark room and shoved a thick poker into the furnace I’d lit earlier, enjoying the way the flames leaped and licked. For a moment, I focused on them, wild but contained.
She had no idea how pathetic I was. How obsessed I’d become with her, with her death. I huffed a laugh. We weren’t even that far from the prison, only twenty minutes away, in the same town. My old apartment was a few blocks in the other direction. It was why I’d seen the for sale sign on the theater, stumbling homefrom a dank bar after yet another night drinking my pain to numbness.
Ignoring the lingering whispers in the back of my mind that she was teasing me, taunting, getting under my skin, I pulled out my phone. It had only been hours since we’d left the prison, and the riot was still in full swing, all over the news whenever I glanced at my phone.
Still, they’d figure out soon she was missing.
Maybe even tie it to me.
But they would never find us in here. And I wasn’t sure I had planned for either of us to get out of here alive. I had food, water, everything. No one would even know this place wasn’t still abandoned for many more years.
Heat raced through me.
Jake wouldn’t forgive me for the revenge I was enacting, which hurt. Maybe I didn’t deserve to live after she was gone. Maybe rotting away here right with her would be my penance for not being the bigger, better person.
“Okay,” I said, bracing myself, walking around the table Penny laid on, digging my nail into her skin justto frighten her. I grabbed a blindfold and slid it over her eyes, removing the last of her awareness. She’d still be able to hear me, to feel what I did, but that would only be heightened. And I wouldn’t have to look into her teasing eyes.
I picked up one of the carving tools from a workbench, lying next to an unfinished marionette, and brought it to Penny’s prone body. The cool metal dragging across her face must have frightened her, but she was still. I smirked this time, relishing that power she couldn’t deny me now.
“I think I’ll carve you up. Take chunks from you with this wood carver. Shave your body down to your bones step by step. Inch by inch until you’re only a skeleton. Then I’ll string you up and use you.” I paused and slammed the tip of the tool into her arm. It was old, with a soft wooden handle and a curved metal plate, almost like a spoon with a sharp edge. It didn’t slide in easy.
Her skin came out in goosebumps as I scooped a mound of flesh free, and her jaw tensed, only a fraction, but she was stuck in her own private hell. Unableto see. To react. To cry out or beg. She was in so much pain that it was overriding the sedation. Christ.
Like it was a fucking melon baller, I worked, scooping little chunks of her flesh from her arm, hitting the bone and scraping along it, until from wrist to elbow, she was covered in these small, messy, gushing holes, red muscle and white bone exposed, drowning in blood.
I snorted when I took her in; her arm swiss cheese. I had the urge to grab some crackers from my kitchen and have a sick feast of creamy skin, scarlet blood and pink, bruising flesh. Despicable.
The holes bled profusely, so when it looked like she was losing too much, I used a sterile rag to clean her up. I wanted her alive for as long as possible, to suffer as long as possible.
What a boon that she thought I wanted to free her to love her. That she followed me from the relative safety of that prison. All those shifts I spent debating how I could kill her, torture her, and make it look like an accident within the confides of that building. And all the time she’d been trying to get me to set her free,was falling right into my trap while she decided she was weaving her own. Stupid bitch.
Everything had fallen into place, and itchy kind of perfection I struggled to trust. But I needed to.
Her finger twitched, an indication that the drugs were wearing off, and fuck, I wanted her to scream. To cry. This silence from her was what I was supposed to need, but shit, her reactions, her screams, her fight. Icravedit.
