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While fingering me again hours later, Drake kissed me and bit into my lip, drawing blood. I flinched, the pain a hot burning ember shocking me. But instead of pulling away, I kissed him even deeper, and moaned as the agony sent another orgasm thrumming deep inside my pussy, contracting around the fingers still pumping away inside me.
Pain mingled with ecstasy, reminding me that even in the midst of running for our lives, there was no denying the brutal bond that held us captive to one another.
“Mine,” he growled against my lips, sealing the vow with a kiss that tasted of blood and longing.
“Yours,” I moaned back, surrendering to the darkness that promised oblivion from the relentless pursuit that haunted us. Even as the plane carried us toward the supposed safety of Haiti, our reprieve was fleeting. But for now, in Drake’s arms, I found a temporary haven—a place where violence and passion collided, granting us a momentary escape from the horrors that awaited beyond the clouds.
When the plane finally landed, I had the feeling that we’d made it. We were safe. At least for now.
Chapter 12
Dahlia
The safehouse loomed ahead, a squat building scarred by years of neglect and secrets. The drive from Port-au-Prince had been silent, a tension coiling like serpents between us. Yet nothing, not the silence nor the dread that gnawed at my insides, could have prepared me for the macabre tableau that greeted us as we stepped through the threshold. Drake had stopped at an airport shop and bought another burner phone, and the entire taxi ride from the airport, he’d been trying and failing to make a call. He looked frustrated and worried.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, my anxiety begging to turn its ugly head.
“I’m not sure.” Drake shoved the phone back into his pocket, sitting back in silence.
The city was awful. Exactly how I’d pictured a third world country. Massive expanses of shanty type houses along hills and mountains, pastel-colored squares stacked one on top of another, shoved in so that every inch of land was used.
Watching it pass by through the window was strange, though. All those years I’d lived in just as much squalor and misery. Poor beyond reasoning, and happy to just have a roof over my head. Now? After only a few months living with Drake and the privilege that came with money, I already saw things with different eyes. I’d become inoculated with money and power and freedom. I was both surprised by and disheartened to know it only took a few months to go from living in hell to feeling sorry for those who did.
The taxi pulled up at a home that was in what looked like the only nice area of Port-au-Prince. A small villa, set high in the hills overlooking the city. Compared to the other buildings around it, this house looked a bit weather worn, but otherwise was well taken care of.
Drake paid the taxi driver, and the car pulled away, leaving us in the small courtyard. The nearest house was about two hundred yards away and surrounded by a twenty-foot steel fence with sharp points and barbed wire atop it. This house also had a fence, though not quite as tall, but still formidable looking. Drake had explained on the drive over that the more well-off areas were always worried about crime from the slums creeping in, and most homes here took precautions like this.
“Come on,” Drake said, taking my hand and leading me to the front door.
He glanced around at the windows and doors, obviously checking for some sort of forced entry. After seeing nothing, he punched in the code on the door to unlock it and stepped inside. Before I’d gone more than a few feet into the entryway, I realized something was wrong. A strong and putrid smell of fresh decay assaulted my nose. Greasy, fatty, and sour. The scent of a dead body rotting.
Drake noticed it too, freezing beside me. When I looked at him, I couldn’t even describe the expression on his face. A storm of confusion, horror, and fear. There was a strange twitch in his left eye, and I had the distinct feeling he was on the verge of breaking down in shock. Why, though? If there was death here, then it was nothing more than we’d seen before.
Leaving Drake, I took a few quick steps past the foyer and rounded the corner into the living room and jolted to a stop at what I found. I’d seen death before. I’d tasted its acrid stench on my tongue, felt its cold fingers trace my spine. I’d felt the fluids of life dripping down my fingers, but the scene before us was something else—something grotesquely intimate. A man and woman were nailed to the wall, their skin pallid in the dim light, naked and exposed, gray with death. A heretical crucifixion or torture and agony.
The woman’s breasts were gone, flayed off and lying on the floor in a lump of red ruin, her eyes and the man’s had been scooped out. The red ruinous holes stared out at nothing, gaping and blind. Hundreds of other wounds were scattered across their bodies. Gouges, cuts, slices, and stabs, like a map of some debauched hellscape. The final act of violence was clear and deliberately horrifying. The man’s cock had been cut off, leaving a red stub and sagging balls behind. His severed penis, used as a final symbol of power by their murderer was lodged inside the woman’s vagina, a mockery of their last embrace.
“Fuck,” I murmured, my voice hollow in the stillness. I looked over the carnage with almost clinical detachment—this wasn’t my first dance with the devil. I noted the precision of the cuts, some were fresh while others had healed over.
“This was prolonged suffering,” I murmured to myself. Whatever was done to these people was dragged out over a day or two. But the bodies were fresh, only hours old. The coppery scent of blood and the sour stench of piss and shit lingered, thickening the air. The blood only dried tacky, not yet the matte finish it would take on when fully dry.
A choked gasp tore me from my analysis. Drake stood rigid, his face drained of all color, his eyes wide with a horror that eclipsed my own. His mouth hanging open in shocked confusion and distress. For a moment, he was a statue, etched with incredulity. I’d never seen him look like that. Like a lost little boy.
“Drake?” My voice sounded alien even to me, but he didn’t respond. He took a halting step forward, and the façade crumbled.
“Mom? Dad?” The words fell from his lips, fractured whispers of disbelief. His body shook with a visceral rage, his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles blanched.
His mother and father? I gaped at him and turned to the bodies again. Never had my assessment changed so fast. In the blink of an eye, the bodies had transformed from subjects of curiosity, into the gut wrenching and heartbreaking tableau that I now saw. No longer were they nameless bodies. These were the people who’d raised Drake. The people who, from his story, had given him a loving and comfortable home. People he loved.
“Drake!” This time my voice got through, sharp and commanding. I reached out, tentatively touching his arm. “We need to think?—”
“Think?” He wrenched away from me. Color surging back into his face, reddening his cheeks. “They’re dead. Fucking butchered!” He lifted his fists, shaking them maniacally in between the two of us. “He slaughtered my mother and father, Dahlia!”
Tears welled in his eyes, something that shocked me nearly as much as the realization about the bodies. I’d never seen this much emotion from him. Drake had always been so calm and collected. This was on the verge of breaking him, and I needed to talk him back from the edge.
His pain was a living thing, a specter that hovered between us. It clawed at my chest, unfamiliar and unwelcome. I was accustomed to the thrill that violence brought, the pulse of excitement that sang in my veins when blood pooled and screams echoed. But this—this was Drake’s agony, raw and unfiltered, and it sank its teeth into my soul.
“Fuck!” His roar echoed, a primal sound that ricocheted off the walls. His grief was a tempest, and it threatened to swallow him whole. He spun and slammed a fist into the wall, crushing the drywall beneath and leaving a gaping, fist-sized hole.
