Page 14 of Ruin

No one but her.

I shake my head. Bare my teeth.

“Enough,” I hiss lowly, and she stills at my rasped command.

Her fingers remain curled around my forearm, skin covered bones, bumpy and uneven. Nails gouging deep in my skin, broken and snagged. I can feel blood dribble down my arm to my elbow ditch, hers, mine. My split skin stinging like a friction burn, but I don’t look. Keeping my eyes on hers, both of them now peering at me aggressively from beneath matted strands of hair.

“Release,” I snarl, a grumble low in my own throat, echoing the one dying in hers.“Now.”

Her nails bite into my flesh harder, my eyes dropping to where she claws into me, her fingers blanching even whiter than her skin. I look at the blood blooming, beneath her filthy nails, bubbling up and spilling over. I can’t tear my eyes away, it looks tooright, the way her skeletal hands are cuffing me. Painting us both in red, I flick my gaze up, her eyes still on mine, my chin dipped. I shift a foot, drawing me closer, my mouth to her cheek where she is pulled flush with the bars, unable to squirm away even as she tries.

“I will snap every joint,” I whisper, “in every finger,” licking my lips, tasting the filth upon her skin as the tip of my tongue catches her cheek. “And then sever them from your hands.”

And just like that her hands drop from my arm. I don’t move, my nose pressed to her prominent cheekbone, the arch of it carving through her flesh like it’s trying to push free of her skin. Her ghostly breath slices down the front of my throat, the chill of it skating down my chest like a blade, hardening my nipples. I fist the chain coiled in my curled hand, my pulse thudding heavy in my tight grip, fingers vibrating with the bite of it. My eyes close, my breaths slow and I breathe in deep, she smells rotten, dirt, earth, shit, blood, and I don’t care, I can’t move. She doesn’t try and move away, she doesn’t try to touch me again, I can’t see her looking at me behind my closed lids, but I can fucking feel it. The heat of her stare as she wishes she could flay me alive.

I understand rage and pain, the fear of being caged. I know what it’s like to have a captor do unspeakable, degrading things to you. I should not want to replicate my trauma. But it’s all I can think about inside my fucked up skull. I want to make her feel what I felt, despite her probably having already experienced something horrific.

I want to be that horror.

I open my eyes, her face a blur, but I look her in her eyes regardless, the shadowed brown and blue orbs nothing but haze.

“Welcome to hell, Baby Bird.”

Chapter9

Charlie

Ilike it when she sleeps.

She doesn’t look peaceful.

No.

But she doesn’t look quite as hateful either.

I should have put a bullet between her eyes on night one.As was instructed. As was decided. Just like I said I did. It would have been what was best all round.

Couldn’t do it.

No one knows she’s still breathing.Let alone still in the house. Down here in my treasure trove of torture.

Still inside that fucking cage.

It makes my teeth ache. The way I clamp and grind my molars like I’m trying to force them retreating down into the bone of my jaw.

The thick iron bars make me think of my time shackled inside one. Admittedly, mine was smaller. Or, perhaps, just felt smaller because I’m so much larger than this tiny waif of a girl.

I also wore a collar and chain around my throat. One cuffed around my ankle. I push all those memories back. Look at her naked, pale body, smeared in fuck knows what. Dirt, probably shit and piss, I’m not sure I really care.

She still had it better than me.

It’s night nine and she should already be buried in a shallow grave or sent off to Heron Mill.

But she’s not.

And I’m hooked.

Completely and utterly obsessed with watching her.

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