Page 39 of Blood Ties
There’s no point in hiding when I’m leaving a clear trail. I have to run.
My feet slip against the stairs as I race down, but I make it down to the living room. I try not to think about that last night here, about spin the bottle, about whether or not Knox is going to kill me if he catches me. I focus on the door at the front of the house.
By the time I reach it, Knox’s boots are pounding down the stairs. That bastard— There’s no way that was twenty seconds— But the door is open and I’m running, kicking up dirt, my clean feet quickly caked in mud. I remember getting lost in the maze of the junkyard, so I head the opposite way, toward the barn.
Fuck, I’m weak. I’m already waning, a stitch cramping my side, my bare feet stinging. But there’s nothing to do but keep running. I don’t dare look back to see how close Knox is. I can’t hear his footsteps over my own frantic panting, but I know he’s coming.
I yank open the door to the barn and stumble in, and—
And stop, my mind going blank with horror. This isn’t an animal pen.
The concrete floor is stained rusty brown. So is the metal table in the center of the room, which has straps on the sides to restrain someone. My eyes dart from the rusty drain on the floor to the tools hanging on the wall. A bone saw, a meat cleaver—
A weight slams into me from behind. I cry out, and a hand clamps over my mouth.
“Looks like you found the butcher room,” Knox whispers into my ear. He sounds giddy, barely even out of breath. His other arm snakes around my waist, holding my naked body against him. He’s rock-hard, erection straining against his jeans as he grinds against my naked ass. Too late, I realize this was all just foreplay for him. He cleaned me up and chased me down knowing it was always going to end like this. “This is where my brother chopped up your friends.”
“No,” I moan, muffled against his palm.
“Yes.” His hand slides from my mouth to my neck, his grip almost a caress, his breath hot in my ear. “Kai dragged their bodies here and he cut them into pieces. Then he fed the pieces to the pigs.”
Tears run down my face. “Stop. Stop—”
“No,” he says. “I caught you. You lost. Now it’s time for my prize.”
I thought I was getting numb to the horror of this situation. But when Knox shoves me forward and I realize what he intends to do, I scream and recoil. It’s no use, I’m already exhausted and so much weaker than he is. I can’t stop him as he bends me over that bloodstained metal table and unzips his pants. He grabs me by the back of the neck and shoves me facedown on the table, my cheek pressing hard into the metal. He pushes into me from behind in one brutal thrust.
It hurts — the stretch of him inside me, the table’s edge digging into my hips. But I almost relish the pain, because it’s a distraction from the bone-deep terror of this room, and the mental image he planted in my head.
I had almost fooled myself into thinking that Kai wasn’t a complete monster like the rest of them, that maybe there was something gentle and good in him. But now all I can think of is him standing over this table with a cleaver in his hand.
Knox grunts and swears. “You’re so fucking tight.” His hips slam against my ass as he fucks me, a dull slap of flesh that makes me think of a blade sinking into meat. Kai swinging the blade.
The only blessing is that it doesn’t take long. But when he jerks and gasps and thrusts deep inside of me as he finishes, I just lay there, limp. Even when he zips up and scoops me off my feet to bring me back to the basement, I can’t bring myself to move. I’ve lost the will to fight. Maybe that was his goal this whole time.
?Chapter Twenty
