Page 17 of The Taskmaster
“I’ll mail it to your son,” I sneered. “And make sure your mutilated face is staring up at him as he opens the fucking box. I’ll send your shrivelled cock to your wife and score it with a tally for all the women you’ve raped. I’ll make sure she knows what the number is for, too.”
Every breath I took was a heavy breath of anger and revulsion for the time I’d wasted. My chest rose and fell rapidly as I stared with scorn at the useless fucker on my screen. He was a pitiful excuse of a player. A nobody who didn’t deserve to die at the hands of my genius. And then, I realised I was fucking pissed at the girl, too. This wasn’t how my night was supposed to end. She’d dropped this piece of shit into my lap and into my game. And it had gone so fucking wrong.
Feeling rage fire through me, making me shake with the need for vengeance I wouldn’t get, I did something I’d never done before. I pulled the plug early on the game and flicked the switch I was going to use for the last part of this task.
Hidden jets in the ceiling sprang to life, spraying and covering the walls, floor, and him in hydrochloric acid. He started to scream as the acid burned through his skin, his screams growing louder and more frantic as it penetrated muscle and then scorched bone. He thrashed, writhing on the floor as pools of blood-red acid gathered beneath him. And then, it went quiet as the acid took hold. Burning and dissolving a man that no one would mourn. A man that was no more, because the acid was already doing its job and dissolving what used to be a vile, pathetic excuse of man called Peter. Soon there’d be nothing left of him. And good riddance.
I had better things to do with my time tonight.
Better people to spend my time with.
I picked up my phone to check the location of the tracker I’d slipped into her pocket, and it showed me she was in an apartment building on the other side of town. It was time to pay her a little visit and show her what happened to anyone who wasted my fucking time.
Chapter Eleven
THE TASKMASTER
For a policeman’s daughter, you’d think she’d have better security in her building. But no. There was no CCTV, and the locks on the main door were fucking child’s play to pick. Once I made it through into the foyer, I walked over to the post boxes, and sure enough, there was her name written on the box for flat number twelve.
Abigail Walters.
She was making this shit too easy.
Was she actively rebelling against her father and making herself a target? The walk home. The shit security. And now there was a fucking red sign pointing right at her, saying ‘pick me’.
I took the stairs to the second floor, then turned left, following the numbers of the flats until I came to number twelve. I stopped outside and glanced up and down the corridor before I put my ear to the door to listen for any sounds coming from inside. I couldn’t hear anything, so I stepped back, let my tools work their magic on her lock, and then turned the handle and opened her door slowly, quietly, impressed that it made no noise to announce my arrival.
Abigail Walters, you are the perfect victim.
It made me feel a little cheated that I wasn’t working harder to get to her. But then, I’d worked fucking hard on setting up that game tonight, and she’d ruined it. She needed to know how that made me feel. And she would. Tonight.
I stepped straight into her living room and closed the front door behind me. Her apartment was tiny, but there was a gentle hint of vanilla in the air that made me pause and inhale to savour it. No doubt, it was a scent meant to calm and soothe. Something rich women had in their apartments to mask the stench of reality. It wouldn’t help her tonight, though.
The living room comprised of a sofa, a TV, a small coffee table and a bookcase. There was one small window overlooking the street outside. The streetlights helped to light up the room I was standing in. Cream walls, beige carpet, old wooden furniture. At first glance, there was nothing here that told me what kind of woman Abigail Walters was. But as I took another step into the room, I saw the bookcase lined with romance books, some horror, and some titles which made me think she had a darker side.
One of the shelves of her bookcase was reserved for framed photographs. Some with friends, but a lot with her parents, especially her father. She was a daddy’s girl, that was clear. He always had his arm around her, and she rested her head on his shoulder or his chest, depending on where they were. Fishing together, on the beach, lazing on a boat. They obviously did a lot together, and instinctively I felt my jaw clench. She’d had the sort of childhood that, for me, was idyllic. Heaven, even. To her, it’d be normal. If she knew what my normal looked like, she wouldn’t fucking cope. No one would.
I saw a photo tucked in the front of a frame of her family. An extra photo of her with her dad at a restaurant, sitting at a table, smiling. I picked it up, studying the way their eyes shone withouta care in the world; the laughter lines around her father’s face as he grinned for the camera, and her easy smile. They didn’t have a fucking clue what the real world was like. Well, maybe he did, but he obviously faked it well.
I pushed the photo into my back pocket and turned to face the room. On the coffee table was a pile of opened envelopes.
Her post.
Interesting.
You could tell a lot about a person by the sort of post they received.
I picked up the pile and started to rifle through it. There were a few fliers, selling clothes and furniture. A bank statement that showed she was very overdrawn. Ridiculously, in fact, and the things listed on her statement were payments to multiple credit cards and finance companies. She’d walked home to save her pennies, but she needed a lot more than pennies to get herself out of this mess. I put the bank statement in my pocket, along with the photo, and moved to the kitchen. If you could call it that. It was tiny, with a fridge, a sink, a few cupboards and not much else. I opened the fridge, making sure to be quiet, and wasn’t surprised in the slightest to find that it was virtually empty. There was half a carton of milk, a half-drunk bottle of white wine, a packet of sliced ham that was a week out of date, and a jar of something even I wouldn’t eat. This girl wasn’t living the perfect life that she portrayed in her photos online. And things were about to get a whole lot worse for her.
I moved back into the living room and turned to face the door across the room. The door that’d lead to her bedroom. That’d lead to a whole night of fun for me.
I took slow, measured steps towards it, my breath catching in my throat as I revelled in the feeling of anticipation and expectation for what could happen. I loved the thrill of power, knowing I held it all and they had none.
I wrapped my fingers around the cool metal of her bedroom door handle and twisted it slowly, pushing the door open as my heart beat faster, racing like my mind. Wondering what lay behind this door.
The room was dark and silent, but that vanilla scent was stronger in here. Was that her natural scent?
I sidestepped into the room, making sure to close the door behind me, so the hazy light from the living room wouldn’t disturb the stillness of her sanctuary. There was a simple dressing table with a stool and a mirror. Makeup and other products lined up neatly on each side. A small wardrobe was beside it, and in the middle of the room was her bed, a double bed, with her curled up asleep right in the middle of it.
