Page 42 of The Monster of Hotel No. 7
“I don’t need thanking, but forcefully strapping me down seems kind of rude, Sullen.”
Ah, she is trying to be so brave with her slight attempts at humor.
This time, I push my finger under the edge of her skirt, going higher.
Her entire thigh goes rigid and stiff and she presses her knees together.
I smile to myself. She doesn’t think I’m gorgeous. She knows I am disgusting.
“Relax,” I say as I hold her cerulean gaze, eerie in the darkness, like the mirage of a ghost staring back at me. “Widen your knees.” I keep my finger where it is, halfway up her thigh, waiting for her to comply.
“No,” she says, bratty and insolent.
“I don’t think you’re in a position to tell meno,”I reply calmly.
The buckles on the straps clank and I know she has shifted forward. I see her eyes loom closer, but I know that band around her throat won’t let her get too close. “Do you want to hear it again?No,Sullen.”
I almost think her funny.
But I only have this one night to steal enough memories to last me until my death. And I know the best way to distract an animal from their lower half is to torture their upper body.
I release my grip on her thigh and shift forward on my stool, the rusty wheels creaking in the dark.
I reach for the hem of her short shirt then slip my thumbs beneath the fabric and the bra she is wearing. It is a thin strip of cotton, no wires, and I fold up both it and the shirt, all the way to the strap above her breasts, exposing her in the cold dark.
She says nothing, but I can feel her rapid pulse beneath my gloved hand as I place it over her heart, the curve of her breast.
A soft whimper leaves her lips, torn unwillingly from her pretty mouth.
“Oh, dear,” I say softly. “It’s okay, Karia.” I brush my thumb over the tight, hard bud of her nipple, remembering it in my mouth only hours ago, before I had to rearrange the pieces of this board. “But it can hurt, if you’d like it to. When I told you to relax, widen your knees, you should have listened. Now I have nowhere to go but here, do you see how this works?” I circle her nipple, marveling over the feel of firm, soft skin even beneath my gloved hand.
“Do you want me to hate you?” she whispers in the dark, eyes flashing as she stares at me, defiant.
“Isn’t this what you let Cosmo do to you? Don’t you want to be a doll? You let him get you drunk so he can fuck you, touch you everywhere. Or do I have it wrong?” I muse out loud, for the first time a sickening thought occurring to me. “Did he…truly take advantage of you or—”
She makes a funny noise that I don’t immediately understand until I feel something warm on my face, wet and gliding down my cheek.
I still, sensing the saliva, amazed that with a foot between us, she could aim so well in the dark.
She spit on me.
I laugh a little, squeezing her breast and tugging softly before I let her go to swipe one finger over her fluid.
Then I push it into my mouth, savoring the light taste ofher,mingled with the leather of my glove.
“What if he did?” she snarls, now that I am no longer touching her, even though she is exposed to me, to this room. Completely helpless like a butterfly with pinned wings. “Would you want to avenge me, Sullen? As you do the same thing?”
I swallow her spit, then drop my hand to my thigh as I watch her. “If you are asking me if I could snap his jaw from his skull if he touched you like that, the answer isyes.”
She laughs. A brash sound, almost like her genuine laughter. It is braying in a way, noisy and loud, and I wish she were laughing at something else I said. I wish, for a moment, we were so far away from here. Things would be different then.
“Do you know what a hypocrite is, or did your dad not teach you that word?”
My jaw clenches, fingers curled into fists as I sit perfectly silent and still on the stool.
“Whatdidhe teach you, at all?” she continues, her tone haughty and biting. “The only way you can touch women is to tie them up? How many have you done this to, huh? Are there bodies buried under here from your little experiments? Do you fancy yourself a scientist? Does he? Father and son, working side by side in a lab of helpless women, thinkingthat’swhat makes a man? Did you both kill your mother, Sullen? Did you help your daddy as he tied up Mommy—”
I stand, then. I can’t help it as my pulse races and the stool rolls somewhere behind me and my palm is slammed over her mouth and I grip her jaw in my other hand, too tight.
