Page 55 of The Way We Rot
“This hurts!” I said through a laugh. “More!”
I could almost feel his anger through the way he yanked my limbs, rough and sharp, a heat radiating through the vast space, like his aura was so pissed off, so dark, the rage rippled into the air.
It made me smirk, try to swing my body a little more like I really was at a play park on the swings. My hands were going numb, the pain in my arm was insane, jagged and clawing, but it only fed me and my stupid desire to make things worse for myself. Let him rip me clean away, bones and skin and tendons swinging and torn.
I shouted his name again, and the rope around my leg joints began to shift, moving my knees back so I was bowed forward, my front facing down, tits swaying, blood in my face.
“You want to fuck me like this?” I yelled through unwanted dizziness. “Just admit you’re enjoying this as much as me and we can move on with our day.”
He moved me until my limbs were at their limit, when another millimeter would make my muscles snap, my bones separate. I couldn’t even swing anymore because it made my bones scream too much, and I wasn’t strong enough to push through it and let them crack.
“You’re ruining my fun!” I screeched, blinking back the fog, desperate to look up and see what he was doing. All shadowy up there, fiddling with his strings. His puppet. Marionette. Whatever. He was loving it, loving hating me.
Everything hurt, from the metal digging into my skull to my muscles at the limit of their elasticity. And then… nothing. He didn’t say a word, didn’t show his handsome face.
I think he left me there for hours, with that loud music playing, just suspended a few feet above the dusty stage with no idea of how long it would be until I moved, until he let me down. Maybe he never would. Maybe this was how he wanted it to end for me, like heknew making it slow and fizzling would be the worst thing.
I didn’t enjoy not knowing.
But the second my eyes fell shut in fatigue, he stepped in front of me. Like he’d been there all along, waiting, this entire time for my body to relax, to show weakness.
“Penelope,” he said my name with reverence in his tone. I blinked slowly to bring him into focus, but still his form swam, wavy and foggy.
“Are you going to let me down now?” I asked. My hands and feet were numb; my head throbbed. My nipples were pointed so hard from the cold, and my stomach was clenching and unclenching. Hunger or fear, both? How long had it even been now? Not long. Not even a day. Maybe not quite half a day. Adrian was trying to work quick, moving me here, tying me up. But it still felt… distant, my mind struggling to track, like I was in a dreamland, a liminal space.
Adrian shook his head and lifted his hand to show me what he held. “You know what this is?” he asked, holding it inches from my eyes.
It was sharp, hooked, like what he’d used on my arm, but small, the hook deeper.
“It’s a carving knife,” he said. “One of the many tools I found after I bought this place. There is so much to explore, so many nooks and crannies to dig into. The owners who had it before, they left it all when they closed up.” He rested the metal of the knife against my cheek, just below my eye socket.
“I know you can tell I’m not sure what to do here.” He dragged the blade over my eye, laughing when I blinked to push it away. The metal felt horrible against my bare eyeball, cold and stinging. I didn’t want to lose my eye; I wanted to see it all.
“You’re talkative suddenly,” I huffed.
“You’re harder to break that I anticipated after years in prison.”
“You’ve been watching me all this time?”
His eyes darkened, a bad memory or something. “I’ve been waiting for my time.”
“Well, it’s here. So what are you going to do?”
Adrian leaned in so close to me, so close the blade squashed between both our faces, his warm breath fanned against my lips. He had to bend his body in anunnatural way to meet my eyes, to be nose to nose, but he did it.
“The best revenge is slow. Careful,” he whispered. “And we have all the time in the world.”
He placed the handle of the carving blade between my teeth, clamping my jaw shut with surprisingly delicate hands. “Bite down,” he told me. “If I come back and it’s not where I left it, I’m going to use it to carve out your eyes after all.”
Twenty-Five
Adrian
Istepped away from her, admiring the way she looked all strung up like a slaughtered pig, scuffs and streaks of blood on her skin, a curiosity in her eyes, and that carving tool between her teeth, making her jaw clench as she held onto it.
Her lack of terror was pissing me off, ruining everything. I was going to watch her last, fear-filled breaths if it killed me too.
Even now, as I told her what would happen if she dropped the old tool from between her teeth, she looked only keen, excited, curious to see where this night might take us. I hated it. Hated her.
