Page 80 of The Way We Rot
She watched me move the knife to her stomach and press in. “You stabbed him how many times?” I asked, knowing she’d realize what I was referring to.
“Seven,” she lied. Or she didn’t remember. Damn troll, not even knowing the minutiae of her own murder.
“Seventeen.” I slashed the small blade across her stomach, a shallow cut that caused a thin line of blood to form. I wanted to lick it up and feed it to her.
“I won’t count again,” she said through a wince, still stony, distant, vacant, unlike before.
With a chuckle, I smirked. “I don’t expect you to.”
It only took a little bit to position her how I wanted again, and with an aching slowness, I pushed my cock back inside her body, my eyes rolling at how welcome I was, how warm and soft and tight she was. “Fuck,” I muttered. “You constantly drive me to distraction.”
She panted when I slammed into her, and kept watch again, studying me close as I drove myself in and out, slow and steady, not for any purpose but to fuck her. No end goal. The need to burrow myself intoher body was too strong; the urge to wreck her was consuming.
“He was a good man,” I growled. “The best of us.” I swiped my fist over her wounds. “A damn saint.” My fist landed on her flesh, met with a grunt. “Fucking admit it!”
“No!” she cried, though she had almost done so before. “He was going to hurt me. He was.”
“No, he wasn’t, little killer,” I replied. “We have proof of that.”
“You have no idea what he said to me,” she spat back, wincing from the pain. She tried to move, to get up, maybe argue her case, but I pinned her down, slapped her face.
Grasping her cheeks, I squeezed hard, making her keep her attention on me. “I knew him, Penelope. I knew my brother.”
She shook her head, pained. “No.” For the first time, there was true fear in her eyes, pain and anguish that looked foreign on her. Gone was the smirking, the playfulness she used to hide her emotions. In its place, like I’d carved right into her messed up brain, despair.
“Tell me, Penelope,” I said, then shouted. “Tell me!”
She cried out, a shrieking, sobbing pain, and her whole body relaxed. “He didn’t touch me, okay? Never did anything to tell me he would. But he was a bad man, hewas.”
“He wasn’t.”
“He was!” her voice broke. “He was because he was there. All of you—”
I clamped her mouth shut with my hand, didn’t want to fucking hear it anymore. She had nothing useful to say. “Shut up.”
She watched me rest the blade at her stomach again, and above the slash I’d made, I began to carve. Carve a word I needed to see on her flesh.
"No," she cried through my palm. "You're all rapists, killers, evil. You are." She was trying to convince herself. Even now.
It took fourteen slices to finish the word across her stomach. ‘KILLER’ in dripping red, over her belly button, the K slicing up high to her rib cage, the R sliding down, toward where our bodies met, where my cock still slid in and out of her, rough but steady.
She shifted from the weeping victim, turning, bore the pain, swallowed it up, used it, tears streaming from her eyes as if she was locked in her own internal battle. She writhed, playing on what she thought I wanted, massaging her tits and running hands across her skin, and smiled through the motions. A blank smile, empty. When I nicked her rib cage, when the blade sunk in too far, she laughed and gasped. But it was fucking fake; that spark behind her eyes was gone. Dead.
Penelope wasn’t in there anymore. Something else was.Penny was playing.
“More,” she cried, her voice high and breathy. “I’m close.”
I fucked her through it, holding the blade in my fingers, using my thumb to rub her clit. The blade nicked my stomach as I drove into her, leaning over her to see her face better, to see what would happen when this fake as fuck Penelope tipped over the edge. Would that be false, too?
“Adrian,” she moaned as she came, spasming and flailing.
When she was mid-way through, I moved the knife, rested it against her throat. As she came down, she noticed, her eyes flashing.
“Do it,” she demanded, blanking even more. “Do it.” She looked gone. Vacant. Weird.
No.
I held the knife there, pushing in just enough to pierce the skin under her chin. This was how she killed Jake. These were the final moments of his life, laid out beneath her, slices and stabs across his body, her blade at his throat.
