Blackness that came from…
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Eighteen
Garin
One Month Ago
My cell vibrated from the inside of my jacket pocket as I walked down the hallway to my bedroom. Shitty fucking timing. Had it been one minute later, my cock would have been in the ass of one of the twins. They weren’t identical. I wasn’t even sure they were sisters. But, hell, they both had blonde hair and light eyes, and they responded to the nickname. That was easier than remembering their names.
I’d left them in my bedroom a few minutes ago to get us some drinks. They were naked, kneeling on the bed. I was sure they were still in the same position, just waiting to suck the cum out of me. Those filthy mouths couldn’t get enough of my cock. They pumped that fucker with every part of their body until they got what they wanted—every goddamn squirt of it. Then, they ate it off me. They swapped it between their mouths. And they swallowed that shit down.
I fucking loved it when they came to my place.
But Billy’s name was on the screen of my phone, so they were going to have to wait a few more minutes before I joined them.
I walked to the doorway of my bedroom, set the glasses down on the floor, and held up a finger to let them know I’d be back. Then, I went into my home office and shut the door behind me. “What’s going on, Billy?”
“I met someone that said she used to do side work for my brother.”
I took a seat in the chair, shifting my pants to make room for my hard-on. Seeing those two bare pussies again had made my dick throb. “I thought you were going to take a break from this shit?”
“I was.” He exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “But then I came across this chick, and my search picked right back up. She said Paulie owed her money when he died.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“She’s a hooker, Garin.”
I shook my head, knowing this was just going to lead to more needles and black tar. “So, Paulie liked to get his dick wet with hookers. How the fuck is that going to help us find out who killed him?”
“Because he didn’t fuck her. This chick worked for him, and the money was for some tricks that he never paid her for.”
I pushed the chair back and leaned on the desk. “What are you talking about?”
“She said she wasn’t his only hooker. He had others, and none of them got paid.”
“Paulie wasn’t running a prostitution ring. We would have known.”
“Maybe we were wrong.”
Nah. I wasn’t fucking wrong.
Paulie ran drugs for the bosses. He didn’t work in prostitution. Prostitution was street level, and the bosses didn’t mess with it. The profits were risky because the girls OD’d faster than the guys could hire them.
When you worked for Mario and his crew, you didn’t have a side job or another source of income. The bosses owned you, and they gave you a small piece of your total earnings. If you tried to hide money, they found you…and they killed you.
The bosses hadn’t killed Paulie. We’d determined it was an outside job back when the murder happened, and the bosses knew nothing about the killer. But, if information was just now surfacing, there was a chance they’d heard about it.
“I’ll talk to the bosses,” I said. “But don’t expect this to lead to anything. If anyone knew what Paulie was up to, they were smart enough to keep their mouth shut. Do me a favor; keep yours shut, too—at least until I talk to the guys and get a better idea of what’s going on here.”
“Too late.”
Fuck
.
“Who’d you talk to?”
“Guys on the street. You know, the dealers who worked in the area at that time.”
Those dealers still worked for the bosses, so I was sure word had spread. I was surprised Mario hadn’t said anything to me about it.
“Did they know anything?” I asked.
“Nothing. Not even one of ’em had a clue on what Paulie was up to.”
He sounded deflated. I knew it wasn’t just from searching for Paulie’s killer.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll take it from here, but I want you laying low. If rumors start flying that Paulie had a side gig, the bosses are going to be pissed, and it’s not going to look good if you’re the one spreading them.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“While you’re laying low, how about you get some sleep? You sound like shit.”
I checked the screen of my phone. I’d been talking to Billy for almost ten minutes, and the girls hadn’t made a noise. I hoped one of them was still on her knees, her tongue running over the other’s cunt. I fucking loved watching them eat pussy.
“I’m fine.”
It made me crazy whenever he said that. He wasn’t healthy. He wasn’t rested. He wasn’t eating. He definitely wasn’t sleeping. He was shooting as much heroin as his body could handle. Every time I spoke to him, he sounded worse than the last time.
“You’re not fine. We both know it.”
“Don’t fucking worry about me. If you lecture me every time we talk, I’m going to stop calling you.”
If he stopped calling me, I’d have one of the guys track him down and shadow him, sitting with him every minute of the goddamn day. Telling him that would only start a fight. And fighting with Billy meant he’d only use more.
I couldn’t be the reason he cooked up more dope…considering I was the reason he’d started using in the first place.
“I’ll call you when I know something.”
He chuckled. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow then.”
“Yeah, tomorrow.”
I hung up and set the phone on my desk, knowing I’d call him whether I knew something or not. Maybe if I could get some answers or at least a little resolution, Billy would go to rehab for me.
I shook the mouse beside my computer, and the monitor lit up. I clicked on the feed for the master bedroom security camera, and a full-angle shot of my room popped up. I zoomed in on the bed. One of the twins was on her back, her head on my pillows, her knees bent. The other was buried, face-deep, in her cunt.
Just how I wanted them.
I exited the feed, left my phone on the desk, and walked to my bedroom.
Nineteen
Kyle
The lights flipped on. I could almost feel the electricity running through the wires and into the bulbs. It was like the current was running through me. It drove my eyes open, made my head thrash back and forth; it forced me to scream. It felt like I’d been electrocuted—not just pain, but an excruciating amount of agony pounded in every part of me.
And I was still here…in the torture chamber. Still tied to the chair. Still naked.
When I tried to speak, my tongue ached from where I had bitten into it, where Breath had chomped on it. My cheeks hurt from where he had squeezed and slapped. My toes…
I looked down, and the ends of my toes were raw. The tops of my feet looked like a dog’s chew toy. My ankles looked like they had been painted red. The babies hadn’t just bitten me; they had fed on me. And the blood wasn’t just on my body; it was all over the floor.
It reminded me so much of…
“I thought you’d find this scene familiar.”
I jumped at the sound of Breath’s voice, which came from behind me. I didn’t know how, but he’d read my thoughts without even seeing my face. There was only one other time I’d seen so much blood. Breath knew that. He’d done this on purpose.
He wanted me to relive it.
He moved in front of me and knelt in the red puddle. This was the first time I’d seen him in the light. He was thinner than I’d imagined. Not scrawny, but not fit. He had a patchy beard and small eyes and an evil dimple on his left cheek.
“All this blood came from your feet,” he said. “There’d be so much more if I put a bullet in your chest.”
I could picture it because I’d seen all the blood that surrounded Paulie when he’d been shot in the chest.
Breath wanted me to picture it.
He stared at me as he dragged his hand through the pool of blood. “Was it hard lying to Garin? Pushing him away because you couldn’t stand yourself? Or watching Billy shoot up, knowing you could help him, but you were too selfish to tell him the truth?”
How did he know? How had he gotten inside my head?
“The truth hurts worse than your feet do right now, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t have to tell him; he knew. He seemed to know almost everything already…everything but the identity of the killer. His accuracy was as terrifying as the torture.
“You saw Paulie’s murderer…” He pressed his finger into the blood and used it to draw over the cement.
It took a minute before I realized he was drawing the outline of a body. Paulie’s body.
“I want to know who it is.”
Paulie…
his arm had been bent slightly inward. His face fully pressed into the pavement. His right leg was straight, his left turned outward at the knee.
I saw it in my head. Over and over.
And Breath captured it all perfectly.
Too perfectly.
“Let me out!” I cried.
“You want out? Then, start talking. I’ll even let Garin out. I’ll put you both in a boat and ship you back to the mainland where Garin’s plane can take you to the States.”
My eyes were burning from the light. Our cell had been so dimly lit that it felt like I’d been in the dark for…weeks? Months? My hair dripped down my back, keeping me constantly freezing. The temperature in here didn’t help. And the cold seemed to make my wounds hurt even more. Even my brain ached, making it hard to process what he was saying.
“What do you mean, take us back to the States?”
“Where do you think you are,
puta
? Fucking Miami? Rhode Island? West Virginia?”
I looked around the chamber, as if the answer were somewhere inside here. But there were no windows, no maps, no signs telling me anything. “Where are we?”
“Margarita Island.” His accent suddenly became thicker, rolling the Rs, something he hadn’t done before.
“Where is that?”
“Venezuela, baby. So, if you’re a good girl, I’ll have the boat take you to Caracas where Garin’s plane will be. You’ll never have to return, never have to see this cell again. Never have to get any more love from my little babies.” He got up and leaned into my ear. “Never get gang-raped by my boys.” His tongue wiggled around my earlobe, and I could smell the coppery tang of blood. “Never get to feel more of my cum on you.”
I shook my head, but his tongue didn’t move. He didn’t move.
“I can’t.”
“It’s simple.”
“It’s not fucking
simple
!” I gasped as I felt something solid against the bottom of my throat. It was freezing, sharp.
He held it in place but pushed it deeper into my skin. When I felt the slice, I knew it was a knife.
“Like I said, it’s simple. You tell me what I want to know, or I’ll slit your throat.”
I tried to calm my mind, my breathing, my heart that throbbed out of my chest. Every time I filled my lungs, the knife pushed deeper into me. I didn’t know how I was going to stay calm, but I needed to.
Garin
.
I had to pull out one of those memories that I had saved. His face, his touch. The way he made me feel. Garin would tell me not to panic. He would tell me to breathe. He would get my mind off the knife, off this chamber, off all the pain in my body. Garin would tell me Breath couldn’t kill me because I was the only person who knew the truth.
If I died, the secret died with me.
“What’s happening on the first?” Breath asked.
The first
, I repeated in my head.
He’d heard my conversation with Garin.
“They have until the first. Then, things will get interesting.”
At least that was a question I could answer. But, now, I knew he could hear everything that had been said inside our cell…everything that had been moaned.
Or had Garin told Breath what I had said?
The thought left as quickly as it came. Garin wouldn’t have told him anything. Garin wouldn’t do that to me. He’d take torture before he betrayed my trust.
“My brother,” I said. “He’s coming on the first.”
“Why?”
“He comes to Florida once a month…to visit my mother.”
“That’s a long trip from New Jersey. Why does he come so often?”
“They’re really close, like best friends. Mom doesn’t like to travel, so he comes to her.”
They were close, but that wasn’t the reason he came to Florida every month.
“Tell me why things will get interesting.”
The blood oozed out of the cut on my throat and dripped between my breasts. My chest was covered.
More red. More…
Breathe, Kyle.
“He’ll come to my house,” I finally said, “and when he realizes I’m not home and I haven’t been to work, he’ll come looking for me.”
As Breath laughed, the knife wiggled on my neck. “
Puta
, your brother isn’t going to find you. We left no trace of your kidnapping. He can dig and search every fucking crevice of North America, but you and Garin simply”—he breathed a puff of air into my ear—“vanished.” He walked around to the front of me and straddled my legs. “Do you know what my boys do to punks like your brother?”
“He’ll know I’m missing. That was all I was trying to say—”
“We gut them.” He pointed the knife to the middle of my forehead. “We start here, stabbing right through the sinuses. Not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to paralyze with pain. Then, we use a chainsaw and run it down the middle of his face and cut off his nose.” He smiled, showing me his rotted teeth. “Who needs a nose anyway, right?” He licked mine, slowly rimming and flicking each nostril. “We skip down to the legs, tearing through the muscle, shredding the tendons, snapping the bones. Do you know why we skip the chest?”
I shook my head as his erection pushed against my stomach. Death got him hard; gutting innocent victims turned him on. He was a monster—much worse than I’d thought.
And I was at his mercy.
“Because slashing through his chest would kill him right away,” Breath said, unbuttoning his pants, his dick falling through the hole of his boxers. “We want him to feel the sharpness of the blade as it rips him apart. Then, we let him scream until he dies. Once his heart finally stops beating, we slice open his chest.” He shifted on top of me, pushing his dick up toward my ribs, holding the back of my neck so that I couldn’t move. “Maybe I’ll have one of my boys go to Florida on the first and bring your brother here.” He moaned as he rubbed his dick over my stomach, pushing hard enough that my skin gave him friction. “Because I want to gut him. I want to gut anyone that tries to save you. And I want you to watch while I do it.” The way he rocked his hips and groaned reminded me of a rabid raccoon. Spit shone across his blackened smile. His eyes spread wide and his pupils dilated. “Look down,
puta
. I want you to see what you do to me.”