Dark Days (Written Pictures #2) (12 page)

CHAPTER XXVIII – And Disconnection

He had considered him his mentor even though they were the same age. All through the harshness of their training, Yuri had looked up to the man named Tomas for guidance and strength. As the men in the testosterone-fuelled training squad had established their hierarchy, Thomas had had the intelligence to know when to fight, but more importantly, when not to – the brains to guide the deployment of Yuri’s brawn.

Crouching part hidden behind a chair, Yuri looked over to the twisted body of his friend, a friend he had hoped could perhaps be more one day. He had been close on one occasion, a brief moment and, looking at him now, Yuri wished he had seized it.

It had come when Tomas had gripped his wrists to haul him from freezing water toward the end of their fifth week of training and their eyes had locked and stayed that way for longer than they should have. Since then, he had been at Tomas’ side, the loyal partner in whatever venture Tomas’ creative mind had chanced upon, wondering what could have happened but never bold enough to search for it again. Yuri’s bravado was unmatched in the physical sense, but the balance to that was an emotional uncertainty that needed someone else to rely on.

Chance or not though, he wasn’t brave enough to take it and now, seeing Tomas lying dead, he regretted that the moment would never come again. Watching the woman carefully lifted and held aloft to stem her pain, his anger burned and gathering himself, the athletic Yuri surged forward.

== ~ ==

“Alexei!” shrieked his sister as she ran into the room, a thunder of other feet close behind her. Quickly assessing the scene, she spat a “No!!!” with such force that the thickset guard stopped clean in his tracks as if he had been shot too. Natalia charged to her brother’s side, skidding on the blood pooled on the floor as she arrived.

Like a machine gun, Natalia spat commands, pointing to Yuri and stabbing her finger toward the crowd that was funnelling down the corridor and shuddering to a halt in the doorway once they caught sight of the dead man. As more arrived, the frontrunners spilled into the room and Natalia barked orders at them, taking charge in the chaos, using them to help.

She turned her focus to Yuri, spewing words at him that he answered with a slow nod, edged with a sneer she didn’t see. With a last look at his departed friend, he elbowed his way forward before using his size and strength to barge roughly through the crowd.

== ~ ==

Alexei looked down at Raven, seemingly oblivious to the melee now swirling around him. The sucking on his finger had stopped and her eyes were now closed beneath the near transparent latex that covered them. Cradling her limp body like he would one of his priceless Faberge eggs, Alexei fished his stubby finger around her mouth to move her tongue and ensure her airway was clear, and then ripped around the valve to pull it away.

He knew in that moment that the danger she held was not the danger he had thought. He knew she was violent, sadistic even and could bring all manner of pain to anyone who crossed her. But he now knew she represented a deeper danger, a danger that he had killed for, a danger fuelled from nothing but desire.

== ~ ==

A blow to his shoulder broke into Alexei’s thoughts and he tore himself away from his trophy to look his sister squarely in the eyes. Words tumbled from her; questioning words, aggressive words, challenging words but they merely cascaded around him like autumn leaves whipped by a pre-winter wind as the seasons changed.

He was that changing season. Where there had been such clarity, he was now less sure. The woman was still American and still had to hurt but now, now that clarity had blurred edges, softening his focus as it softened his heart.

Alexei watched without seeing as his sister walked around him, still talking, before she stopped by Raven’s side and fiddled around her ankle to free it from its shackles.

Raven’s leg flopped heavily down, Natalia side-stepping it rather than catching it - a test to see if Alexei would. Her fears were confirmed. Bearing Raven’s limp weight Alexei hooked his finger into the torn latex around her mouth and ripped it larger – another threat to her removed. Tearing further at the latex, he hurriedly fashioned a ragged oval to expose Raven’s nose and lips.

Despite the resistance of the stretchy material that clung doggedly to her face, he wasn’t going to stop until he could see her with nothing to blur the vision. This was their moment. He turned, snapping his head toward to the assembled watchers and screamed at them, “Get out!”

Chest pounding with the surge of adrenalin, Alexei gulped down a breath. He no longer cared what others saw or what they thought. Plunging his lips down to hers for the first time, he pressed home a kiss. She wouldn’t feel it, wouldn’t register it but it was a kiss to sate a need she had relentlessly built.

CHAPTER XXIX – Rolling Deep

With a groan, Red drew her knees up to her chest, balling herself in an attempt to deal with the pain that wracked both her body and soul. It had been a hard day, one of the hardest and to the perennial pulse of pain, she just wanted it to end; wanted it all to end.

It wasn’t often the mists in her mind parted to be able to summon up much of the past but for once she could look back clearly. It had been just under three weeks, that was all, since the cataclysmic events on that final day in the mansion, but she thought it was many more and indeed it could have been six centuries; certainly felt like that at least. Before then, all had been going so well.

Those days of constant progress. Those nights of wild and sometimes brutal passion as she increasingly dominated the sex with her partner, Amber. But when that girl had entered the house, things had moved on apace and spurred off in an unexpected direction. Amber had been outgrown, she remembered that now and the girl had been a catalyst. Katarina was her name. She had offered the necessary clarity to see that the relationship with Amber lingered only through habit. Habit was no good to her though when hedonism was all around.

Katarina had sparked a chain of events that had led to
that
day and had ultimately led her to where she now lay, shivering with cold and still shuddering with shock. Weak, the fog crept back to try to squeeze out Red’s memories.

Drifting in and out of full consciousness, her mind hesitatingly reconstructed a past it had almost let go of. The fight that had ended a relationship that had once saved her; the crescendo of hope before the crack of despair; the fight that hurled her into the abyss; all were inexorable steps on the road that then took a turn for much worse.

Those had been nothing but a precursor to what had happened next and Red physically retched again, though this time her stomach was empty. She had coped okay during the first night on the streets, staying awake, staying alert.

Nowhere to go, she had hung around a bar on the second night and swapped what passed for her morals for a meal and somewhere to sleep. Raven would have been proud.

With no ID and without a cent to her name, as hunger had started to gnaw she had had no choice but to steal. She had done it before, a wayward teen taking a tank top she just had to have. Different priorities now, different times. On the afternoon of the third day, fate determined that she had tried to steal from the wrong shop, at the wrong time, driven inside that particular one by the nagging feeling she was being followed joining the nagging need to eat.

Desperation had dulled her judgement and karma had conjured a payback that was as brutal as it was poetic. She couldn’t help but stand out with a tiny skirt topping her long legs and the North African man tucked away in the back of the shop had watched via CCTV with increasing interest.

Touching himself, he was reassured she would fit his purposes perfectly. Rising from his chair, he had quickly gathered a bottle and cotton gauze while he watched her look left and right before tucking a health bar into the waistband of her delightfully short skirt.

The man nodded. Yes, now he also had justification, a sign sent to him from above and with a predatory silence, he had slipped out of the back room of his cluttered shop. With utmost stealth, he had stalked his prey down the aisle just as a burly, athletic man paused and stepped back into the shadow to watch. He had been under instructions but they were vague so instead Tomas had waited, slipping a business card into his pocket from a small plastic stand on the counter. He would brief Natalia and contact the man later.

== ~ ==

Convulsing, Red’s eyes shot open, punctuating the re-enactment in her mind. She needed a fix, needed it just to get by and yet, opening her eyes, she saw only blackness. Her ears rang and a hand ran down her ribs to trace a body that was becoming increasingly unfamiliar. This wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. She hated herself for what she had become but was reassured that she had had no real choice. And so she screwed her eyes shut again as if trying to deny who she now was and drifted back into the tormented dreams she had only just left.

== ~ ==

In her mind’s eye, Red saw herself look around. She was still toned then. Her hair still had a deep lustre that could stop a man dead in his tracks and give a woman cause to bitch. That alone should have told her that her memory was starting to muddle.

She had paused, careful not to raise suspicion being a tall, cheaply dressed white girl alone in very much the wrong part of town. It all happened so fast though from there.

One second she was closing on the door, a meal bar secreted in the waistband of her skirt, the next a slight movement seen out of the corner of her eye. Before she knew it there was a smell of putrid spices rapidly followed by an arm around her waist and a sweet smelling cloth clamped roughly over her nose and mouth.

She had tried to struggle and kick back but the scar on her newly scrawled tattoo had pulled, causing her to gasp with the sudden shot of pain. That in turn had made her gulp deeply on the pungent fumes. Her head had already started to spin her into oblivion, her fate already sealed.

Even waking with the man on top of her, Red had known something deeper was wrong. Something inside had changed. As frenzied hands roamed unchecked over her body and she felt herself impaled by the man, her fight was only cursory and the clouds veiling her mind wouldn’t part to reveal why.

It hadn’t taken long - she could barely feel his small presence anyway, before the man rolled away with a grunt, taking his nauseating smell with him. Her mouth was so dry but it had not really been a care to Red as her mind had formed strange shapes before her then open eyes. The shapes had merged with her memories, annotating them, adjusting them, making them and it, one.

The old faltering light bulb had cast strange shadows that flickered above her. The shadows though had taken form, gained flight and merged into demonic birds. They had then reared at her, forcing her to press herself hard down onto the bared rusty bed springs. From that point on they been her constant torment, always there, always calling out ‘murderer’.

Dread had flared inside her and Red now relived it as she slipped into a horrific dream.

One shadow, larger than the rest, swooped down, fangs bared, beak snapping and Red screamed, flinging her head to one side. The adrenalin inside her surged. Fight or flight. The sedative she had already been injected with ensured she was fit to do neither. When a second pitch black bird shrieked and dived at her head to the wail of North African music she couldn’t know the sound was nothing more threatening than a ringtone of the cell phone of the man who had just raped her.

Her wild scream of panic cracked her parched lip but the slap that swiftly followed split it wider before a thick gag was wrestled into her mouth and secured.

Looking down at the tormented woman with the athletic body, the man zipped up his fly. He had sampled his new merchandise, a perk of his job, and was satisfied the drugs he had injected had already taken hold. There would be no problem controlling her now.

If Red could have heard it over the demonic shrieks and wails that filled her head, the heavily accented voice of the Algerian man gabbling into his cell phone still would have made no sense. Even as he squeezed and pummelled her enhanced breasts while he spoke, all she could see was a feathered black shadow with piercing black eyes pecking at her chest, cackling with abandon.

The argument had raged around her as Red lay oblivious to it in her own privately projected hell. “Give me ten days to earn from her and
then
you can have her,” offered the man, covering his phone in spittle as he spoke. “Okay, seven, a week, I can’t say less.” He was negotiating hard for more time to make the money he urgently needed.

“Five, final offer and make it fifty thousand.” The Algerian was already banking the profits in his head. He wouldn’t have much – the shop needed money but that was trifling compared to the threat of where his other debts lay. Quickly running the calculations to his satisfaction, he nodded to himself as the woman at the other end of the line accepted.

Oblivious to the transaction under negotiation, Red had sunk back into the browning, thin mattress, the bed springs underneath pricking her skin. Ten? There were at least that. Demons flew around her, darting and diving and she had shaken in panic, tossing her head left and right, thrashing hard against the chains that held her in place.

== ~ ==

Several thousand miles away, the transaction had been similarly satisfying. “Fifty thousand, delivered soon. We have what we need, brother. We have the next.”

The small woman explained the deal to the thickset man as she massaged his prematurely greying temples. She had sourced local women first but they were too close, especially when they permanently disappeared. Alexei didn’t need those kind of complications. Finding the Algerian man was hard but not impossible and he had been eager to conclude the deal.

Inhaling deeply in satisfaction of body and mind, Alexei had smiled, knowing the wheels were now fully in motion. Tomas had done well in tracking the man and what fortune in seeing him at work – he could use that if he needed to. Tomas had been able to slip away, the Algerian would never know that he had been watched.

== ~ ==

Another cramping of her emptied stomach hauled Red back out of the trawl of a memory that had long since started to fray. But this time when her eyes shot open, even the blackness of the room paled against the return of another shadowed demon. It crouched over her and she felt another peck of pain. She hadn’t the senses remaining to distinguish it as, in reality, the latest injection spearing into her buttock before the liquid from the syringe was plunged inside.

A silent scream prized opened her mouth, causing saliva to string between her lips. Her body seemed to buzz back to life and unfurling her legs, Red stretched to speed the flow of the narcotics she craved.

Racing the precious drug, a cocktail of adrenalin and stimulants hurtled inside her. For the first time Yuri slunk away from the woman to leave the room without taking his own pleasure – he had taken it already with the other American and this one’s time was passing.