Wicked Hunt (Dark Hearts Book 3) (2 page)

Zorie

“I wish you were her,” the bald man said, as he rose to his feet with a sigh. “Then I would be rid of this myth. Of this woman who kills us.”

Oh fuck.
The bed seemed to drop from under me and I floated on the words he’d said. He didn’t...know. I shut my eyes for a bare second, only to open them again, trying to pretend I hadn’t been overcome by relief.
He isn’t going to kill me.

“You’re not her.” He leaned in to breathe in my ear, then to bite my lobe hard until I gasped and tried to roll away. “I could see you take in air,
ahhhh
, when I said that you were not her. Like I wasn’t going to have to kill you. Hmmm?”

His smile was broad, gleeful, as if he’d heard a great joke.

I made an agreeable noise.

“The thing is,
Mädchen
. I need the practice. I never thought of this before. Of killing. Now I have,
ja
, I think I need to practice, after I fuck you.”

The madness in mesmers ripened with age. I couldn’t make my eyes close.

“You watch me hurt Tia, then I hurt and fuck you. Hurt. Fuck. Etcetera. When I get tired of this, I will see how we can end this.”

I so needed to stick my knife in him.

And my eyes wouldn’t close because he willed it so.

My rage boiled but I wrestled it down. Not yet. Tears of both sorrow and anger leaked down my cheeks.

Sadness that my life might end here, anger that I’d fallen into this trap. What else could I have done?

Run. Only that. Run before I entered this place, and that I would never have done. He’d been my next victim when I came in those glass doors.

He still would be.

Bare-chested, with his cock making an obvious bulge in his pants, he went to Tia and picked up the whip from the floor. The leather slithered in coils across the floor as he raised it, the tip dangling then flicking back.

The snap as it cut across her back was echoed in her thin squeak and the crumple of her knees. She should have screamed but he was willing her silent. His aim was deliberate as he labored with the whip, making
X
s out of lines. The heating in here was fine and sweat began to mingle with the blood trickling over the contours of her body. She shone in the down lights, sweating red, it seemed. Every so often he would pause and pace to her to place a hand on her skin and smear the blood, or run his fingers between her legs, or down her flanks, or to reach around and cup her breasts. He cared enough not to make her into mincemeat.

But he still made her scream inside her head. I felt every moment of that, as tied to her as I was, waiting for my moment.

Then he came to me and wrapped the whip about my neck, towed me backward and held me to the bed with the coil tight while his fingers plowed the slick trough between the lips of my pussy. I couldn’t help being aroused or arching to meet his touch. It was programmed into collectables and I didn’t dare scorch away that part of myself with rage.

Not yet, not yet.

I cried out as he plunged one finger deep inside me, my cunt squeezing onto that digit, and I heard myself whimpering as he shoved in and out. Waves of ecstasy rolled in effortlessly, drowning me.

“You’re wet. You
mädchen
are always wet for me. For my cock.” The sound of the zip followed the last sucking withdrawal of fingers.

Legs forced apart, bound in place, with my arms painfully squashed beneath me, I swear I pulsed at the anticipation of him fucking me, entering me.

God, yes.

I hadn’t come for so long. I’d killed them all too soon. I couldn’t do it by myself anymore.

It had seemed terribly wrong to get off on murd—

He slid into me and that first cry of penetration was truly joyous. I couldn’t stop myself.

Wrong.
He slapped in deeper, withdrew. The thickness of him halted, nudging my lips open down there, poised...then slammed in again.

So wrong. But my eyes rolled back and I let myself surf on the roiling lust. A mesmer made a storm of sex so easily. A brush of fingers, a whispered command in the mind, a thrust so deep there was none of one’s self left, only the obliteration of climax.

I let myself go as he fucked me, and he breathed like a rusty machine, sawing the air. Pulling out of me while I teetered, ripped open and gasping on the very brink of another
O
.

I pined for him when he strode over to finish whipping her, the need for cock and sex so bad I lost track of my purpose for several crazy minutes.

I’d barely recovered when he returned to fuck me again.

The bed squeaked and rocked, much as the girl did when whipped. The whip left red curls on the sheets and I stared at them with one eye while he whipped and fucked her.

He came to fuck me again, then stalked back to whip her.

At last he stood over me, panting hard, with sweat turning his face into a mess. The sheets beneath me were damp and wrecked. I focused on the figure behind him, then watched him hand her a knife. My throat and mouth were dry from the rush of inhalations and exhalations.

“Cut her,” he whispered. “Cut her deep, between the legs, then her breasts.” He leaned in, with one knee on the bed, and pressed a finger to my mouth. “No sounds. Nothing. You hear me. No matter how it hurts. Swallow the pain.”

He made himself comfortable on the bed, lying stretched out beside me, with his elbow propped on the blood-smeared whiteness.

I blinked through a landscape of blurs, picking at the remnants of distant anger.

Cherie...remember her death, the video going around and around.

Tia held the knife point down over me, between my spread-open legs. Her hair was dark and long. Though tied in a plait last I’d noticed, now it was unbound and hanging over her shoulders in beautiful cascading ringlets.

“Don’t close your legs,” whispered the man to my left. “Let me see.”

I swallowed and strived to shut my thighs but nothing moved. My muscles quivered from the strain, aching where the ropes dug into them. My arms had been under me so long they’d numbed.

“Cut her.”

Tia frowned, her cute eyebrows tensing as she lowered the knife. I’d known a knife there before...from Mavros. The bastard.

They were all bastards. Curls of fire rose in my mind, sparking ashes, flickering hotter.

Sadistic bastards.

Cut her.

Sadistic asshole fuckwad...bastard cunts.
My teeth ground together.

Bald man glanced up and saw my face. The rage tore in, a hurricane that flung aside all his commands, and let me take her.

Take control.

Awareness flashed in both their faces. Too late.

I grinned as the knife was sent on an arc from low to high and she sliced across his throat, leaving that familiar gaping hole. The blood. Oh now, that, was...pretty.

As it gouted and poured from him, as he flopped about on the floor writhing, as she stabbed at him over and over, more than I’d commanded, the place turned into a red-raw butcher’s palace.

This was going to be hard to clean up.

I managed to sit up as the last of the drama played out, leaving Tia sitting on the floor weeping and him dead and twitching out the last nerve impulses to his dying muscle tissue.

I could dispose of this sheet elsewhere. Only a small amount of blood was on me. His cock might have my DNA. I grimaced. I’d chance that. What cop would think past her as the murderer, with her fucked-up back and the knife in her hand? None.

Take the sheet. Put a new one on, or get her to do that. Get handbag and clothes. Tiptoe out. He hadn’t made much more than thumping noises.

My mouth twitched.

I was going to leave this poor woman to rot in jail, after making her do this?

Yes.

It wasn’t the first time.

Kneeling there, with tears wetting her face, she looked the most innocent of any collectable I’d yet seen. Young and vulnerable.

But it was her or me.

I could get rid of more of them. She couldn’t.

I made her cut me free, bundled up the sheet and the rope, watched her remake the bed with a sheet already bloody from her hands. I wiped my face with both my hands while pins and needles tortured my nerves. I cleaned myself with a wet edge of the sheet I was taking with me.

I shouldn’t touch anything on the way out. Dress and go.

She’d get a lesser sentence surely, due to it being self-defense? The Germans loved their kink. Maybe they’d think her in the wrong?

Maybe. Nothing I could do. With the sheet rammed into a plastic bag, I silently paced to the front door, and I paused at a mirror there.

That was me. The tired woman with the ruffled hair and the blood speck on her forehead.

I put my hand on the glass of the mirror, covering my face, hiding me.

Who was I now? Some evil witch? That I could walk out on that...scene behind me and barely blink?

Who was I?

I cleaned away the palm print and the speck, walked out the door and closed it.

Sometimes the means justified the ends.

I paused, my footfalls muffled by rug. I should’ve drunk some water. So thirsty.

Or was it the other way around? Ends then means?

Either way they died.

The bus I’d scrambled to catch went past two men emerging from a car.

Grimm and Mavros. I ducked my head and refused to think as the engine roared and took me farther away from them.

Grimm and Mavros? How had they found me?

I’d been so many months without seeing, or talking to, another human being who knew me. Who had liked me, loved me. Now though, I wondered why they were here. I’d tried to kill Grimm, left them both bleeding, maybe dying.

That wasn’t right, or nice.

I’d thought the blood today was pretty.

Pretty.

The rage deformed me when I let it take over.

For a moment, just a moment, I wanted someone to hold me, someone to hold onto. Once the rage drained away I was left hollow, empty of anything worthwhile. People made you worth something and all I was doing was killing people, even if they were bad people.

What I did was right yet awful.

Eyes shut, I slumped into the seat and every rock and vibration of the bus seemed to sink me closer to the upholstery. I splayed my hand, pressing my finger and thumb into my temples as if that could make me think better.

I’d lost my identity, my future...I’d lost Grimm.

How sick was I that I wanted to feel his arms around me? I shivered and hugged myself.

The video sprang to life in my head – of Grimm slashing Cherie’s throat while she hung upside down, tied up and helpless.

Fuck him.

I think I moaned then, out loud. I bit my lip and pretended it was nothing.

My stop was three past the one we’d just pulled out of. I’d get off, pack up, go elsewhere, like always.

The last clue had said the man I wanted most might be in India. So be it.

Onward. I’d haunt the airport, find someone similar and susceptible who’d let me borrow their passport and ticket. When I killed the man who’d owned Cherie, I could rest.

When I stepped off the bus, two heavily armed police officers were patrolling the stop. I ignored them, keeping my head down as I walked by. If the law ever caught me, I’d have no excuse for what I’d done. I still couldn’t say a word about mesmers to anyone outside the circle of their influence.

Käthe, the woman whose apartment I was temporarily sharing, knew nothing of mesmers, because she’d never met one, never been taken by one. Worst of all, I couldn’t warn her. It seemed I wasn’t quite the same as a male mesmer.

People bumped past, flowed around me, and none of them recognized me as anything more than another nameless person caught in the machinery of this vast city. The difference between me and them? They could go home and talk to and touch and cry with and take joy from their friends and family.

I could never again be plain Zorina Brown. I was Zorie, a woman who sought revenge for a friend and for herself, and in so doing I had killed my own self.

Johann

“Toss me a
Singha
.” I held out my hand and Rudy dutifully fished the bottle of beer from the ice and threw it over. The condensation made it a slippery catch.

I twisted off the top, then dragged the ancient folding chair a little closer to the edge of the concrete-encircled maw and settled it in place. There wasn’t much in the way of safety mechanisms left after years of neglect. No fences, just fallen leaves, branches, miscellaneous rubbish, and straying soil. This missile silo had been doomed from the start – a secret neither the Americans nor the Thais could admit to, or ever would.

“You’re sure this is a day off for the contractors?” Rudy asked this every time. The man was paranoid about interruptions.

“Absolutely.”

The barbed wire fences were maintained when the military contractors decided to come out here. Tuesdays, always Tuesdays. This was a Saturday.

The old base was swathed in jungle with most of the above-ground buildings swamped under vines. Some of the roofs had collapsed.

“Is it eight years now?” He screwed the line leading to the antenna into his controls. The line led to the hole and the antenna hung down ten yards – enough to improve reception immensely. We’d trialed it many times.

“Yep. Last month was the anniversary.”

Eight years since we’d closed down the secondary usage of this site, since research had ceased. Governments...when the divide between right and wrong was fuzzy, you could never tell which way they’d jump.

The lack of unwanted humans made these little celebrations more relaxed. The screams of monkeys and raucous calls of parrots, the rich moist scents that came with such surroundings, all this along with a good beer and good company colored these days for me.

“Love this.” I grunted as I sank into the chair and swatted a mosquito. My joints were getting as rickety as the chair. I leaned forward, eyeing the drone Rudy had set on the two-meter-wide concrete edge then I took a pull from the beer. Sunlight dappled the edge, though we’d found a nice bit of shade for the chairs and equipment.

The red arm of the crane hung out over the edge with the chain dropping from it almost dead center, disappearing from view into the dark hole. Flakes of the red paint had lifted and bare metal showed here and there, but the motor still worked well enough. I paid a man to keep it right for us. The chain jerked to a stop as the crane hit the set limit, the engine idling.

“It’ll work fine, Johann.” Rudy flicked on a switch on the drone controls and the drone rose a foot in the air its engines humming. “Got an hour on this one’s battery. Camera works well too.”

The monitor in front of us showed the flare of light from the jungle and sky. Way too bright for details to show up.

“Once she’s down there –” Rudy began.

“I know,” I murmured. “It’ll look better. I think I can get us an infrared cam though. I saw one online yesterday. That damn light seems to tip him off.”

“Think he’s still alive?”

I chuckled. “You know it. The bastard is tough.”

“When did you last feed him?”

“A week ago. Some monkey meat. Some of them fall down there too. Sick ones. Dumb ones. Kim Phuang brings his carcasses here too.”

“Huh.” Rudy screwed up his face in disgust. “Something about dumping corpses from his criminal messes makes my stomach turn. I don’t like Wolfie down there having them as well as what we bring.”

I raised my eyebrows, said zero. I didn’t understand his morality. And, we didn’t know for sure Wolfe, or
Subject 31
as we used to call him...didn’t know he ate them. In the depths, there’d be plenty of water. The rainfall here was high. There were cisterns below, fed by rainwater, though no longer filtered and sterilized. There must be small critters too, lizards and so on. Though the light seemed to peter out in the depths, plants grew down there in the detritus. Whatever it was he ate, it’d kept him going for years.

The chain dangling from the crane clinked and swayed and, for a few seconds, a human scream punctuated the noise from the wildlife. My balls tightened. It never got old. Not for me.

“He’s alive.”

“Of course. You’re such a doubter, Rudy.” I hunched forward, trying to see details as the drone sped across to the hole then zoomed into the missile pit. Ten stories down, it’d find him. “Get that thing down there. Show’s on.”

If he was too slow, we’d miss Wolfe taking her. He always killed the drone after a while but last time we’d had nearly ten minutes of footage. Dark, mostly blurred, but good.

“See if you can spot those tentacles.”

“Don’t joke.”

Rudy had a theory that Wolfe had grown new appendages and, since we could never quite see him properly, I humored Rudy. Wolfe hid. That we saw what he did to the women we gave him only reinforced my theory that he hadn’t gone as crazy as we’d suspected.

Through the drone’s speakers, we picked up more noises. The screen stabilized, revealing the entrance to the upper story of the underground complex. It was a damn maze. The US forces had abandoned the place. The Thais hadn’t committed to cleaning it up, not once they heard the stories about monsters roaming the facility. People shuffled files, memories faded, and only the maintenance company kept track. And us.

It was our weekend amusement arcade. Wolfe was also the one remaining creature that I could harvest my research from again, if I needed to. He was a living, breathing, infection soup.

If they gave me a lab and a research fund again, would I step up? Maybe not. I was comfy now. I had things to do, interests I hadn’t foreseen back then.

All my other significant test results had been destroyed. The frozen CSF fluid, brain specimens, the cultures. Not that I’d ever been convinced I had cultured anything of significance.

In theory, Wolfe was a source. I didn’t really know what he carried. In the meantime, us voyeurs benefited. One day he might die. I wasn’t sure if I’d care.