Read Infernal: Bite The Bullet Online

Authors: Paula Black,Jess Raven

Infernal: Bite The Bullet (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

 

Time passed painfully slowly, counted in wet
drip-drips. An hour later, maybe two, the door lock rattled, and I huddled
against the wall, anticipating the worst. A woman entered carrying a basin of
steaming water and a small bag. She relocked the door behind her. Super-model
stunning and elegant, with sunflower blonde hair and chocolate eyes, she saw me
and smiled. Her face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place why.

“Oh, well look at you. Aren’t you a pretty slut?
And clever too.” Her accent was like Konstantyn’s. She set the bag and basin on
the floor and unfolded a towel before kneeling at my side.

I eased away from her.

“He forgot to take your gag out. He’s always doing
that.” She clicked her tongue and it was affectionate irritation. “Here.”

She ripped the fabric gag from my throat and I
swallowed convulsively, sucking in air like I’d forgotten how to breathe
through my mouth.

Her eyes rolled and she yanked me up by my chin
from where I was drinking in air.

I met her eyes and she grinned. “Better, no? You
already got your blindfold off, clever slut. I won’t tell him about that. Don’t
worry.”

“Help me,” I murmured, my eyes skipping to the
camera as I tried not to move my lips too much with the request. I needn’t have
worried.

The woman laughed.

“But I am helping you. I am here to prepare you.
You must be cleansed.” She unclipped the small bag she’d brought with her and
it unrolled to reveal an assortment of vials and razors, all lined up in their
separate compartments.

She said cleansed, but no one needed sharp
implements for cleansing, and I scooted further into my corner, trying not to
look like I was retreating. The woman was odd. Far too calm. Far too happy. Far
too unharmed.

“Did they rape you?”

I blinked. Had I misheard? “What?”

“Did they have sexual intercourse with you when
they brought you in?” she said, annunciating each word like I was an idiot. “I
need to know if you’re going to require stitches.”

“No. I,” Dumbfounded at her casual manner, I
answered her as slowly as she’d asked me, sounding out my words. “No, they
didn't.”

“No.” She nodded and her perfect ponytail bobbed
like it all made sense. “Dante will have told them to leave you alone, for now.”

“Well, gee, thanks.” I must have said it aloud,
because she cut me a daggered look.

Dunking a black washcloth into the basin of
steaming water, she finally shrugged. “He thinks you’re special. He always
thinks they’re special, at first.”

Yeah, he’d made me feel really special.

“He believes your magical vagina is going to cure
cancer.” She laughed, but I failed to see what was amusing.

“The man’s dying from a brain tumour. He’s
criminally insane. You must know that.” How could she not? The woman was brainwashed,
and that promoted her from odd, to crazy.

She shrugged again and smiled. “What I believe
does not matter, as long as he gives me what he promised.”

“Help me.” It was worth a shot. If she was so
easily influenced by a lunatic, maybe I could sway her.

Or maybe not.

“You are beyond help now.”

Her words knifed through me.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I asked quietly,
watching her hum over her bag of tricks.

Her lashes flicked up and her gaze met mine
head-on. “It is better, I think, not to know.”

“Tell me, please.”

She sighed like it was the biggest request and
gestured to the bag she’d laid out.

“I am to bathe and anoint you in preparation for
the ritual.”

“Ritual?” That did not sound good.

“They call it alchemy, sex magic. Consider
yourself a glorified blood donor and semen receptacle.”

I shouldn’t have asked.

“Is it going to hurt?”

I knew the answer.

“Pain is an essential element,” she said, all
matter of fact.

Of course it was.

I drew my knees in tighter, reminded that Daniel
hadn’t survived this. But I had to. I would survive this.

Then she continued, and I wasn’t so sure.

“You will be bound on the altar of Barron.”

She had to mean that seven-pointed star I’d seen
the others tied to, in the photographs. “Barron? Do you mean the demon from that
Gilles de Rais story?”

The woman smiled. “Not a story, a history,
stretching all the way back to the first sacrifices in the Middle Ages, when
Gilles and his priest, Francesco Prelati, summoned Barron from the darkness.”

“Dante calls himself Barron too,” I said, pushing
for more.

“Dante
is
Barron. He possessed the body of
the mortal who summoned him, and has lived in this world ever since, taking a
new physical form whenever the old one wears out.”

The woman was an utter fruitcake. How could this
Dante guy have brainwashed so many seemingly intelligent people, I wondered.

“Gilles de Rais was executed for his crimes,” I
countered.

“True, but his alchemist priest, Prelati survived.
He disappeared, after the trial, never to be heard from again.”

“You don’t actually believe any of this
supernatural mumbo-jumbo demon-summoning bullshit, do you?”

Her smile was Mona Lisa enigmatic. “You asked what
they will do. I’m telling you. They will mark you, they will draw blood and
mingle your blood with theirs. Then they will make you drink from the cup.
After that, the Seven will drink, and fuck you every way imaginable.”

“That’s all?” I said, but in spite of the sarcasm,
my voice shook.

She seemed to take pity.

“I’d like to say it gets easier after the first
time, but... I can give you something. To take the edge off.”

“No drugs.” I was adamant. Old habits died hard.
I’d second guessed taking even simple painkillers all my life. Besides, waking
up and not knowing what had been done to me would be worse than what they actually
did. “No drugs.”

“You say that now,” the woman murmured ominously.

I ignored her.

She ran the washcloth over my face.

The water was too hot and I twitched away from
her, glaring when her hand cupped my jaw and held me still for her cleansing.
My forehead stung where I’d face-planted onto the stone earlier, and her cloth
came away bloody.

“How can you help him do this to other people?” I
asked quietly.

“He got me out of hell,” she said.

“And he puts us in it. That’s fair?”

Her nostrils flared and her lips twisted. “Is
being left behind, just because you are a woman, fair? Is it fair that my
brother flourishes under the hands of a man he can never truly appreciate,
while I stay locked in my room, dreading the next time my drunken swineherd
father will break in and force his cock down my throat. How is that fair?” Her
voice shook and the washcloth shivered in her hand.

“You’re Mariya.” That was the familiarity I’d seen
in her features. “You’re Konstantyn’s sister.”

I watched her face close down, but there was no
denial.

“Da,” she said eventually, with a shrug.

Mariya was here, and she was no hostage, no
victim. She was alive and well, and helping Dante commit his terrible
atrocities.

Had Konstantyn known? Surely he must know now.

“He said he’d come back for me,” Mariya hissed.
“The day he left, Konstantyn promised to get me out of there. Well, he never
fucking did.” She flung the washcloth against the wall and it fell to the dirty
concrete with a sodden splat. “Years I waited, and nothing. Years of that
stinking, fat pig beating our mother and forcing his way into my bed.”

“I don’t think Konstantyn knew.”

I frowned, and she snatched up the fallen cloth,
swiping it over my lips like the sight irritated her.

“You know nothing. I wrote hundreds of letters.
Begging, for me, and for mamma. He knew.”

I shook my head. “No. He told me you never wrote,
after he left to join the military. He tried to write to you, and Dante
tortured him for it. He thought you’d turned your back on him.”

“No. He turned. He abandoned us to that pig. But
Dante got me out. He gave me a job, money, a new life.” She straightened her
shoulders and got back to business, scrubbing at my skin so hard it stung. “A
good life.”

“You need to speak with him, Mariya. Dante is
manipulating all of us.”

“No need for words.” She shook her head, her
bouncy blonde ponytail at odds with her hard expression. “I have no brother.
Dante has made me rich. He will die soon, then this will all be over, and I
will have the new life he promised me.”

“You’re wrong, Mariya. Your brother came back to
Dante, because of you. He believed you were in danger.”

“You shut up now, slut. I have work to do. Don’t
make me put the gag back in.”

I ground my molars. Why the hell was I even
trying? Konstantyn had given me up to Dante, he’d abandoned the chance to
rescue all the other suffering souls down here, and for what? This ungrateful
bitch?

He’d given in so easily to his mentor. He’d kissed
the son of a bitch, drunk vodka with him, asked to be in on my rape and
torture. He’d betrayed Gracie without missing a heartbeat. I’d heard the
muffled shots as he killed her.

Sure, he’d warned me Dante would make him choose,
but that didn’t make it any less hard to stomach just how easily he’d cast me
off. Maybe Mariya had the right of it. Perhaps he had abandoned his family,
just as he abandoned me.

Faithful unto death.

Had he been planning to sell me out to Dante all
along? In exchange for his life, perhaps? Or his sister’s?

I thought back to the audition, how he’d singled
me out from all the other talent, chased me down the street, and lured me back
to his apartment. That phone call he took. It had been Dante on the other end
of the line. I knew it. Had my instincts been correct? Had they been plotting
to take me even then? A trade, me for Mariya. Except I ran, and he pursued me,
and only that I’d called the police… Christ, I’d bought right into that ‘dirty
cop’ bullshit, when mild-mannered Oliver Dalton was the last person I could
imagine dabbling in occult sadism. He’d come to try and help me, and I’d sent
him away.

But what about Konstantyn’s injuries, and all
the intimacies we’d shared?
Not just physical either. He’d opened up about
his past, and so had I. Some things were hard to fake, and even now, I couldn’t
fit them as lies.

He’s trained to lie, you fool.

A horrible thought struck me. Had he been using
me, all along, to get to Gracie? Dante had a weakness in his organisation, and
I’d led Konstantyn right to her.

But he stopped Dante before he could beat the
name from you
.
The others wanted to rape you, there and then. He stopped
them.
It was a familiar voice, the same second-chance persuasion that had
seen me forgive my mother a thousand disappointments, when all along I’d known
the truth.

I was a gullible fool.

Thinking about Konstantyn, and his part in all
this, made me sick to my core, when I needed all my strength to survive what
was coming.

Mariya gripped my ankle and used it to split my
thighs, hauling me roughly and suddenly out of my scrunch against the wall. She
wiped at me with the hot cloth in a place I hadn’t been expecting it.

I yelped and she sighed, avoiding my other leg
when I kicked out in shocked mortification, but it didn’t deter her. Slathering
on a white foam from a small aerosol can in her pack, Mariya had no qualms
about touching me, and the more I thrashed, the more she basted me.

“Hold still,” she huffed, her fingers vising on my
ankle as I squirmed.

Nothing was going to make me stay still. Whatever
she was trying to do, I wanted no part of it. I wanted her hands off me and I
wanted to be alone again.

She took out a straight razor.

“Hold still or I will cut you.”

My eyes peeled wide as everything clicked into
place.

No. She wasn’t going to… she was. Finally, she had
me completely immobile. She was going to shave me.

And she did, thoroughly and embarrassingly, and my
face was flaming by the time she wiped the razor off in the bowl and dabbed a
light oil between my thighs.

By then, I’d stopped fighting. There was no use.
Whatever Mariya wanted to do to me, she was going to do, and I got the sense
she’d done this enough times before to know how to subdue me by force, or
worse. She could drug me, and I didn’t want to be roused
mid-whatever-the-fuck-they-were-going-to-do-to-me. If I was to have any chance
of escaping this nightmare, I had to stay conscious.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

 

I was an idiot and this was my reward.

Trusting someone who’d made my instincts roar from
the first meeting had led me right into the heart of what killed my little brother.
Now I was stuck in a cell that had seen death, awaiting my own, and thinking
about the asshole who had delivered me to it. Konstantyn had a cruel mouth. I
never should have let myself believe the lies that came from it.

And what do you know? I spoke of the devil and the
Ukrainian bastard appeared, striding in, looking none the worse for wear and
smirking, with a gleam in his eyes that made my core temperature drop below
freezing.

“There you are.” Konstantyn laughed and snatched the
chain linking my wrists, hauling me out of my ball and up onto my feet. He fit
the length of my body against his chest, his eyes settling on my face as that
stupid, beautiful, hard mouth twisted in a sneer. “Oh, you’re afraid of me now?
Not long ago you had your lips around my cock.”

I flushed with shame at the memory and when I
looked away he laughed, his strong fingers grabbing my face and forcing me back
to look at him.

I hated the sight of him.

If he hadn’t been gripping my jaw so firmly, I’d
have told him just what I thought of him.

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