Best of 2017 Page 8

  She sets them beside the table and lifts Javi's shirt. His body is so little here. The body of a child. And already, it is riddled with scars. Old and new. Deep and shallow. It is obvious that whatever this practice is between them, it has been happening already for some time.

  As the film goes on, it becomes apparent that Zara was living in another dimension altogether. She proceeds to document her findings in a series of unintelligible words and gestures. Sometimes walking directly to the camera to speak, or alternately scribbling into a notepad.

  A notepad already covered in black ink.

  When she is done, she rattles off some information about Javi. His age and gender and a few other clinical details that seem to separate her from the reality of the situation, at least briefly. She sobs over him and then hits herself in the head, yanking on her own hair. Crying out that she doesn't want to do this. That she doesn't understand how they keep implanting him.

  She berates herself for failing to protect him yet again. Then she whispers that they are listening. She must get the device out now. Her personality does another one-eighty when she reaches for a scalpel.

  With the precision of a surgeon, the barbaric practice begins. She carves into Javi's arm, digging around in the flesh. When she does not find what she's looking for, her search continues on his leg. His abdomen. His chest.

  And I can watch it no longer. I lunge for the machine and fumble with the buttons. On the screen, Javi is waking up. Crying. Bloody. Helpless. Pleading with his mother to stop.

  I feel like I'm going to vomit.

  And finally... finally... I find the power switch. The machine and the horrifying visions on the wall come to an abrupt end.

  I'm still shaking when the door swings open, and I am faced with the adult version of the monster she created. His rage is a force of nature this time. Unstoppable.

  Before he even comes for me, I know that I have crossed a line. This is a space I was never meant to see.

  I am incapable of words when he stalks towards me and backs me into the corner. It is of little use to close my eyes. The monster is still there. He will always be there.

  Javi grabs me by the throat and breathes into my face.

  “If you wanted some pain, my Bella, all you had to do was say so.”

  His words are taken as they are meant to be. They terrify me.

  I plead with him as he hoists me up over his shoulder and pins me down onto the same table he was tortured on. I apologize. I cry. I beg him and kick him and scream as he tightens the bloody straps around me and shoves my face down onto the cold steel.

  He reaches for one of the tools on the tray beside us.

  “Please, Javi. Please.”

  “Please what, beauty? Please remind you who you belong to?”

  “No,” I beg through my tears.

  It doesn’t matter. I know it doesn’t matter. He tears open an alcohol swab and wipes the cold over my forearm.

  I am afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. But still, I plead with him.

  "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. Please, Javi. Please just let me go."

  My words are swallowed back down my throat when the metal tip of a scalpel digs into my arm. The weight of his massive frame crushes me into the table. I can’t move, but even if I could, I think I might be paralyzed.

  The only sound in the room is his ragged breath. The knife slices into me again and I stop breathing altogether.

  It burns.

  But there isn’t time to focus on the pain because it comes from a different direction each time he carves into my flesh. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how deep the wounds are. But I can feel the blood dripping down onto the table. I can feel his excitement against me. His want and his need.

  And my mind blocks it all out somehow.

  The pain. The terror.

  And when he is done, the only thing left are the endorphins flooding my system.

  He dips his fingers into the blood and smears it over my cheek when he grabs my face and forces me to look.

  "Mine," he snarls.

  And that’s exactly what his bloody artwork on my arm says.

  He kisses me again. Brutal and demanding. I'm still trying to fight. Still confused. But the adrenaline surging through me is tainted by something else.

  Something feral and toxic.

  Javi tastes me like he owns me. Drinking from my lips and rolling his hips into me. He's feverish. Ravenous. And so drunk on me I am completely at his mercy.

  He leaves my lips only to bury his face in my hair and inhale me. Whispering his secrets in Spanish. Touching me reverently in one moment and violently in the next. He licks the length of my jaw and bites down on my ear, sending a shock of pain and heat through my body. I buck against him and cry out, and he repeats the sentiment on my throat.

  "Mine," he growls.

  I don't know who he's trying to convince.

  His hands are a hurricane, laying claim to the landscape of my body. My breasts, my back, my hips. He worships them all with his fingertips.

  Warmth gathers in my belly and spreads down between my thighs. I can't help thinking of a similar scene. A scene that I wrote in my own journal. A journal he has read thoroughly.

  His lips hover at the base of my neck, chest heaving. His fingers drag down my spine, and he follows. My cheeks are hot. Everything is hot. And he is too heavy. I don't know how to feel right now. I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.

  The only thing I know is that when he assaults me with his mouth, I cry out for him. I encourage this fucked up need inside of me. Javi likes it. He likes it so much he tears the straps away and spreads my legs apart and shoves his face between them.

  He licks me until I am raw. Until I feel like I'm going to explode. Until I hate him for doing this to me. I can't find the words to tell him so. Because he's possessed me. And I fear the only way to get him out now is to find an exorcist.

  He unzips himself.

  I plead with him to stop. To keep going. To put me out of my misery. It goes unanswered.

  That's when I feel him against me. Scorching hot and rock solid. He rests his cock between the cheeks of my ass and grinds against me. Squeezing my flesh around him as he rocks back and forth.

  I whimper, and he leans forward to suck the space behind my ear. His palm comes around the flesh of my throat, a reminder of his control. With a simple squeeze, he could end me.

  I should be terrified. I think I might be. But there is another part of me- the part of me that wrote this scenario in my journal- that is unable to separate the reality from the fantasy.

  He isn't supposed to know these things about me. These thoughts were private, and they were never meant to be real. He is violating me in the worst possible way. Infiltrating my mind and creating a reality of the depravities that live there. He is punishing me for exposing his own vulnerabilities. For seeing things that I was never meant to see.

  "Javi," I plead.

  He growls and unties my hand. The hand that is coated in my own blood. It is this hand he chooses to wrap my fingers around his cock. He is so large I can barely grasp him. So hot, it feels like he is branding my palm.

  "Please," I murmur.

  All the while my hand continues to stroke him. I'm tattered and torn. He is groaning above me. So deep. So masculine. So wild and untamed and desperate for my touch.

  It's too much for him to handle. It's too much for me to handle. I'm ashamed and confused and turned on when I shouldn't be.

  "Javi."

  I keep saying his name. Over and over.

  He yanks my hand away and forces both of them behind my back, pinning them beneath his wrist. His other hand comes up to capture a handful of my hair, wrenching my head back.

  He is captive to his depravity now. Fucking the soft flesh of my ass without ever pushing inside of me. I can't see his face. I can only hear his sounds. Feel him against me. And still, it is the most intimate thing I've ever experienced.

  "Javi.
"

  He's moving harder. Faster. Rougher. I can barely breathe. My wrists are bruised already. Every part of my body is sore. But needy too.

  I need something from him. Something I am afraid to admit.

  Right now, he is only taking. Using my body to get himself off. And he is close. So close. I can feel it in the way his muscles tense.

  When the tension finally snaps, he releases himself over my back with a long, tormented sigh. And then he rubs the come into my skin, spreading it over me in another show of ownership.

  "Javi."

  I'm pleading again. I want to tell him to leave. I want to beg him to stay. I want to see his face. I want to hide. His come soaked fingers move down between my thighs and over my sensitive flesh. My breath halts.

  He smears my arousal with the blood on his fingers. And then he slips them inside of me. Feeling me from the inside.

  He moves in and out of me slowly. Stroking the cheek of my ass and squeezing with his other palm. His breathing has calmed, and mine has not.

  I'm squirming beneath him, my face buried against the steel table to muffle the sounds that escape me. My hedonistic desires are reflected in the noises that rip from my lungs.

  I don't want him to hear.

  I contract around him, and he grunts in satisfaction. I want to fight it. I want to prove a point. That he can't do this. He can't just take from me and do whatever he wants.

  I also want to give in. I want to be completely at his mercy. Like my stories. Like my darkest fantasies.

  In the end, it doesn't matter what I want. My body is a slave to its own cravings. And eventually, I come around him, just as he had intended.

  It's embarrassingly wet.

  Javi does not apologize. I don’t expect him to. But I am not prepared for more of his cruelty either. He jerks me to my feet without warning and opens the trap door again.

  “You want to play games, little Bella?”

  “No.”

  My eyes are blurry, and my legs are still weak from the orgasm that just ripped through me. I can barely stand. I can barely breathe. But beneath Javi’s release, his war still rages on. There is no escape for me.

  He hoists me up again and drops me back into the hole that I came in from. And then he kneels down and pats me on the head.

  “Run, run as fast as you can, beauty,” he says. “Don’t let me catch you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I TRY to stay away from her.

  I try.

  But she saw. She went into that room, and she saw. And now I want to punish her. I want to beat her ass red and then fuck it. I want to fuck her.

  The virgin.

  The innocent.

  The beauty.

  She was not made to be fucked by a beast like me. Beautiful things are not meant to be touched. But I have touched her, anyway.

  How can I ever forget it now?

  The softness of her skin. The catch in her breath. The way she looked face down while I debased her. The way I rubbed my come into her flesh.

  My claim is carved into her arm. Her blood still coats my fingers.

  A woman's body is the most sacred thing on earth. That's what River told me when he brought me my first. A prostitute. She wasn't soft like Isabella. But I fucked her nonetheless. She paid me weekly visits for two years. She let me do whatever I wanted to her.

  Until I saw her. Until I saw my Bella. Young and faultless and pure as snow. My dick never wanted anyone else after that. But I had to keep it to myself.

  Her father couldn't know the depravities that lay hidden within my mind. The depravities I imagined with his own daughter. The most sacred thing on earth.

  I kept those thoughts at bay. I told myself that I could never indulge them because he was the one. He was the one I would destroy.But he is gone now. There is nothing to stop me. Nothing to hold me back.

  I want to take her. I want to make her mine. I try to tell myself I can't. That I won't.

  But I know it's a lie.

  It's always been a lie.

  I SMELL her before I see her.

  The scent of her arousal is still strong. Contaminated with fear and the copper of her blood.

  Damp earth sinks beneath my feet as I follow her through the darkness.

  She is trying to be quiet. But as I close in on her, she cannot hide the terror in her breaths. And I know when I touch her skin, her pulse will throb against my fingers. I will touch that dread in her veins. And then I will taste it on my lips.

  I hunt her through the darkness, and her footsteps quicken. She knows I’m coming. She just doesn’t know when or where.

  She stops up ahead beneath a sliver of light, shoving desperately on a trap door that won’t open. The light creates a kaleidoscope of her face, washing it in shattered splinters of orange and the salt of her tears.

  Her hope is gone.

  And I like her broken. I like her shattered. I want her tears. Her fears. I want the darkest and most intense parts of her. Every human emotion that she can feel, I will experience through her.

  My steps are quiet, and she does not hear me coming. But my Bella is smart. Paranoid like her father. She can sense me. She looks down the dark passageway and freezes for a split second before she turns and runs again.

  This time, I give chase.

  Following behind her, I do not try to disguise the sounds of her predator. I want to feel her heart beneath mine when I capture her.

  She catches her foot on a rock and cries out when she collapses onto her knees. Bloody and dirty and still trying to crawl away when she sees my shadow.

  “Javi?” she whispers. “Is that you?”

  The hope in her voice ignites the hunger in me. She wants it to be me. She dreads it being anyone else. And who else would it be?

  This is a fear I did not know existed. One that I will exploit at a later time. But for now, I will take pleasure in this knowledge. And I will not answer her. Even when I catch her around the ankle and she screams, I give nothing away.

  I lower the full weight of my body onto hers, pressing her into the dirt as I stroke her hair, and my lips find her throat. She shivers, and her heart is loud. Erratic. Beating so hard it vibrates up through her and into my chest.

  She breathes in, and she is relieved.

  “It is you.”

  My Bella is smarter than I give her credit for sometimes.

  I flip her over beneath me and position myself between her legs.

  “Please, Javi,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Not yet,” I reply. “But you will be.”

  Her chest heaves and she trembles when I grasp her throat and lick her face.

  This has gone on long enough. I have been too kind to her. She has grown too attached to me. She should be afraid. Not relieved. And I don’t know how this happened.

  I squeeze her throat, cutting off her air while she claws at my wrist. I count the seconds in my head, quietly. And then I let her go, listening as she gasps for breath and sobs beneath me.

  Now, there is fear. The way it should be. But when I reach down and touch her between her legs, she is still wet for me. Soaked for me. And there is something wrong with her too.

  This sweet beauty is just as fucked in the head as I am, perhaps.

  It makes my chest warm, and I want to kiss her. Hold her. These are not things I should want. So I unzip my jeans instead.

  Her breath halts, and she clings to my biceps.

  “Javi?”

  I position the head of my cock against her wetness. Her deranged need for me.

  There is no more time for niceties. I plow through her virginity in one hard thrust. She bucks up against me and cries out, but still, she clings to me.

  “Javi,” she whispers again.

  This time, I do kiss her. Because I have to. My own disturbed need for her is getting the best of me.

  That voice inside of my head tells me I’ve claimed her. I own her now. She’s mine. And nobody else will ever have her this wa
y. Nobody else will ever get to touch her this way.

  She kisses me back and digs her nails into my arms as I roll my hips and fuck her into the dirt. I tell her that she is nothing in one breath, and everything in the next.

  She sobs and pulls me closer, burying her face between my neck and chest. Smelling me. Covering my skin with her tears.

  I take one of my dirty hands and smear it over her face before I make her kiss me again. This time, she opens her mouth and lets me inside.

  My cock is swollen. So sensitive I can no longer control my thrusts. I smash into her. Fucking her hard and fast. Pulling on her hair. Biting her throat. Sucking her skin until I taste more of her blood.

  She reaches up. And tries to pull my hood down. I growl and capture her wrists, pinning them above her head.

  “I want to see you,” she pleads.

  “What you want doesn’t matter,” I tell her.

  I bite her nipple, and she cries out. In the next breath, I soothe it with my tongue.

  I’m getting close. My body is alive. On edge. But it’s her next words that trigger the explosion.

  “I’m not on birth control,” she cries out. “Javi, I’m not on birth control.”

  I bury my cock deep inside of her, and I come. I fill her up with all of my pent-up frustrations and the sadistic part of me wonders if it will happen the first time.

  “I’m not on birth control,” she repeats, and this time her voice is frantic. Terrified.

  I stroke her hair. Her cheek. My dick softening inside of her.

  “I know, pet.”

  She shivers.

  “You want me… you want me to get pregnant?”

  She is horrified. And I am getting hard all over again just thinking about it.

  I think of her father. How much he would hate it. And I smile.

  “It would be my greatest accomplishment, Bella.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SHE IS READING when I bring her lunch. Feet curled up, bare against the velvet chair she likes. Her eyes rise to meet mine, and they are soft. Timid. Embarrassed.

  This is not the girl on TV. The one who they say is arrogant and stuck up and uses her good looks to get what she wants.