Dark Days (Written Pictures #2) (21 page)

CHAPTER XLVIII – Red Rising

Red stretched – she had eaten a meal fit for a king. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten so well but then again the constant commotion of the birds meant she couldn’t remember much at all these days anyway.

It had been her plan to try to ignore them for a minute, then two, then three, taking each moment as a snatched triumph from the hell they caused her. As yet she had only managed to last four minutes until the deep swoop of the black bird in her mind caused Red’s resistance to crumple and her to flail her arms above her head in a wild attempt to preserve her own space, while it cried and cawed, “Murderer, murderer.”

She did feel a little stronger now though. Even the birds couldn’t take away the satisfaction she felt after a hearty meal. Perhaps she would give something back in her fucking today, show the large, muscled man that his attentions were appreciated and that she could be worth that little extra effort. With that thought, Red risked a smile that lasted until the next of the birds dived down to try to peck at her eyes.

The latch of the door slid open but today the muscled man had been replaced by a bizarre looking, waspish man in a red and yellow costume. His face was twisted into a seemingly permanent smile that looked to mock her ceaseless battle with the birds and placing the bag he carried to her right, he licked his tongue over the side of her face as he retrieved a syringe.

She knew what was coming next and twisted her head away and her arm ready. She hated needles but what this one administered she craved and was so, so good.

The needle plunged into her forearm, the usual narcotic and hallucinogens laced with stimulants as they had been the day before. A moan passed her quivering lips as she felt the drugs course through her. “So good. So fucking good.” When the strange man groped her breast, Red rose to his hand as thanks for what she had received, contented.

== ~ ==

Mela paced the corridor, agitated. “Come on, come
on.
” She pursed her lips, biting fingernails as she strode up and down. “Fuck! Come ON!” she beseeched again, causing a woman to steer her small child away in the opposite direction.

Her head still throbbed and she could feel the tug of the stitches above her eye. Prodding the red button on the phone, she cut the unanswered call and tried again, scrolling further down her directory, beyond Amber to find Kat’s entry. Mela punched the mobile number listing and thrust the phone back to her ear just as the ringtone started.

God, she hated fucking hospitals. Somehow, they had come to signify all that had gone wrong in her life. That smell, the invasively bright light, the perky efficiency of staff that pretended to care. They had never cared about her brother and they couldn’t wait to patch her up and push her off the medical conveyor belt tonight either.

Her hip hurt like fuck but still she paced with her smartphone glued to her ear, willing it to be answered. “Hi Mela, you’re calling early sweetie, what’s wrong?” The groggy voice at the other end of the phone was Kat’s, finally wakened by the insistent ringing.

“It’s….it’s….it’s Jade, she’s….” And as Mela tried to say the words, the tears started to flow.

Kat sat bolt upright, unable to believe what she was hearing. Peering at her clock through sleep-glued eyes she saw it had only been a matter of hours since the four of them had been locked in the discussion that had apparently been continued by the pair in the car, and had ultimately led to the crash.

Listening to Mela’s tear-stained account, Kat pictured it in her head and winced as she imagined the car leaving the road and diving out of control down the embankment and onto its side.

Mela had been lucky, at least physically. The car had slid in such a way that she was away from the full force of the impact. As a result though it had hit the tree right where Jade had been sat. Even though she was lying in a coma, she was lucky it hadn’t instantly cost her her life.

She hated to say it but she had to. “We have to abandon the plan,” urged Kat after being satisfied by several reassurances that Mela was okay.

“No. We can’t, otherwise Jade was hurt for nothing,” reasoned Mela, steeling herself for what she was about to say, “I’ll do it instead.”

CHAPTER XLIX – Turn of Events

In her dreams, Jacqueline Corbeau relived both the day and the life that had delivered her to it. When she woke, one leg hung over the edge of her bed while the other was wrapped so tightly in the sheet that she could barely move it. It took a while to place herself properly, so vivid had been her dreams but the chain from the band around her ankle eventually reminded her precisely where she was.

They had allowed her a shower after the pier and before she had been locked to the bed and it had been utter bliss. No matter how hard she scrubbed though the stench of the man called Yuri remained. It was a smell she would never forget with its reek of alcohol, body odour and breath, the latter two made worse by the heat of the sun and the exertion of their fight.

He would come again soon no doubt and Jacqueline wondered just how long his rough hands would scrape over her body then. Hearing footsteps beyond the locked door, she clutched the thin white sheet and drew it up her to her neck, a flimsy barrier that would soon enough be ripped from her no doubt. She was afraid to face him again.

The door swinging open caused her to flinch and memories of the previous day assaulted her, making her press herself into the pillow. Though it was indeed a man from the day before, rather than filling the frame, he was slender, shorter and dressed in a seedy jester’s garb of tatty red and a yellow that might have once been white.

“Hello Ki-Ki,” he chirped, mocking her with a bird-like tilt of his head. Dancing forward, the Jester clutched a bundle of black in his spindly arms and dumped it unceremoniously on the steel-framed bed beside her.

It wasn’t what she had expected, another thing out of routine. Where was the large man? Why had things changed? The questions rung unanswered in her mind, distracting her sufficiently to allow the man to unlock the chain to her ankle and swiftly cross the room back to the safety of the door. A few weeks ago he would have been fucked but that was then, Raven was then, Jacqueline was now.

“Dress Ki-Ki. Big day ahead.” And with that he was gone, slamming the door behind him with a cackling laugh.

There was a manic sloppiness in the approach of the one she had christened as the Jester. He had unlocked her and only then rushed to the door. He was smaller than her too and the predator within narrowed its eyes, confident she would have the measure of him when she needed it.

It was a window of chance and she made a mental note of it for the future. If such an opportunity came again, she would have to be ready. Now was not the time though, the door had slammed shut and so had the briefest of opportunities. Still, it had been a chance nevertheless and it was the first one she had noticed since being in Alexei’s house, a flower of hope in an otherwise desolated moonscape. He was the weak link, the chain of events could, in time, be broken.

She filed it away in her mind alongside the thought of Red. So out of place, the thought of a chance nourished her, reviving the Raven within as she reached out a hand to retrieve the black pile beside her on the bed.

== ~ ==

Mela’s heart pounded. Slowly, she put away her phone, slipping it into the front pocket of her skinny jeans that were still splattered with blood that wasn’t just hers. It felt like her heart would burst from her chest with the gravity of what she had just done and finding a chair, she slumped onto it.

She sat there, legs splayed, burying her head into her hands, hiding behind her fringed mop of hair so nobody would disturb her. With her eyes screwed closed, she tried to breathe, hoping it would calm her down. She’d had to volunteer but even she wasn’t sure why. When Kat had started to argue, she had quickly brushed the objections aside with an exclamation that she needed to do
something
to keep her occupied, to keep her mind off Jade and so it had been settled.

Mela would be the one. Sitting there as the hospital staff bustled back and forth past her, she would take one last look at the comatose Jade before she headed out and started to prepare.

Part 4

Games, Sex & Matches

CHAPTER L – Deja Almost Vu

Mela held Jade’s hand, stroking her thumb across the back of it. They had done initial tests and no doubt there would be plenty more as well. That was how they avoided lawsuits - or was that too cynical?

For now at least, Jade was stable. Internal bleeding caused by the crash had apparently been staunched by emergency surgery on arrival at the hospital and now she was on a ventilator.

Mela looked at the woman who had been so good to her. So good, yet this had happened, just like it did to her brother, turning her full circle from happiness to tragedy again. The smell of antiseptic and the constant, steady blip of the heart monitor were just the same as they had been all those years before.

Jade hadn’t deserved to end up like this, nobody deserved to. The side of her head was shaved where they had made an incision and the stitched scar almost made Mela retch.
She had
done that. As sure as if she had driven the car off the road and targeted the tree herself, she had done that.

As she looked, Mela stroked a thumb again over the back of the elegant hand which still sported the same perfect manicure it always did. This time though it was punctured by an IV tube. It was so cold and with her free hand, Mela tucked the sheet further around the sleeping woman to preserve what heat she had.

Her eyes turned back to the hand she held in her own. She seemed so delicate, so fragile and as much as Mela wanted to stay at her side, she couldn’t. She wasn’t good for her and she knew what she had to do.

Laying the hand carefully back down on the bed, Mela’s fingers lingered before releasing it. With her eyes heating with tears, she bent to place a soft kiss on the sliver of forehead still exposed between bandages and after a final touch to Jade’s shoulder, Mela turned and headed for the door.

== ~ ==

Raven sat on the bed, looking down at herself. The outfit was right and the colour was right but the woman inside it wasn’t the same. Robotically, she circled the cloth, polishing herself to a deep lustre, enjoying the sensations as she always did but with less depth of feeling than she had in the past.

If she could have put a single word to describe it, she probably would have chosen ‘conviction’. As she had gone through the motions of dressing herself in the clinging latex, it had seemed somehow detached from her, rather than part of who she was, part of
what
she was, as it always used to be.

She still looked the same, more or less, and she knew that ‘same’ could stop a man cold in his tracks at twenty paces, thirty on a good hair day. She even moved the same with the sensual fluidity that just came naturally and was inspired by simply
knowing
. Inside though, something had changed. Jacqueline and Raven coexisted now and that was the root of her discomfort. Raven had always been for herself and to hell with the consequences and yet now there was another trying to occupy the same space.

Never a passenger, Jacqueline took precautions. She was careful of contexts, of impacts, of feelings. She felt in her soul that somehow she was weaker now and yet allowing her natural self its time in the sun after so long locked away was also strangely liberating. In trying to reconcile the dichotomy of feelings that pulled her this way and that, a single phrase that she had once read and dismissed as impossible bullshit kept circulating in her head, ‘There’s freedom in slavery.’

First setting the silicone spray aside, the black-haired woman snatched up the spike-heeled boot. Just her size, but of course it was. Flipping it forward, she thrust a foot inside and reached for the tab of the zip, careful not to snag a nail and break what little she had left. As she drew the zip up to enclose the soft leather around her calf, she reflected on the phrase that niggled her. She kind of understood what it hinted toward now, revealing a meaning she had never quite got before.

With care, she smoothed up the leather, making sure the boot stood tall on her lower leg before fishing for the second which had slipped off the bed to the floor. Pointing her toes, she pushed into it, repeating the processes of the first, then pushed off the bed to stand on the stilettos, turning to inspect the look, lifting a heel to gauge the effect.

A nod was her approval. They were good boots and though the four inch heel was high, it was still within her comfort zone. The only thing that spoilt the silhouette was the twin metal bands that ringed each ankle, causing the leather to bulge in the same way as the arms of her outfit.

Twisting, she checked out the back of the catsuit, smiling to herself at the way the tight latex lifted and sculpted her butt. It really didn’t need any help but somehow the clinging fabric always managed to make it just so damn-well lickable.

She smiled at her choice of description. Her mind drifted to an imaginary world, but fixed on an image firmly rooted in her past. She imagined her ass thrust hard into a face as it was held to her by the hair. Grinding back in rhythmic arousal, the licking in her mind’s eye picked up pace despite the squirming of the man who was clearly in growing need of air. That was when the struggling always started for real but still she hung on, despite the urgency of his need.

Queening had always held a special thrill and separated from her by only a thin layer of latex, it plugged right into her fetish to utterly impose herself on another, especially a man. With another smile, in her mind she hauled the head back and, even in her imaginary world, Raven was surprised. Looking down into frantic eyes that bulged with the urgency of breathing, she saw the face of Alexei.

== ~ ==

Mela stuffed what she needed into her small bag, only taking what she was absolutely sure she would use. The last item caused her to pause though, running her fingers round the collar as she bit her lower lip. She had to take it - it was more than a memento. Inspecting the strand of leather draped across her hands, it was the reminder that gave her the sense of purpose she needed to follow through. Was she betraying Jade? Mela didn’t want to stop and think, she just knew she had to get away to save her.

A nod of the head reaffirmed that it was still the right thing to do and, prodding the collar hurriedly into the side pocket before she changed her mind, Mela yanked the last zip closed and swung the bag onto her shoulder.

Her mouth was dry as she passed out of the front door, and she turned to gaze at the imposing façade of the manor, taking in the grotesquely-carved figures that perched atop the finely-worked stone porch. The contrast shouted of Jade and Raven, elegant poise beside compelling danger. They were so different but she needed both. Gentle authority coaxed her while dark threat drove her. Carrot and stick, ying and yang, Jade and Raven. So different yet similar in so many ways.

Lost in thought, Mela scarcely noticed the car as it crunched up the sweep of the gravel driveway and drew up just the right distance away.

“If you are ready, Miss Mela,” interrupted Dan, opening the door and offering a hand to help her inside. Inhaling deeply, Mela ducked in and settled into the backseat. Reaching into the side pocket for the chocolate bar he always kept there just for her, she fished it out with a flicker of a smile. It would be a journey where her mind would work overtime. This wouldn’t be the last hit of sugar she would need.

== ~ ==

In keeping with the now-normal routine, Raven locked the metal band around her neck to the frame of the bed before someone entered the room. Secured that way, the only band not encased beneath leather or latex, she couldn’t really see much except that it was the Jester once again.

With his usual rush, he unlocked the chain and wrapped it around his bony hand then with a yank, set off at pace. Strutting along behind him in stiletto heels, Raven wondered what had happened to the bear named Yuri. At least this freak’s pace was more natural.

A couple of turns and Raven was already disoriented. She had expected left and they had gone right, had expected a turn where they went straight ahead. It was haphazard as they seemed to double back and cross a corridor they had crossed before but it wasn’t long though before Raven was looking down a horribly familiar corridor.

It was the one she had been dragged down the day before and at the end of it lay the arena, the scene of her utter degradation. She feared what lay beyond the doors for her today, she feared a repeat of yesterday would completely tear her apart.

The Jester drew her by the neck. In response, she pulled back, reluctant to be there again so soon. “Come on Ki-Ki, there’s a good girl,” he chided and with a tug, pulled the taller woman forward, down the corridor and out into the light.

Though not as hot as the previous day, it still made for an uncomfortable temperature. She soon felt the rays of the sun picking out the black of her catsuit to turn it into her personal sauna.

It was the same taunting routine again only it didn’t feel as cutting this time – she was either less sensitive or more certain of herself, but she wasn’t sure which. She could feel watching eyes again, hear catcalls but now clad in the outfit of her trade, she just felt stronger, more, well, more Raven.

Though she was glad of the layer of latex insulating her from his scrawny, grabby hands, she also thought of how the assembled crowd would be enjoying seeing her publicly groped. Let them look, let them leer. She would watch, wait and strike when the prancing fool made his next mistake.

When the Jester skipped away with his familiar flourish, Raven was left alone in the centre of the arena. Clad in gleaming black latex, she stood with more confidence. She knew how she looked and so, playing to the howling crowd, she widened her stance to display, and thrust hands on hips to press out her chest and chin.

It was then that the door in front of her was swept open. Seeing her opponent for the game of the day framed in the doorway, Raven’s jaw dropped and her hands slipped off her hips to hang by her sides.