Starting to hyperventilate, I concentrated on my breathing, blowing out the overwhelming urge to puke as the crowd screamed and chanted around me.
Grunts, cries and thumps ricocheted around the air, the infrequent crash of the bars making me flinch and screw my eyes together tighter.
And then, just as my legs started to wobble, silence fell over everything. The oxygen in the room disappeared as every single person sucked in a large gasp. Blood rushed in my ears, pounding in my head and causing my whole body to vibrate with dread.
I daren’t breathe. I daren’t open my eyes. I daren’t move.
But when the silence broke with a roar of cheers, I took a breath.
“It’s okay, Kloe. Open your eyes,” Robbie urged.
Only then did I have the courage to look. A broken sob tore from me when I saw Anderson stood quiet and subdued, looking down to a mutilated Killstreak. Blood coated every surface and the scent of it caused me to turn to the wall behind us and expel the contents of my stomach.
“See.” Robbie grinned at me.
How the fuck could he stand there and smile? How the fuck could he stand there and watch something so fucking gruesome?
“Now we can go see him.”
I stood silent and in shock as a man came over to talk to Robbie. I didn’t hear anything they said, I didn’t hear anything as I stared at the mashed up carcass of Killstreak. His dead eyes stared straight at me as his tongue hung limply from the side of his mouth.
A loud burst of laughter ripped up my throat and out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop. Hysterics took me over and tears streamed down my face as Killstreak’s stupid bloated face watched me. My stomach gained a cramp and I bent over, holding on to my legs as hysteria ran through me.
“It’s okay, Kloe. Shh.”
Robbie’s arms around me were the only physical thing I felt. He held me so tightly that I thought I might snap, his soft pleading for me to close my eyes finally registering in my head and bidding me to shut my eyes and block it all out.
I buried my face into his chest as he directed me through the mass of still screaming people and through a door we had been heading for earlier.
The bang of the door behind me made me jump, and I relished in the muted quiet of the long thin corridor.
“You okay now?”
The concern on Robbie’s face made me warm to the usually cold man. There was another layer to Robbie I hadn’t witnessed before, and for the first time, I understood the relationship between him and Anderson.
Nodding, hating that I had worried him, I managed a smile. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to freak out.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said with a firm shake of his head. “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”
That was an understatement.
“Come on.”
Pulling on my hand, Robbie escorted me through a couple of doors, people greeting him with a friendly ‘hi’ or a handshake every now and again. I felt safe with him. All these people were as rough as they came, some towering above me, some with inhumanely huge muscles, some with their whole faces covered in tats. But every single one gave me a friendly smile and a quick wink.
“This is Anderson’s room,” Robbie said. “You need me to come in with you?”
Shaking my head, I told him thanks.
And opened the door.
Luckily Robbie was still behind me.
He caught me when the air rushed from my lungs and I stumbled backwards.
“Shit!”
It was all I caught. Robbie’s ‘shit’. The soft hiss of his angry murmur the only sound that registered.
Anderson’s face shot to mine. But I didn’t see him. I couldn’t.
All I saw was Sarah, Ben’s ex, on her knees with Anderson’s cock in her mouth, and the cruel glint in her eye aimed directly at me.
Present day
SOMETHING LEFT ME.
Something died within me.
Something started to grow deep inside me.
I think I had given in then, at the very moment I had stood before the man I had given myself to wholly, dejected and dazed while Sarah laughed. And Anderson smirked. And grief settled in my cold bones.
Hope and promise, it all died, crumbled beneath me. And I allowed it. I gave the hatred permission to fester, to bubble, burn and feast beneath my skin. Until the only shred of sanity I had left oozed from my pores and every drop of rage in my heart slid into my veins.
They all took. They all wounded. They all made me suffer.
And now it was my turn.
He walked in quietly, sighed, and picked up the mail from my doormat. His feet were loud as they padded across the carpet and I squinted when he pulled open the curtains and light spilled into my lounge. Turning, he jumped and gasped as his eyes widened on me.
“Jesus, Klo!” I hated that he called me Klo. Hated it. “What the fuck?”
He stood regarding me quietly as if he was frightened to come any closer – that was mainly because I had a gun pointed at his head from where I sat on my sofa.
Point and click, he’d said. Point and click.
“Hello, Richard.”
He paused, his brow pinching as he tried to get a read of me. “What’s going on?”
Clicking my tongue, I smiled, but it wasn’t at all welcoming. “How did you get in?”
His eyes flashed as he tried to think on the spot. How stupid was I? “You gave me a key, remember?”
Slowly shaking my head at his lie, I chuckled. “That all you got? I gave you a key? Try again, Richard… or should we even the odds? You call me Samantha and I’ll call you Robert.”
Fear caught his breath and he licked his dry lips.
Point and click. Simple, he’d said. Just point and click.
“Where is he?”
Shaking his head, he frowned, “I don’t know…”
He didn’t say any more. His blood sprayed across my lovely cream curtains when I forced a bullet straight through the middle of his forehead.
Apparently it was as easy as just point and click.
Slowly loading another bullet into the pistol, I smiled, gently stroking across the cold sheath of metal.
And then I sat.
And I waited.
For Anderson.
To be concluded in
Chained
Coming July 2016
Out Now
An erotic thriller
After her mother abandoned her when she was just a child, Dove fled the only life she’d known with her younger sister, Serenity, frightened that the authorities would tear them both apart.
Leaving behind a life of poverty and constant hardship with the group of travellers she had grown up with, Dove has no choice but to turn to a life of debauchery and crime to feed their bellies and provide them with shelter and security.
Fast forward ten years and life is now so very different for Dove. Her once best friend and fellow traveller, Flick O’Kane, now a Hollywood star, appoints Dove to accompany him to a charity ball, unaware just who exactly his companion really is.
Both their lives come together in an explosion of sex, drugs and secrets. The friendship they once held close is about to be tested when their past threatens to rip them both apart and endangers not just their own lives but the very life Dove has broken her own soul for – Serenity’s.