Shoving my bedroom door open, I enter, sighing when I see River on my bed. He’s lounging against the headboard, his body naked except for the small pair of blue boxer-briefs hugging his hips and thighs. My bedroom is stark, just like me. The dark space, with the white and silver paintings along the walls are almost clinical. I don’t like color. I don’t enjoy being outside. The sun is far too cheerful for me to endure. Thankfully with my natural tanned skin I don’t look like the walking dead.
His green gaze lifts to my blue one. Silence is heavy in the air as I shrug off my jacket. The clink of my gold, engraved cufflinks are the only sound when I drop them on my chest of drawers. Next are my slacks, then my shirt. When I’m in much the same attire as he is, I join him on the mattress.
“How is she?” he asks, knowing I’ve been in that hell all day. I want to tell him about her, about the feisty little girl.
“Malcolm isn’t going to be happy about her,” I inform him. “She’s far too fiery, and she’s not going to break easily.” My assumptions on Caia are strong. I’ve never seen such fight in a girl before.
“Perhaps she’ll be easier to break,” he suggests, pulling me closer, and I place my head on his chest. His heartbeat slowly thrums in my ear. It’s the only time I allow myself to not think about the dark. River is as broken as I am, and he understands there are times I just want silence.
“Dante is out with a girl,” he informs me, and I hear the agony in his tone. River and my brother have history. I have a feeling my best friend is in love with my brother, but he’s never said anything to me. Perhaps it’s because I fuck River as well.
“Good for him,” I respond, placing my hand on his soft cock, hoping to wake it up and have him forget Dante for a moment.
“You can’t do that, you know,” River smirks. I hear it in his words.
I don’t look up at him, but question, “What?”
“Fuck me to make me think about you instead.” Pulling my hand from his bulge, I sigh and push off the bed. Padding barefoot into the adjoining bathroom, I turn the shower on and shove my boxers down.
Under the spray, I close my eyes and imagine Caia. Her slim body, those big eyes filled with fight and innocence. I want to steal it. To fucking take everything from her so my father can’t.
My cock jolts when I remind myself of her slight frame in my arms. She was so delicate, so fucking soft. Fisting my dick, I stroke it slowly, taunting myself with images of her, of what I could do to her.
I’ve fucked so many women in my short life, but there’s something about tearing apart her body that does things to me. A fire burns in my veins when I squeeze my shaft, almost to the point of pain.
Realization dawns that I want to take her sweetness, and it stills me for a moment, but only one moment, because soon I’m pumping my release down the drain imagining her virtue slick on my cock.
I will have her.
I’ll break her, make her mine, before she’s taken and defiled worse than I ever can do to her.
The darkness surrounds me.
It always has. By the time I was thirteen, I had seen far too many horrors. But it’s all him. He took and took, and when there wasn’t anything left, he preyed on others. Then again, he’s always done that. I recall the first time I learned what he was.
A monster.
It was that day my life changed. I’d never be the same again, and now that I’m twenty-five, I feel as if I’m an old, ragged man. Even though I’m only starting my life. Not the life I wanted, but the one I was thrust into at an early age.
There’s a stench in the basement when I enter. Five rooms sit to my left, and another five to my right. That’s ten captives he holds each year. One month, four weeks, he takes one of those lucky ten and ensures they shatter. The process is simple. They come in, they get tortured and used, and then on their final day, a group of men and women walk in, watch the show, and choose which they’d prefer.
He’s broken them in for years. It’s the way he gets off. I’ve seen the vilest of acts being done to girls over the years. He’s had boys here too. However, they don’t earn him enough, so he focuses on girls. They can offer him what boys can’t.
And as many years as I’ve been here, I’m still trying to find a way out. A way where I can run with my brother and my best friend and never look back. Slowly, with each night that falls, I know that day will never come. But I hold onto that faraway emotion we’re taught as kids.
Hope.
The problem is, in this place, that’s a fruitless wish. There’s no such thing as hope in here. Life will end here the same way it started. In agony. It’s the cries and screams that haunt the walls of the mansion. Even though the captives are kept in the basement, being on the upper levels, even in my bedroom, I hear them. As if they echo to me, to taint me for what I’ve helped be done to them.
I recall the day I walked into the basement when he was in one of his sessions.
The door is ajar. There’s a dim light telling me to run, to hide, but I don’t. I’m intrigued. I’m ten years old, and all I want is to learn to be a good boy. He tells me I need to be, but I never understand what he means.
I reach the last, cold, concrete step and peek through the space in the door. A gold light comes from within. A scream so loud, so filled with pain I can’t help stumbling back. It’s a girl. I can tell that already.
I lean forward once more, and the door slides open another inch. The image before me causes me to retch. The sound echoes along with her screams, and he snaps his vicious glare at me.
“Bring him in.” The familiar, deep voice I’ve known all my short life vibrates through the walls of the basement. Cold concrete greets my ass when I fall back.
Two strong meaty hands grip my bony shoulders, lifting me with no effort. My skinny legs flail wildly in the air as a man who’s the size of an ogre carries me inside the room where he’s standing.
“What the fuck is he doing in here?” the man questions.
I recoil when a hand reaches for my face. Gripping my neck, he lifts me onto a steel gurney and presses me flat on my back. The smell of blood is thick in the air, and I retch once more.
My body folds in the middle, my small arms hold onto my stomach, but he growls, ordering the ogre to bind my arms and legs to the four corners. Once I’m unable to move, he chuckles when I beg for mercy. But I know for a fact he won’t show it.
The little girl on the gurney beside me is not moving. Her long blonde hair is matted with dark red liquid. It looks like she’s sleeping —her eyes closed, her face at peace—and I notice her chest isn’t moving. She’s no longer breathing.
“What did you do?” My question is hoarse. My throat burns at the realization running through my mind. I shake my head when he looks at me and nods.
“She served her purpose.” His words are cold, then I notice him pulling up his zipper on the dark slacks he always wears to work.
I don’t understand. My brows crease in confusion. He hurt her. I know that.
“Perhaps we can have him trained?” the man asks the ogre. They both look at me as if I’m an experiment. I’m not sure what they mean, but my chest tightens, and my breathing gets more difficult.
“I think he’ll be a good investment,” the ogre agrees after a long while of studying me. He smirks, his mouth curling evilly as he watches me.
“Tie him in the training chair.” The old man grins happily. He cups my cheek in his hand and leans in. His breath stinks of alcohol and blood which makes me choke on the spit dripping down my throat from his open mouth.
“What if he doesn’t—?”
“I said tie him to the fucking chair,” the man bites out angrily at the ogre. “He’ll learn to appreciate my business. He is my son after all.”
Shaking my head to clear it of the gloomy time in my life, I move into the empty cell and start my clean up. I couldn’t sleep after I’d left her in that room, so here I am at one in the morning working when I should be asleep.
The wet mattress has already been pulled out of the room, and the bucket needs to be removed and cleaned. Grabbing the mop, I start on the floor now dried where she’s pissed herself while I was holding her. I shouldn’t have gotten angry, but it was her weakness I hated.
When he told me there would be more coming, he mentioned bringing a new, special girl in. I knew what he’d want from me. I’ve become wary of the girls who arrive, because I know the moment I see them in their beauty, it will be the last time they’ll ever look that way again. But after my jerk-off session last night, I closed my eyes, with River curled around me in bed, and saw her eyes. I recognized the plea in them. She needs a knight to save her, and as much as I never believed I could be anyone’s savior, this girl makes me feel something I never did before — I want to be the one who saves her from the Devil himself even though it may kill me.
I want to sever the link to him and have her be mine.
But as much as I want that, I know I can’t ever have her because he owns them all. Each one brought into hell, he takes them and makes sure they never see the light of day again.
But it’s not the fact that he takes from them, it’s the way he does it. A scrape of a boot sounds from behind me, and I find my brother at the door. He eyes me warily. We’ve both been working here for the man we call father for so long it’s become second nature to clean up the mess left by each toy.
“She going to last?” he questions naturally, as if we’re talking about the fucking weather. He looks like he’s been well fucked, and I wonder who the girl was.
“I hope so.” I’ve never uttered those words. Never once cared if the girls come back from their sessions or not, but with the pretty toy I’ve just led to the den, I wonder if I’ll ever see those soulful eyes again.
“There’s no hope in here, Drake,” my brother grunts in frustration. He’s younger than me by two minutes. But I was dragged into the darkness much earlier than he was.
“I know,” I finally respond, causing him to glance at me. The blue eyes that match mine stare at me for a moment. My father told us we were a gift to him from our mother. That she had told him how special we were as she birthed us. In her screams, she told him we’d carry on the Savage legacy. I think he’s full of shit.
My mother may be a stranger to me — I’ve only ever seen a handful of photos of her — but there’s something in her gaze whenever she looked at the camera. A faraway look that reminds me of the girls in here.
Her ancestry took us back to Europe. Both our mother’s and father’s bloodlines originated there. But now we live in what is known as the “land of the free”, which to me is a lie, because it seems to stifle everything good in our lives.
“Is she pretty?” he questions as he unscrews the bottle of bleach. The harsh scent still bothers my senses as he douses the floor in the clear liquid.
Is she?
Yes.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, not answering his question because I know there isn’t any reason for me to want her. As much as I could attempt saving her, it would be pointless.
“Then perhaps you should go in there and ask Dad if he’ll allow you to play the final round.” I glance at my brother then. It’s the first time we’ve really gotten to talk about something like this. An option of perhaps winning and keeping one of the girls.
But even so, if I do get her, she’ll hate me for what I allow to happen to her. I’ve left her in there with the Devil himself. I know what she’s going through right now. In my mind, I recall the training chair. My father’s idea of teaching impressionable youths on the basics of human nature. That’s a fucking joke. More like the intricacies of being an animal.
“That will never happen,” I tell him.
“You never know,” Dante murmurs as he carries the bucket from the cell and disappears, leaving me to wonder if I’ll ever have a chance against our father.