Page 40 of Lethal

“Behave,” he growls, leaning forward and nipping my bottom lip between his teeth. Pain radiates from the spot as a delicious curl of desire follows it. “You can have more of me later. It’s time for you to learn a thing or two.”

He grabs my hand and leads me to where our captive is lulling his head back and forth, doing his best to remain conscious. He doesn’t seem to be doing all that well. Cole has been having tons of fun over the past 24 hours, moving between spending chunks of time on his computers and switching to the fleshy pile of fun.

Cole has been so singularly focused, every thought consumed with not only our captive but the end goal of finding Brent, that any normal girl could become jealous. That’s not me though. It doesn’t hurt that he also involved me as he was doing it. Our own version of a sick, fucked up date night. Although, those seem to be my signature at this point. Killing Grayson’s dad as a date night. Skinning and general mental games with Cole. Getting fucked by a gun with Vander. And now what seems to be electrical torture with Jasper.

We pause in front of the man tied to the chair. His glassy eyes are open but remain unfocused. Dried blood stains his cheek, neck, chest, and clothes. It’s splattered everywhere, and on his knee is the complete, thin sheet of skin Cole removed from where I touched him. While the man dropped out of consciousness a few times during the meticulous time spent on removing his skin, it wasn’t until he spread it out in view that the man completely passed out.

Reaching into his pocket, Jasper extracts a knife. With a flick of his hand, the blade snaps into place, glinting against the low light in the room. “Do you want the pleasure, or should I?”

“Don’t you want me to have the full experience? I thought your teaching would be all hands on, not asking me what I’d want.” I can’t help but rile him as I snatch the knife from his hold. He remains silent while handing it over easily, not wanting me to accidentally cut myself. Assuming he means for me to remove the clothing from our victim, and knowing he’d correct me if I’m wrong, I get to work slicing through the fabric along key areas. The man doesn’t even react to what I’m doing. He may be awake, but he certainly isn’t fully comprehending anything.

Once I have his clothing sliced open, Jasper helps me to yank it out from under him until he’s completely naked. It’ll certainly be amusing to see his reaction when he’s fully lucid again, assuming that even happens. He very well might be past the point. The plan had originally been to force him to answer our questions about where Brent is, but it’s turning into full on torture for our personal amusement.

With the clothing out of the way, Jasper bends and picks up two objects, both connected by an electrical cord that’s hooked up to the car battery he brought in. From where I was across the room, I assumed he was attaching it to the chair, but apparently, I was wrong. One of the objects is a long rod, and the other is what appears to be a control box.

“Which role would you like? Do you want to do the shocking, or control the voltage? You know what, I’m not sure why I’m asking. Take the rod.” He says it in a mocking tone, apparently not brushing off my comment like I thought he did. It’s all done in a teasing way, though. He hands me the item, making sure I don’t touch myself with the end that shocks, even though he has the voltage set to off.

He walks me through the mechanics of how the system works, specifying what voltage level becomes dangerous for the victim.

“Got it. What about this?” I ask, holding up the rod.

“You use the pointy end to shock him.”

“Remind me why I have you around to teach me again?”

Jasper smirks, finding my reaction amusing. He nudges the dial on the voltage to a low setting and drops the box, moving to stand behind me. One of his hands snakes around my waist, settling on my lower stomach. The other wraps around my hand holding onto the rod.

“When torturing someone with electrical shock, you want to go for the most sensitive places,” he tells me. “Mouth, face, armpits, genitals, pecs, and nipples.” His hand guides the rod to correspond with each location, zapping a low voltage shock in demonstration.

With the first one delivered to his mouth, the captive jolts in his seat, the shock ripping him from the half lucid state he was in. And each subsequent shock has the violence of his shaking body intensifying. Fear coats his eyes, distorting his vision. After shocking one of his nipples, Jasper releases his hold on me, and the rod drops to my side. I’m careful to make sure I don’t zap myself in the process while watching him pick up a bucket of water.

He turns to ensure I’m watching him, and upon noticing my gaze, he continues with his teaching. “You’ll want to make sure you douse your subject in liquid. It works to reduce electrical resistance of the skin and has the added benefit of increasing the effect of the shocks.”

“Two birds,” I murmur.

“That it is.” He dumps the water over the man’s head. It runs over his face, turning pink as it streams along his body until making its way to the floor below him, soaking his feet in a puddle.

I’m fixing to use the rod on the man again, to explore what reaction I get with each bump in intensity, when a shout of excitement from the other side of the room draws my attention. Cole jumps to his feet, clapping his hands together once as he strides across the expanse to swoop me into his arms. Jasper barely snatches the rod from my hands in time.

“What’s going on?” I ask with a wheeze as he squishes me in a hug.

Cole’s brilliant smile flashes before he painfully grips either side of my head and slams his lips to mine. It’s bruising and possessive, especially when the area hasn’t had much time since he last kissed me this way. I don’t mind though. In fact, I enjoy the added pain to my pleasure. His hand dips to my neck, where he squeezes and uses the advantage to push me away, acting as if I was the one who attacked him with my wanton advances.

“I got into their systems. They don’t even know they’ve been infiltrated, and I found the information we need. My systems are capturing everything they can now, in case they realize I’ve hacked in. I know where they are.”

He uses the hand around my neck to pull me toward him forcefully once again. This time only pressing a fast kiss to my lips before walking away. Over his shoulder, he says, “Let’s hurry and wrap this up. We need to get there before they disappear on us.”

When he reaches his computers, he jumps into packing the unneeded equipment, wanting us to get out of here as quickly as possible. In the few seconds I stand here watching him, he glances at his screen several times, tracking the progress of the downloading information.

No doubt about it, he’ll be rushing us back to the jet the moment it’s finished.

Glancing at the rod in Jasper’s hand, disappointment fills me. “So much for having some fun,” I pout. This time when my lip pokes out, it’s not an entirely fake show of emotion.

“We can still have fun. It just has to be compacted in a few minutes.” He steps closer, holding the rod out for me to take. “This won’t be the last time we kill this way either. We’ll have a full extended torture session at some point to make up for it.”

He kisses the side of my head, but I don’t find much comfort in the action or his words. “Yeah, so Cole can interrupt us again? No thanks.”

Jasper barks out a laugh, making me narrow my gaze on him and contemplate zapping him with the rod instead of our captive. “You can’t stand it when things don’t go exactly your way. Good thing we’re all too obsessed to let it affect our opinion of you.” That helps my decision. I shift the rod in his direction and he jumps back with another bout of laughter. Fucking asshole. He’s not supposed to enjoy this. I’m surrounded by idiots.

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