Page 18 of Karma

Her boyfriend shows up in the doorway, and a dark laugh leaves him. I’m dripping in sweat from the pain at this point, and if anyone would understand, it’s him.

“Baby, you didn’t,” he says.

He pulls the hammer from her hand and uses the back to pull out the nail heads. I don’t know what hurts worse, the going in or the coming out, but my soul leaves my body as he removes them. They land on the floor beside me, rolling idly and covered in my blood. He smirks at me.

“I don’t know if I should be afraid,” he says.

Based on that bruise on her face and the old one on her shoulder, he probably should be. A man who lays a hand on a woman deserves more than nails driven into his balls.

“I would be,” I say, and his face tightens into a grimace.

As he pulls my mask away from my face, he doesn’t seem to recognize me. He must be a new kind of stupid. He throws my shirt at me, and I use it to stem the bleeding, which isn’t bleeding the way I thought it would. This is turning into the worst Reckoning I could have imagined.

Somehow, even worse than the last.

Sam let Knox off the chain to go to the bathroom and clean up. I said to let him rot. Either way, he’s back on his chain now. I hand a cup of water to him, and he drinks it down in a few gulps.

“Sam, would you be a peach and grab his other arm for me?” I ask.

Sam gives me a smirk as I rifle through the drawer. I pull out an archaic-looking device I had Sam make. It’s a modified shock collar, but it’s not meant for his neck.

“What? No!” Knox says, fighting Sam over his right arm’s freedom.

I lean over his legs and steady them as he flails and fights me. He yells out, as if anyone can hear him. We’re in the middle of nowhere. He can scream until his voice breaks.

I work the ring over his flaccid cock and push it to the base. I hope it hurts. I had anticipated catching a man, and what better way to make a man talk than to shock the shit out of his dick? I wasn’t going to use it on him, but then I realized he faked sleeping while I rode him. I fully intend to get him back for that while I try to coax information out of him.

I lock the device and set the key on the dresser, very far from him. Sam leaves me alone with him again. He isn’t into these interrogations. Maybe he can’t handle what I plan to do with Knox’s genitals.

“What is this thing?” he asks, trying to tug on it with his free hand. It doesn’t come off, even as his tugging grows more desperate. “What the fuck is this?”

“It’s a shock ring,” I tell him with a smile.

“You wouldn’t.”

I grab the remote and turn it on, and a soft hum fills the room as I power it all the way up. “If you get hard, I absolutely will. Unless, of course, you end this all right now and give up who they are.”

“I won’t get hard with this thing on me,” he says with a certainty that’s almost laughable.

“We’ll see about that,” I say.

Soon, he’ll have no choice. We cut the water to the bathroom so he couldn’t drink from there when he cleaned up with the damp rag we offered him. After going so long without water, he happily drank down what I handed him, which also contained two dissolved pills in a very particular shade of blue. When it comes to getting hard, he won’t have a choice in the matter.

I hope it hurts. I hope it’s so fucking uncomfortable. And I love that he’ll get no release. Again.

I sit on the bed beside my little stuffed rabbit until I hear the sound of the ring coming to life. He screams out in agony and clutches his dick.

“Goddamn it, what did you give me?” he asks, but he has to know.

I hit the manual override and depress the button. “Care to tell me who you work for before I turn this thing back on?”

“Over my dead body.”

“Why do I feel like that’s what this will come to?”

“It won’t make you feel better, you know,” he says. “You already killed one of us, and you don’t feel any different, do you? The scales haven’t tilted back in your favor, even after you nailed my balls to the floor.”

His words bite a little. I do worry I won’t feel different when I kill him, but I can’t let him leave now. He’s seen too much. He knows too much. And I know nothing at all.

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