Page 23 of Torment

I held up a hand, cutting her off. She shrank back even farther. “They found eleven bodies. That’s all!”

“The rest were eaten by alligators,” she said quietly. She’d stopped crying now. Most likely needed to focus all her energy on lying.

“So a hundred and forty bodies magically vanished into some gator guts in such a short period of time?” I said. I let out a low, mirthless chuckle. “What a load of shit.”

“They didn’t know the plane crashed for a long time after it went down over the river,” Jolie said. “There was almost a whole day for the alligators to have their feeding frenzy. That part of the Sabine is teeming with them, so it isn’t hard to believe that over a hundred bodies were eaten.”

I nodded slowly as a cold smile turned up the corners of my lips. She was truly committed to this lie. “Do you want to know what I think really happened that day?”

“What?” she asked, eyes wide and fearful.

“Your father decided to sacrifice a few useless men for the greater good. He put some of them on that plane and faked the passenger manifest to say that all the men were on it. The plane was somehow tampered with, and it went down exactly where he wanted it to go down. When some of the bodies were found and identified as cult members, everyone assumed the rest were eaten and gone forever. Just as you keep trying to claim.”

“And then what?” Jolie’s eyes were narrowed now, and her arms were crossed over her chest. She looked and sounded defiant. Her true nature was showing itself yet again.

“Then the remaining men, including your father and the Elders, hid themselves.”

“That isn’t possible. The borders were scrutinized for months.”

“Because they never crossed the fucking border,” I growled. “They’ve obviously been right here in the States all along. Hiding in plain sight. Living normal lives under assumed names, moving from place to place so that no one ever knows them for too long and figures out who they are.” I paused and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Now, who else do we know who suddenly vanished after all the attention and became an expert at changing her name and appearance, while also moving all over the country for the last several years?”

Jolie’s face had turned a ghostly shade of white. “I hid myself because I hated the attention. I haven’t been helping anyone. The cult is dead.”

My smile grew wider. “Of course it is,” I said sarcastically, reaching forward to grip her right arm. She yelped as I dragged her out of her cell and up the steps.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, her panicked voice several octaves higher.

“I’m taking you somewhere to make you talk.”

“I amtalking!”

“I meant truthfully,” I said with a nasty grin. “You’ve always had an issue with that, haven’t you?”

She kicked and screamed all the way up the dim passage leading out of the water and into the house. She’d been full-blooded and feisty ever since I captured her. She simply never stopped fighting. Even when she wasn’t trying to lash out at me with her hands, feet or words, she fought me with her eyes, focusing them on me like laser beams and making her hatred of me very clear.

At first I found it amusing that she was trying to fight back, especially when the little bitch thought a little canister of mace and a kitchen knife could overpower me, but it turned irritating very fucking fast. The little whore almost got me caught.

Firstly, her body hadn’t been anywhere near as susceptible to the drugs I shot into her neck as it was supposed to be. She drifted in and out of consciousness for hours instead of falling into a deep sleep right away. Perhaps she simply had a stronger constitution than average, or perhaps her system had a built-up tolerance to sedatives from all the years she spent at New Eden. Either way, I suppose that was my fault for not bringing enough of the stuff or having the foresight to realize she might tolerate the drugs more than an average girl. The rest was her fucking fault, though.

She just wouldn’t quit trying to fight me. When she was in my trunk, she kicked out my taillight and attracted the attention of a bunch of drunk kids. If they hadn’t been so fucked up, they probably would’ve noted my license plate and called the cops on me.

After that, I got pulled over because of the broken taillight. Jolie was conscious enough to moan in the back seat, and I was lucky the cop who pulled me over seemed exhausted enough to fall for my radio excuse. I was sure she felt sorry for me too, after seeing my scarred face. I could tell by the way her gaze lingered a little too long on my left side, and the way her eyes filled with sorrow as she tried to avert them and pretend she hadn’t noticed my monstrous appearance. She let me go almost immediately.

And so, despite all of Jolie’s struggles, I finally got her where I wanted her in the end. Eight years of pain, struggle, despair, and frustration had finally come to fruition. She needed to be punished for everything she’d done, and that was exactly what I was going to do.

The last two weeks had served as a way of humiliating her, breaking her down, and making her accept the reality of her situation. Now things were getting serious. I wanted her to finally see who I was and what she’d turned me into, and I wanted to know where the fuck the men from the Path of the Covenant were.

I knew she knew. There was no way she didn’t. They all got away because of her treachery toward me, so they’d surely filled her in on their plan to disappear. She was probably even in regular contact with them, merely pretending to live a normal life in the real world while she waited for them to build a new commune somewhere.

I tapped the code into the keypad and dragged her into my lake house. For a moment, she stopped shrieking and went completely silent with shock instead, her eyes wide as she gazed around.

She must’ve been expecting some sort of decrepit dungeon or an old shack in the middle of nowhere. While the house was quite far out in the sticks, it was brand new. I’d based the design on the lake house I once renovated in upstate New York, except the New York house didn’t have a submerged torture cell. That part was definitely a new addition.

The house was filled with modern furniture and artwork along with a few vintage touches, like high ceilings, chandelier lights and intricate carved moldings. A nice mixture of new and old. I wasn’t sleeping here at the moment, but it was still good to have a place to relax in for a couple of hours once I was done dealing with Jolie for the day.

“Come on,” I said, dragging her down the closest hall toward a crimson door. It was clearly out of place compared to all the other cream-colored doors in the house, and Jolie tried to dig her bare feet into the floorboards when she saw it, trying to stop me from taking her any farther down the passage.

“What is that?” she squeaked.

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