Page 51 of Rawest Venom

“What?” She swallows and wiggles her hips with anticipation.

“Who are you?”

A quick inhale causes her tits to bounce almost outof the top of her dress. “I-I-I don’t know how to answer that.”

If rage were a color, I only see red. “Who. The. Fuck. Are. You.”

“Cal, I don’t know! I can’t answer that!” she yells with some level of annoyance.

“Goddamnit!” Maybe I will kill her. Perhaps just take some parts off slowly, one at a time. If pleasure isn’t working, maybe I should go for pain.

“I don’tknowwho I am! How could I? I-I have very few memories from before I was trained…” It comes out almost like a sob.

Flicking off her toy, I pull out my knife and flip it open with a click. Spotting it, she squirms toward the head of the bed, but her face is resolved. Like she’s being honest. When I move to her fingers hanging off the suspended wires, she doesn’t even flinch as I hold the sharp blade to one.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t have to… You don’t, Cal. I’m with you. I’m on your side.” She’s good... Fat tears form, then fall over the lids onto her cheeks, but it doesn’t seem like a fear reaction. If anything, she seems hurt. That’s confusing.

Gripping the blade by the hilt, I jump onto the bed and kneel over her chest, holding the steel against the skin of her throat. My hands shake as my fury consumes me. The yell that bellows from my chest vibrates the bed, causing her arms to wave in a sadistic dance. “Give me something real!”

Sobbing now, her voice rings out just as loud with a panicked cry. “Come on! We have to move!”

Every cell in my body stops regenerating. No air enters my lungs. My heart ceases to beat. No, no, no, no, no…

I know her.

“It was you.”

Twenty-One

JANE

The bad man will come back at any moment. My friend lies in a pool of sticky blood. She hasn’t talked to me in hours. I tried to keep her with me, but she went to sleep. Everything hurts. Especially deep within my thighs, all the way to my core. I don’t want him to hug me anymore.

Steps on the cold floor down the hall make me press against the stone wall, but there’s nowhere I can hide. The patters echoing underneath the wooden door aren’t like normal, though. These are lighter, smaller. Before my hoarse shriek can leave my throat as the shadow of legs appears beneath the slit to the hallway, a boy about my age rushes in.

In his right hand is a gun pointing at the floor. I’m too afraid to do anything, but he unbinds me quickly. Whimpers come from my friend next to me. “Kill me.”

I stand and lean against the wall, frozen with terror.

“Kill me,” she sobs. Between her legs looks like raw roast beef. There’s so much blood oozing from her, it’s as if someone doused her in ketchup for a meal.

The boy leans over her and peers at her eyes, which are fixedand large. They look like ominous black holes in her head. Both he and I glance up to the ceiling as we hear a scrape above us, meaning the impending visitors are probably minutes away. The boy straightens up, then points the gun at my friend’s head and shoots, the sound causing my ears to go numb.

Standing as still as a statue, he watches the floor for a long moment before his green eyes finally look at me. Thrusting his free arm out, he says, “Come on! We have to move!” Placing my small hand in his, we run as fast as we can, but I’m so tired, it’s nearly impossible. I don’t know where I’m going, but I follow my rescuer, my hero, out into the cold, black night.

“It was you,” Cal repeats, backing away slowly with his knife at his side.

I’m broken. I can’t breathe. Only my tears escape, as well as the sobs in my chest. Those memories are worse than death. Dying would be a release from the pain they cause.

“I don’twantto remember who I am… Don’t you see? You saved me. You set me free.”

Giving me his strapping back, he raises his hands to the sides of his head and tugs on his chocolate strands, the blade sticking out like a horn. Taking a small step to the left and then changing to the right, his body seems to be confused, not knowing whether to run or stay. The sweetness in his voice has been replaced with some type of animal cry as he repeats the word over and over. “No, no, no, no…”

Blinking rapidly, I clear the tears clouding my vision and try to contain the heaving breaths squeezing inside my chest. When I sniff back my snot, his taut form whips around to face me and that familiar fear I’ve heldfor him returns. His green eyes are the color of a dark forest riddled with rain, red marks smeared underneath each socket. If I look closely enough, I can see tiny spider capillaries on the sides of his nose. Focusing on them, they move slightly, almost as if waving at me, and I want to say hello.

I’m sure his movement is swift, but I can see him coming before his feet move when he drops his knife to the floor and sits down next to me on the bed. His face peers into my eyes, studying them. The colors in his irises dance underneath the rivers they contain, which spill over on one cheek. My tongue sticks out to catch it. The thought of doing so makes me giggle and the pulsations in my lungs change from heavy thunder to a babbling brook, which rises from my belly and out of my mouth. I laugh.

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