Page 38 of Little Puppet

“Cain?” Grace’s voice has me shaking away from my anxious thoughts and looking at her where she’s exiting my bedroom.

She’s in my sweatpants and a T-shirt. I hadn’t thought to reconnect her strings to her piercings, and now I’m glad I hadn’t. Though, it’s ignorant. She could’ve left me.

She comes to the chair where I am in the living room and straddles over me to sit down. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“About what you said in the bedroom earlier. About how you don’t want to let me go.”

“I’m scared, Grace. I’ve never admitted that to someone, but you scare me.”

She laughs, and the sound of anger roils my veins.

Before I think twice about it, I grasp her throat in my hand, cutting off her oxygen. Her eyes light with heat.

“What are you laughing at? You find me funny, Grace?”

She licks her lips, and my cock stirs.

It’s never sated. It always wants to be inside her. Have more of her.

I release her throat. “You see? Do you see who I am? With you, I’m more raw, more myself. How am I ever to stuff this part of me back down if you’re not dead, darling? I need you gone to return to life as it always is.”

“But why?” she asks. “Why do you have to go back to it? Why can’t you be yourself at home with me and be Dr. Mordova at work with them? Those peasants don’t need to see you as I see you, Cain. You save those bits for me. You don’t need to repress it and save it for one week a year. You come home and fuck me, cut me, slap me, dowhatever you need to do to me to feel alive. To feel happiness. Then, you go to work in the morning with my scent on your lips, the feel of me on your cock, and you save lives. That’s what you do.”

Her words awaken the beast in my chest, and he rolls his neck in answer.

“It sounds great, puppet. But it can’t happen. Be honest. You’re going to run from me the first chance that you get. You’re going to call the police, rat me out. I’ll rot in a cell, fisting my dick to thoughts of you, coming all over concrete walls and writing your name in it, night after agonizing night.”

Her cheeks heat with blush, and I rub my thumb over it as if some will sink into my skin.

When I glide my thumb over her bottom lip, she opens for me, a small breathy exhale billowing out.

I only have another week of vacation before I have to go back to real life. I give myself only two weeks each year: one to hunt and play and one to preserve my puppet.

She’s made it to Christmas and is still alive. But before New Year’s, I have to kill her.

We both know she’s going to run.

“Run along, puppet. Go to bed.”

She opens her mouth to give a rebuttal, and I shake my head once, the look on my face warning her not to push me tonight. I’m too on the edge. I don’t trust what I’ll do if she continues.

“Can I sleep with you tonight, master?” she leans in,her lips dusting over mine. The whispers of her scent curl around me, and I breathe them in deeply.

“Yes. But you’d best be bare for me when I get up there, understand?”

“Yes, master.”

She slides off my lap and up the staircase, but I don’t follow her with my gaze as I usually would, and that’s where I fuck up.

Even as my brain says that we could try it her way, her next move solidifies her death.

Her scream carries down the stairs, and I sit rigid as I turn my head slowly, knowing just what my puppet has found.

I sigh as I stand, turning for the stairs and taking them two by two.

She’s backing away from the open door, the one I expressly told her to stay the fuck away from. She backs into my chest, and I walk her into the room, flicking the light switch.

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