Page 5 of Little Puppet

“Something feels broken,” I tell him, shifting as I feel something move in my belly that likely shouldn’t be there.

He sighs, looking down as I lean against the porch, my hands finding a stick shoved into my stomach a few inches. Warm blood trickles out of the wound, and I cry out as panic seizes me.

“Don’t remove it.” His voice sounds annoyed. Like I’ve clumsily ruined his game.

“It hurts.”

“Mm, I bet it does. You should’ve run faster, puppet, and I wouldn’t have caught you.”

He helps me to my feet and lifts me into his arms.

I try my hardest to see behind the mask. I need something to tell the police when they eventually find me.

Someone has to know by now that I’m missing. My mom had me checking in every hour on the hour of my drive, and I was about to call her when I saw headlights getting far too close to my rear end.

She knows something’s wrong, and she’s had to have called the police by now. She tracks my phone. She knows my location. And even if that malfunctions, my phone will detect a crash and alert her, as she’s my emergency contact.

Pain takes hold of my thoughts as I’m thrown down on a bed without a care for the stick jutting out from my gut, and I grab for it, trying to hold it still.

“You’ve made quite the mess of yourself, puppet,” he tsks, shaking his head as he rips my shirt open to get a better look at my wound.

His scent is nearly overwhelming, spiced, yet laced with a sickly sweet tang that has me licking my lips.

His mask looks like the one Jason Vorhees wore, a classic hockey mask, except it is worn and has blood staining it. The longer he looks over me, lingering withhis overwhelming scent, the more confused my brain grows.

I know it was him who ran me off the road. Why else would he have then come back and towed me into the woods? However, he could be working with someone else.

His veined, thick hands look at the jagged entry wound where blood oozes each time he moves the stick.

“I need a hospital,” I breathe, and I hate how small and helpless I sound.

“You only need me,” he growls back, not looking up at me.

His dark hair is wet with sweat. His leather jacket is worn and has the last name Mordova embroidered on its lapel. It looks like a bomber jacket worn by a pilot in some distant war.

“And who are you?” I ask, knowing he’s not going to answer but trying anyhow.

“Your master, of course.”

His answer skitters through my cortex. “What?”

He looks up at me, his ice-blue eyes stabbing into mine as they hold my gaze steady and stern. “Every puppet needs a master.”

What the fuck?

This was the stupidest decision I’ve ever made. To come home alone. Now, I’m captured by a fucking psychopath who thinks I’m his toy, and a stick is going to be the end of me.

All on the week of Christmas, too.

But it wouldn’t be my life if it wasn’t a shit show.

“This will burn,” he tells me, and I tug back to my reality that’s growing blurry around the edges the more blood I lose.

“What will?”

Before answering, he leans over the bed, and a prick stings my neck as he injects me with something.

His cologne hovers dangerously close as I slip back onto the bed, feeling like I’m sinking into each fiber, becoming a part of the woven fabric as its hostage forever.

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