Page 21 of The Fire Went Wild

“Lift up your ass,” he tells me, the panties bunched around my upper thighs. His eyes are daggers. When I don’t make any attempt to do as he says, he digs his hands into my hips, his fingers long and sharp, and hoists me up with more of that surprising, hidden strength. He shoves the panties into place. Drops me.

His hands are still on my hips, still under my skirt, and he’s kneeling in front of me almost like he’s the one in supplication.

“L-let me go.” I hate that there’s a shiver in my voice. “The stupid things are on.”

For a moment, I’m afraid he’s not going to release me. But then he slides his hands out from under my skirt and stands up, looking at me expectantly. I don’t move.

Jaxon sighs, crouches down, and grabs that cruel-looking knife he brandished against me. I want that knife. It almost feels like a hunger inside me, the desire to have a weapon and use it against my captor.

Pain sparks in my head, like a warning not to do anything stupid.

“You will come down and have dinner with me,” he says calmly. “If you’re good, you’ll get a bath.”

He steps closer, and I brace myself against the bed, my eyes on the knife, watching as he lifts it so that it catches the overhead light. When he lays it against the side of my throat, I whimper a little, even though it’s just the flat side, and he doesn’t actually cut me.

“We can also talk about what happened to your friend Edie.” He gives a slow, curling smile. “Assuming you ask the right questions.”

I stare at him, breath shuddery, the knife warming against my skin. He said just the right thing to snag my attention. To remind what I originally set out to do.

Behave.

Play along.

Find a way to escape.

I swallow against the knife and then nod, one short tiny motion. Jaxon doesn’t move right away, though. Just stares at me, his eyes stormy. I hold my breath, curling my fingers against the blanket. The skin of my hips still tingles from where he touched me.

Then he steps back, taking the knife with him. “Come on,” he barks, and I stand, my legs shaking. He comes around behind me, eyes never leaving mine, and loops his arm around my chest so the knife grazes my neck again. “Walk.” He’s close enough that his breath whispers across my ear, and my bitch of a pussy clenches with heat.

I do what he says.

He’s surprisingly graceful, guiding me out of the room and into a dim hallway with his arm around me and the knife to my throat. I sweep my gaze around, taking stock of mysurroundings. Everything out here looks old and dusty, too. Faded wallpaper. Strange paintings on the walls—some of them portraits, of people that sort of look like Jaxon, and some of them odd abstract art that makes me feel vaguely queasy.

The stairs are on the other end of the hallway from my room. Distressingly far. Jaxon nudges me downward, and I take slow, careful steps, pressing my fingers against the wall, running them over the photographs hanging there. All black and white. Old. Unfamiliar faces posed beneath sprawling oak trees.

“That your family?” I ask. I can’t help myself.

“Some of them.” He’s dropped the knife a little so that it rests against my collarbone, but he still has his arm around me. I can feel his strength, even in that loose embrace, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t frighten me.

I’d also be lying if I said it didn’t turn me on.

Don’t be fucking stupid, Charlotte. I repeat that mantra to myself as we go down the stairs and step into a foyer illuminated by yellowish globe lights affixed to the walls.

The front door is only a few feet away. There are windows above it and beside it, dark from the night outside. My breath catches. My heart quickens.

And Jaxon notices, because he presses the knife a little more firmly against my neck.

“This way.” He whispers the words into my ear like a lover, and his arm tightens across my chest as he veers me away from the door. I hate how firm he feels against my back. Hate the way he did that thing with my underwear by hand, too, his eyes never leaving my face. Hate that it makes me wonder what other things those hands could do if these weren’t the circumstances we’d met in.

The thought evaporates when he guides me into a cramped, dusty living room, though.

Because there are two corpses in there, propped up on the tattered, threadbare furniture.

I shriek and then think better of it, my voice lodging in my throat. The corpses stare at me. They’re preserved somehow, the skin leathery and discolored. A woman and a man. Hair combed and styled, their bodies dressed in old-fashioned clothes. They stare at me with strange, shining eyes. Glass, I realize after a moment. Glass reflecting the yellow lamps.

Did hetaxidermythem?

“Don’t mind them,” Jaxon says gruffly, pushing me past the corpses, which stare at me. “They’re for the Unnamed.”

---