Page 35 of Twice as Twisted

“Flattery usually means the person doing it wants something in return.”

He just grins and shakes his head. “You’re a trip, Mabel Darling.”

“Did I pass?”

He sets Boots down and moves to the door without answering, then stops with his hand on the knob. “Guess you’ll find out.”

I nod. “That’s fair.”

“Just give him a chance,” he says. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

nine

Baron Dolce

“There she is.”

Duke fumbles his phone and nearly drops it, and I shoot him a frown. I’ve kept a lookout since we got here. I don’t need to numb my nerves with mindless scrolling. I don’t like distractions, and I don’t get nervous.

Still, Duke hasn’t seen her since she left Faulkner. He hasn’t been watching her like I have.

So I let him look before we make our move.

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath, and I wonder what he’s thinking, what a normal person would think in this situation. What does the man think upon seeing the girl he loves again for the first time in two years? Does he feel a rush of love? Triumph? Does he feel distant, or like no time has passed?

That’s a game I like to play, but we don’t have time for games right now. Not with Jane in the car. I threatened her into complicity and cuffed her, but she’s tried to escape too many times for me to trust her. That’s how Dahmer was caught. When a victim escaped, handcuffs and all. The way Jane acts, you’d think I was a serial killer, not a man who fed and housed her for half a year. Sure, I did experiments on her in exchange, but I’d kept her alive. Sometimes I even gave her anesthesia.

I glance at my car and then, content to have seen Jane sulking in the back seat where we left her, return my attention to Mabel.

Tucking her phone into her purse—a device I have access to with a few taps on my own screen—she heads toward the row of stores without looking around. Like any small beach town in America, Havoc Harbor has predictable shops: a seafood market with a fresh catch of the day; an upscale boutique that sells local, handmade jewelry and art; a realtor; an ice cream parlour; and a tiny, overpriced grocery where people buy produce and essentials while on vacation.

Her blonde hair is in pigtails, and she’s wearing a knee-length white skirt, white Mary Jane shoes over white socks, and a pale yellow shirt with a towering stack of ice cream printed on the front. She enters the place with a chalkboard sign on the wall next to the front window, flavors written in her cutesy handwriting with different colors of chalk. Little doodled ice cream cones and popsicles decorate the border.

“Let’s go,” I say, standing.

Duke follows. When we reach the front window, he runs his finger down the board from top to bottom. The chalk smears in the cool, humid environment. She’ll have to rewrite all the flavors on that side now that he ruined them all. He smiles and does the same on the right side of the board, wrecking the handwritten sundaes and malts, banana splits and shakes.

I nudge him to bring him back from his urge to destroy, then open the door and step inside. There’s not much to the place, and I can tell in one glance that most people order from the window and eat at the picnic tables outside. Inside, three small, yellow metal tables sit in a row to the left, while the counter waits directly ahead, the window to the right side where they serve customers. Another handwritten chalkboard sign stretches above the counter, the flavors written out in Mabel’s unmistakably feminine, precise handwriting.

I take all that in with one cursory glance, less than a second, before my gaze finds its target. It takes another second for her to look up, to meet my eyes, to register what she’s seeing.

The delicious shock on her face makes my cock stir, my fingers twitch to wrap around her throat, to squeeze until she knows that her life is in my hands, that I choose to let her draw each breath. Until she realizes that if I choose not to, she’s snuffed out in the next heartbeat, and she accepts her punishment and is grateful for the life I give her each day by allowing her to breathe despite what she’s done.

I watch the realization that we’re finally here sink into her. The scant color drains from her face. Her fingers white-knuckle the edge of the counter. Her nostrils flare, prey searching for the scent of a predator. Face ashen, eyes wide, she’s a rabbit waiting to see if she’s been spotted before she bolts.

If Duke had his way, he’d pounce, going straight for the kill. He wouldn’t waste a single moment before yanking up her loose skirt and plunging his cock to the hilt inside her.

For me, that’s skipping all the fun. That’s the end, not the beginning.

The game is more fun than the thrill of victory, the chase more enjoyable than the kill.

Before any of us can move, the door bangs open behind us. “Don’t look outside, doll face,” shouts a raspy female voice. “Some fuckwit with two brain cells battling for third place thought it would be funny to destroy your hard work. Again. I swear, I don’t know what’s smaller, their dicks, their brains, or their senses of humor.”

The girl who stomps in matches the voice, minus about twenty years of smoking unfiltered cigarettes in biker bars. She’s around our age, but one look at her tells me she’s exactly the tattooed, pink-haired, loud-mouthed type I can’t stand, onewhose motto is some variation of “I don’t need no man,” but who will one day take money from the government to raise her four kids because she does, in fact, need a man.

Mabel doesn’t say anything, just stares at us with those same big doe eyes filled with an intoxicating level of fear.

The pink-haired girl gives us the briefest glance, her lip curling slightly before she turns away, as if we’re vermin, unworthy of her full attention or even a full sneer. I’ve never been so summarily dismissed in my life, and the urge to show her the error of her ways threatens to take hold of me. She shrugs out of the motorcycle jacket she wore over a shirt that matches Mabel’s and tosses it under the counter. When Mabel doesn’t say anything, the rude girl sighs and turns to us begrudgingly.

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