Page 73 of Her Wicked Knights
Marley please for her sister, the last family she has, and my heart burns inside of its cage.
"Good girl." Whit affirms, skating his gloved hand over her chest, helping himself to a feel of her breast before gripping her neck. "You and Audrey came here alone. You never met up with other friends. You were together all night until you got separated in this haunted house. Got it?"
Marley nods vehemently, but it's not enough for Whit to give up intimidating her. "If you tell anyone what happened tonight, we'll find out. And then we'll just have to show the whole town what you were doing while your best friend was getting her guts rearranged... literally and metaphorically speaking."
Marley chokes on a sob. "Okay."
"I think part of you wants the world to see you like that." Whit chuckles, gesturing at the screen with the knife in his hand.
"Focus on me." Rev whispers, his fingers flexing against my skin until I flick my gaze to his.
I think he may be trying to communicate with me telepathically. I can't see much of his eyes behind that mask, but I can tell that he's watching me. I know he's trying to tell me that it will all be okay, that this will all be over soon, and it will have been worth it. I know that Whit needs her, that he won't kill her. But I also know that he's so much worse than I thought, that he's capable of things worse than I imagined him to be capable of.
"You really do taste like sin." Whit laughs, and I turn to see him squeezing Marley's throat, not hard enough to cut off her air supply, but enough to prove that he could. His touch releases, only to grip her nipples between his gloved fingers and pinching hard enough to make her cry out, and her hips buck in an attempt to throw him off of her.
Rev's nails dig into my flesh as I stare, my horror burning through the facade and the games, ready to tear everything down to keep him from going further. This is already too far. This is sexual assault, and I'm sick because I'm just fucking watching it, completely fucking useless to do anything about it. I don't care if he tries to kill me, but I saw firsthand that he's clearly insane. If I try to stop him, I don't know that Marley will be spared in the fallout of whatever’s to come.
"You're sick!" Marley cries as he lifts his robe, moving for his belt.
"I am."
Colton moves in front of me, shaking his head ever so slightly before moving around to stand closer to Marley, ready to act if he needs. But I don't know how he can stand right there, so close to her, and not try to stop Whit as he takes his belt off.
"What you don't realize, puppet," Whit says, "Is that you're sick too. You'll figure it out one day. And I'll be waiting for you when you do."
He seizes her wrist and wraps the belt around it before she can even try to wrench free, and then he twists it behind her back, forcing the other one in before yanking on the sack so that she's stuck, unable to get her hands free. She's horrified, but I'm relieved when he stands and steps away.
"What did we do to you?" Marley cries.
"You?" Whit laughs. "Sweet, innocent Marley. Don't you see? This is all for you."
He snags the fabric sash from his costume and uses it to blindfold Marley, wrapping it around her head and obscuring her vision. But he doesn't stop there... he's clearly done something like this before, or at least imagined it, because he doesn't hesitate to knot it around the back of her head before taking the slack and tying it again around her mouth so that it acts like a gag he ties around her neck. And even then, he ties it to the belt around her bound wrists, making escape impossible because each tug on her wrists will only tighten the fabric around her neck. It's not enough to strangle her, I'm sure, but it would be horrifying all the same, and I don't think she knows that his plan is not to kill her.
It takes everything in me not to fall to my knees and free her or slip my jacket off and drape it over her shoulders so that I can cover her and offer her a little dignity. But Colton's eyes stare at me in warning, and Rev pushes me toward the door.
I don't fight them. I just go, moving numbly to the door, and then, when we slip out into the dark night, I break out into a run.
I expected something more. I thought Whit would hold court and gather us so that we could talk about what's next. I thought we'd convene and make plans or reinforce our alibis. But we only clean up quickly in the locker room and leave, slipping out of the park the same way we came in. And surrounded by dozens of other scare actors heading home for the night, we blend right in. But my head is back in the last room of the haunted house, thinking about Marley, sitting there alone in the dark, tied up and blindfolded, exposed to whoever will walk in and find her there next to a dead body.
Instead, Whit told everyone to split up, to go home and act like everything was fine.
Everything is not fine, and Colton, and Rev at least recognize that. We sit in the back of the parking lot, where other cars have been left to wait out the night from guests who decided to take a rideshare home and avoid drunk driving. We watch as the police and ambulance lights cut through the dark night, the red and blue lighting up the darkness as they race toward the park, which is dark. Most of the employees were gone by the time security would have done its final rounds and shut everything down for the night, but the lights on the Ferris wheel where Rev and I had our first kiss not even eight hours ago are dark, and everything about today feels tainted.
"We're useless to help her if we got ourselves killed trying to be a hero." Rev reasons. He's always the most logical of us. Colton reacts with a hot head, impulsive and brash most of the time, but he knew we couldn't do anything to keep her from suffering. I'm the most emotional, prone to letting my feelings push me toward reacting. It’s why I'm still gutted, my stomach twisted into about fifty knots as I think of how scared she must have been. How scared she must still be. But the first responders are here, and as they rush in through the vehicular path to get as close to where we left her, I know that means they found her. She's safe.
We can fix this for her. We can make it better. We have to, because there's no other choice. Tolerating what we did was wrong, but it was the only way to keep her safe. I know that, as much as I hate it. Whit is unhinged; there's more than a few screws loose in his head.
I don't know what comes next, but we'd better figure it out soon, because I don't trust him after all that. I barely trusted himbeforeall that.
We've sat in silence for a while before I can't handle it anymore.
"Shouldn't they have brought her out by now?"
"She's a witness." Colton says calmly. "They're going to question her, investigate her, scrutinize her. It'll take some time."
I nod, and we fall silent again, each of us lost in our own thoughts as the radio plays quietly in the background.
"Shit." Rev says after a while, pointing his phone toward us so that I can see the headline. "Murder at Halloween Terror Nights."
