12. Ava

AVA

I almost started crying as my orgasm fell away from me.

My stalker’s intentions became clear. He meant to torture me.

He hovered the tip of the handle an inch away from my aching pussy and growled, “You’re going to stop investigating. Say it, and I’ll let you come.”

“I—” My voice caught in my throat in a whimper before I tried again. “I won’t stop.”

His handsome features twisted into such anger, it sent a shiver down my spine.

I almost caved.

He plunged the handle back into me, angling it to hit my G-spot.

Pleasure roared through me again, a strangled scream tearing from my lips. I bit my bottom lip, smoothing my screams into whimpers.

I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing I wanted it, needed it. Loved what he was doing to me .

I was sure he knew it. Could see it in the way my hips bucked wildly, the way my thighs trembled, the way I tugged against the ropes, the burn around my wrists adding to the pleasure.

He watched me, egging me on with his hungry eyes, with the way he licked his lips and drank in the sight of me.

I was so close.

But he stopped again, pulling the handle from me and leaving me feeling empty.

“Stop investigating,” he growled. “And I’ll let you come.”

I tugged at my ropes and tried to squeeze my thighs together. “N-never.”

He brought me to the edge, fucking me with the knife handle, but stopping just before I came.

Three, four, five more times.

He tortured me, teased me, hurled curses at me when I refused.

Until his gloves dripped with my juices.

Until my head lolled over the pillow, my hands numb from tugging at the ropes that bound them.

Until I was drenched in sweat.

And so was he.

“P-please…” I begged.

But I no longer knew what I was begging for.

For him to stop?

For him to fuck me?

For him to make me come.

He punched his fist into the pillow at the side of my head.

“Fuck,” he growled, “you make me fucking crazy.”

He plunged the handle inside me again .

I was already crying, sobbing at the thought that he would stop again.

But this time he didn’t.

The thumb of his other hand found my clit, working it in tiny circles, and he fucked me with such savagery that I shuddered to think what he would do to me if he lost control.

My orgasm roared through me. My back arched off the bed like I had been electrocuted. And I screamed as if I was dying.

Perhaps a part of me was. The decent and normal part.

My vision flashed white. Every nerve from head to toe erupted like firecrackers before my body went limp.

I sagged onto the sheets, spent and numb.

I shuddered when he pulled the handle from my dripping wet pussy.

Fresh tears swelled in my eyes when he sucked the glistening handle clean of my cum.

He let out a low groan. “So fucking sweet.”

What had I let him do to me?

He flipped the blade over in his hand again and lashed out.

My hands fell to the pillow above my head as the ropes holding them to the bed fell apart.

He held the knife to my throat, letting me feel the cold sharpness of it.

“This,” he promised, “isn’t over.”

He pulled back the knife as he stood and walked to the balcony door.

Before I could cry out, he was gone, merging with the shadows like he was made of them .

A cold sweat seized my body. My nakedness disgusted me, but I still couldn’t move to go clean up or even cover myself. I stared at my nipples which were still peaked atop my white breasts.

When I imagined them pinched between those black leather gloves, I gagged. But my nipples strained further still.

He was a monster.

But why didn’t he take me like he took Liath and the other girls?

Was he leaving me here alone just to torture me? To drag his twisted little game out? Did he want me to hate myself for giving in to him so easily like I had? For coming around his knife handle?

The next time I saw him, would I try to kill him for what he’d done?

Or throw myself at his feet and beg for more?

Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep after that.

After I’d pulled the frayed ropes from my wrists, I lay there staring at the red raw marks. Running my fingertips along the sensitive skin and feeling my body flush with need as I remembered how he brutalized me.

What was wrong with me?

How could I reconcile how my stalker—a man I didn’t even know the name of—had fucked me with a knife handle and edged me in order to torture me and had instead given me the most intense orgasm of my life?

How did I explain something like that?

I still wasn’t sure how to explain it to myself.

I hated him.

I hated my stalker with every burning cell of my body .

So then why did my body turn against me the way it did whenever he showed up?

Why did I, deep down in a seriously fucked-up way, enjoy being tied up and tortured by him?

How could he have given me the most mind-blowing orgasm of my life while trying to manipulate me into dropping my investigation into Liath’s disappearance?

And why did he care?

Was he involved in her disappearance? Or was he trying to protect me from whoever was?

In truth, I hated how he left me so confused and turned on, so angry and wanting more all at the same time.

I hated that he’d taken over my body, claimed it.

Like it was no longer mine.

Like it was his .

I was still staring at the ceiling when the first sliver of dawn crept through my open curtains.

I grabbed my phone to check the time but spotted two messages I’d missed sent late last night from Seamus, a friend of Lisa’s working as a teaching assistant in the science department. He was doing a PhD in chemistry. And he’d helped us before with any science-y questions we’d had for previous stories.

Earlier, I’d taken the damp rag and drug vial to him and asked him to figure out what it was.

I didn’t think he’d get back to me so quickly.

Seamus: Got the results back…

Seamus: WTF have you gotten yourself into?

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

I sat up, fumbling for my bedside light, drawing my sheets up around me and glancing to the window to make sure I was still alone.

I didn’t care that it was barely five a.m. I dialed his number, chewing my bottom lip and trying to ignore the current of electricity running through me.

He answered after four long rings, his muffled, sleepy voice coming through the speaker. “H-hello?”

“What was the drug?” I demanded.

“Huh, wha? What time is it?”

Frustration itched under my skin. “Seamus, you said you got the results back. What was it?”

There was a shuffling of material and a clatter and I imagined him fumbling around for a light or his glasses.

He cleared his throat and his voice came on a little more awake now. “First, I ran it through the mass spectrometer to determine the molecular—”

“Seamus!” I interrupted with a frustrated growl. “Give me the TLDR in non-science speak.”

“Oh. Yes. Right. So I ran a full panel of tests on the sample you gave me.”

I snatched the notepad and pen from my bedside table and prepared to take notes. “And?”

“It’s not a combination I’ve ever seen before.” He paused and the silence felt sharp. “Ava, where did you get this sample?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. For a second, I debated telling him the truth. But then my stalker’s warning echoed in my mind.

I was fine risking my own safety. But I was not okay risking anyone else’s. The less he knew, the better .

“That’s not important, Seamus. Just tell me what the drug is.”

There was a long pause.

For a moment I thought I’d have to coax it out of him or bribe him by offering to put in a good word to Lisa about him. I wasn’t blind. I saw the way he looked at her when he thought no one was looking.

Lisa was clueless though. She thought Seamus just helped us because he was nice.

He was. A nice guy, I mean. But getting close to Lisa was definitely a major factor in his helpfulness.

“Please,” I tried, infusing my voice with urgency. “It’s important.”

He let out a sigh. “Okay. Fine.”

I fist-pumped internally.

“I just… whatever you and Lisa are investigating for the paper. Be careful, okay?”

“I will,” I said, crossing the fingers of my left hand.

“The drug is made up of three main compounds. One is called Curare. The other is Lycorine, which is a natural compound that affects the nervous system. The last one is Scopolamine.”

Curare.

Lycorine.

Scopolamine.

I made him spell them out and wrote those three compounds down in my notebook.

I tapped my chin with my pen. “Okay science guy, once again for the non-nerd, if I’m dosed with this drug, what happens to me?”

“Ava, this combination…” He let out a curse. “Your mu scles would all freeze. You’d be able to hear, see, and feel but you couldn’t move, a prisoner in your own body. But worse of all, when it wore off, you’d have no memory of what happened to you.”

The realization hit me like a punch to the gut. Liath—drugged with a paralytic. My hands shook as I pieced it together, the horror creeping up my spine.

Liath would’ve been trapped inside her own body, unable to move, unable to fight back. The thought made me sick to my stomach.

I could almost feel the fear she must’ve felt, the panic that would’ve set in when she realized she couldn’t escape. My chest tightened, and my breath hitched.

“Curare comes from a vine in South America and has been used as a poison for centuries by the local tribespeople.” Seamus kept going on and on about the compounds and where they were sourced, but I’d stopped listening.

My friend, frozen, helpless, while I was oblivious. My mind raced, trying to grasp the full weight of it.

Liath would have experienced a mind-shattering horror, then forgotten about it.

She’d wake up and not remember the trauma she’d suffered, walking around and seeing the twisted fuck who did that to her and not remember.

Who dosed her? And why?

My blood boiled, rage simmering beneath the surface, but beneath that was guilt—a suffocating guilt. How did I miss it? How had none of us seen the signs?

What did they do to Liath while she was paralyzed? What did they do to her that she couldn’t remember?

Seamus’ words cut through my thoughts. “…Belladonna Li ly and Spiders L—”

“What?” I straightened, picking up the lily off my bedside table that my stalker had left for me, the lily I’d used to get off earlier. “Say that again? What about the Belladonna Lily?”

“It’s a source of Lycorine.”

One of the drug compounds.

A poison compound.

My stalker was leaving lilies for me which contained the same compound as the drug I found in Liath’s bedroom.

I dropped the lily and it rolled off the side of the bed and fell to the floor at an angle, crushing its petals so they lay broken and limp.

My mind wouldn’t stop spinning.

The lilies—the same lilies the drug was made from—he’d left them for me, carefully placed beside my bed like some kind of sick gift. Why would he do that?

My throat tightened, my stomach twisting into knots as I stared at the evidence, the truth screaming at me, but I didn’t want to listen.

He drugged Liath. Could he?

I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to accept that the same man who had saved me from Cormac, who had hidden me from the Byrnes’ butler, could be capable of something so twisted.

But the lilies… why the hell would he leave me the exact same flowers that created the compound?

My chest ached with every breath, torn between the cold, harsh facts right in front of me and this illogical feeling in my chest. He couldn’t be both, could he? A protector and a monster ?

But what kind of person leaves a trail of clues that link them to something this dark?

My mind fought against itself, trying to find a way out, some explanation that didn’t end with him being responsible for Liath’s suffering.

But the evidence was right there. He was dangerous.

Or maybe I just didn’t want to see the truth.

I didn’t want to believe he could be so evil.

The man who made my body light up with electricity, who made me feel alive, who brought me to two earth-shattering orgasms.

I hated it. The way my heart skipped whenever I thought about him. The way I felt his presence even before I saw him, the way I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

It made no sense, and yet here I was, my pulse quickening at the thought of him. Every logical part of me screamed to stay away, to run, to remember all the ways he’d crossed lines no one should ever cross.

But there was something about him—something that made me feel alive, something dangerous that pulled me in, no matter how hard I tried to resist.

I couldn’t even fully admit it to myself, the truth hovering there just beneath the surface, waiting to be acknowledged.

But admitting it meant accepting that something was deeply wrong with me, that I liked the thrill of the danger, the attention.

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake it.

I liked him.

I liked my stalker.

And that terrified me more than anything else.