3. This is Halloween

3

This is Halloween

Camila

W e start in the prison's dungeon, which has been mostly converted into a boiler room, but it seems they left the old crematorium intact, along with some shackles and torture equipment likely brought in for this very event.

There are a few throwaway Halloween decoration-grade lanterns hung on the walls, an electric chair that probably doesn't work anymore, and some medical tables. Knives of every shape and size sit on the table in a neat line for show, but they don't walk us close enough to touch.

The tour guide is going on about how over three hundred inmates have been brutally murdered in this prison in the last century when he stops in front of an empty cell. "And those were the ones who weren't in line for the electric chair," he clarifies.

"Your boyfriend looks pale," Demetri states the obvious to Naya.

"I may or may not have brushed over a few of the details in the waiver." She gives an awkward smile, shrugging with one shoulder before taking a few rushed steps to catch up with Kyle and the rest of the group.

"Tonight isn't going to end well." Demetri doesn't bother lowering his voice; it doesn't matter who hears us.

"It's Halloween." I shrug.

He grabs me by the waist in one fell swoop and shoves me against a cell, the metal bars rattling behind me. I look up at him through my eyelashes, batting them for the full effect. It's going to be a long night, and I already know it'll be impossible to keep my hands off him.

"Do not," he threatens quietly in my ear, "make me fuck you in front of inmates on our anniversary."

I struggle to swallow the lump in my throat, amusement slowly creeping into my expression. "But what if that's what I want?" Pressing away from him, I let out a maniacal laugh before running off to join the crowd.

He may have a PhD in plant biology, but I'm a doctor in brat with a focus on pushing his buttons.

Harkins lingers behind us, and I prefer it that way. It's a quiet comfort he provides when I know he's got my back. Naya slows back a few steps from Kyle and hooks her arm into mine. The look on her face makes it glaringly obvious that he's well on his way to ruining her night, too.

She drops her head to my shoulder, so I give her a comforting squeeze.

There's a guilt-ridden sadness to watching your best friend finally get her dream guy when the dream guy ends up just being another asshole.

"While the inmates were terrifying and still haunt these cells," the tour guide boasts loudly, "the old warden was the worst of them all. Nicknamed The Death Warden, he was personally responsible for over four hundred executions, only a few of them actually state-sanctioned."

"Wait, he was just killing people?" Kyle's dumbass voice interrupts the rehearsed speech.

"The Death Warden himself was known to dabble in curious interests, including the limits of the human body. He employed many scientists and doctors who shared the same…appetite for knowledge as he did. Under his employment, various torture techniques and cruel methods of research were used on inmates with charges as minimal as petty theft." The guide points us down a narrow hall, the gloom hanging thickest there, swallowing all the light like a hungry monster. "Intake is just this way…criminals."

There's a cacophony of creepy laughter playing on the loudspeakers. It's unsettling, but in these sort of haunt attractions, it's predictable.

"What happens if we want to…tap out?" a young girl's voice asks near the front of the group.

"Please review your waivers; there are no tap-outs. Anyone who wishes to be excluded from participation at any point in the night will be escorted into solitary confinement. With nearly one thousand ghost sightings to date, we cannot guarantee how solitary it truly will be." The guide adopts a spooky tone, bringing the flashlight to his face.

A few Chads near the front laugh, and another girl whispers to the one who voiced her concern.

And I can't feel Harkins behind me anymore.

I don't bother looking to check; I don't need to. Even his cologne has faded. My lip curls up on its own, my heart thrumming in anticipation for what he may be planning. I walk arm in arm with Naya, fighting the need to search for him, to keep him at my side.

Intake is a farce of a show. It's kind of hard to believe the douchebag yelling in my face isn't an actor, but I'm gauging by the boner in his pants that maybe he's a real cop. No one else would be getting off at possessing this kind of authority. We're all given orange jumpsuits, and I'm not surprised when Naya raves about it being her color.

It really is.

Kyle rolls his eyes, and I'm suddenly doubly annoyed that the cop is storing my knife in a fake evidence bag and putting it in a locker. "You'll get all of your possessions back at the end of the night at release."

I can endure a night without it.

I can get creative. After all, a girl is only as dangerous as her imagination.

The thought is barely a seed in my mind when the abrasive guard begins to physically shove us through a narrow hallway after everyone has been fake fingerprinted and added to "the system." I'm looking over my shoulder now, trying to find Demetri in any dark corner, but wherever he's gone off to is far from my line of sight.

Gnawing on my dry cuticles is the only distraction I have. I'm fully dissociated from Naya's blabbing, my vision practically blurring while we walk through the hall, the anemic glow of ancient lights struggling to cast a whisper thin puddle of light.

The first chainsaw goes off in the distance, two girls in our group screaming as they clutch each other.

A smile spreads over my face.

Finally.

I've been waiting all year for this. I fucking love Halloween.

A hysterical clown runs past us so quickly, it's not until he's at the front of the group that I even see his face paint. One eye is fully whited out, the other with a red contact, but it's the machine guns in his hands that are drawing my attention.

No props . I snort at the tour guide's earlier words. As if they'd be giving haunt actors real weapons, unloaded or not. The liability is way too high to take the chance, but I always appreciate the attempt for theatrics.

The clown doesn't make direct eye contact with any one of us; he just walks back and forth past us in the hall, menacingly taking up what little space is allowed for a single person as he pushes us into the wall with his shoulders. His fingers hover the trigger of his guns, but he keeps them pressed to his side. He paces back and forth like a bulldog, cutting through us until we've created a single file line.

The clown sniffs the air as he stops at the front of the line, taking a pause before hocking a loogie into the grated ground below us.

"Creepy as shit." Naya's words are a rushed exhale.

The tour guide disappears into the darkness of the corridor, leaving only the clown actor with our group. "Welcome to cell block A." The clown turns his head to the side slowly before another hysterical bout of laughter escapes him. "Home of the Murderesses."

A banshee shriek fills the air, another haunt actor in the distance certainly, but it's the hushed whispers inside the cells that drape me with dread.

Murderesses.

Every woman in this cell block has taken a life. The only things separating me from them at this very moment are iron bars. Well, that, and the likelihood that a small percentage of them are actually innocent.

I catch the glow of two eyes in a shadowed corner, a haunting premonition slithering up my spine. It vanishes before it can sink its fangs into the flesh of my psyche.

Not tonight .

I will not let the guilt of my actions consume me tonight.

"Where's Demetri—" Just as the words come out of Naya's mouth, they're replaced by a startled scream.

Absolute darkness.

Full silence.

Not a hum of electricity, not the sound of a generator kicking on in the distance.

Dead silence.

An orchestra of panicked voices rise simultaneously, the clown's charade dropping as he works to calm the frightened girls at the front. "It's a power outage. No cause for worry. We can continue." He waves his flashlight, the only source of light in the entire cell block.

The female inmates are a loud droning of misery, demanding the warden and the guards attend to their needs. But it's not just them—the deafening quiet is gone now, replaced with the buzzing of every inmate's discontent growing louder even beyond these walls.

They aren't in on this. The thought hadn't even occurred to me until this very moment. Why would they be consenting participants when they've been stripped of every ounce of humanity here? Of course they've been displayed in their cells like animals at the zoo for gawking, entertainment, and cheap amusement.

My lip twitches involuntarily, my gaze still locked on the two eyes in the corner of the cell. Naya's grip on me loosens, but before I can answer her question, I feel a hand cover my mouth.

An arm wraps around my waist, and suddenly, I'm being pulled from behind, feet in the air as I'm pressed to a hard body. I don't struggle, don't fight; I can smell Demetri's cologne, the signature scent of amber resin and blood-orange-soaked cedar so familiar, all I can do is relax into his hold.

Then, we're both inside a closet, pitch black. All I know is that there's hardly room in here for me, let alone him. He's panting hard, his breathing forcing his chest to move out of sync with mine, and it's only when I'm focused on him that I'm able to notice how I'm breathing too.

Erratic .

"Where ya been?" I bite my lip even though he can't see it.

"Planning a night you deserve." His voice is low, confident, his growing white smile all I can see in the dark.

"Tell me more," I whisper, pressing myself to him, disappointed when there's no hard cock between his thighs. I palm him anyway, threatening to bring it to life.

I can feel his exhales on my skin, and it only drives me into his arms. I want to breathe his old air, drink his backwash, and fuck, if it didn't require killing him, I'd say the only way to truly be as close to him as I want would be to zip myself up inside his meatsuit and wear him out to dinner.

And goddamn, some days, I come close.

"Not here. Not yet." He grabs my wrist to stop me.

I whine impatiently. "What?"

Demetri turns his head away from me, like he's talking to someone I can't see. "You know how the readers get when there's too much smut and not enough plot."

His breath is visible in the air, and he stays frozen, unmoving, just breathing.

I snap my fingers in front of his face, attempting to direct his attention back to me. "Are you possessed right now? Harkins." I snap until his chin turns my way again, a glossed over look on his eyes. "Did you just break the fourth wall?"

He just clears his throat, shaking his head, as if he's somehow more confused than I am.

Demetri shuffles between us, pulling his phone out of his pocket and turning the flashlight on, exposing a much bigger utility closet behind him.

I finally look around and notice why we're so crammed. The gasp flies out of my mouth before the uncontrollable laughter starts. Demetri's hand flies over my mouth again, silencing me as best as he can. "Shh."

When I'm finally able to reign it in, I take a big sip of air before I look up at the man I love with all my heart. "You're such a fucking romantic."

"It's Halloween. Let's have some fun, right?" His grin reminds me of a Jhonen Vasquez comic, specifically the one with the homicidal maniac.

I lower my eyes to each of his hands, where he pulls up from the ground two haunt workers by their collars. They both wear glow masks—one a girl with pink LED Xs where the eyes should be and a frown for lips, the other a guy about his size with the same neon mask in blue, a large smile on that one instead.

They're both unresponsive.

"Are they?" It doesn't really matter if they're dead, but I'm curious.

Demetri shrugs before dropping them to the ground. "Once the power went out, I smashed their heads together pretty hard, so if they aren't dead, they might want to be after this."

It's too much, all of it. He's everything, and it's nearly suffocating to feel loved in such a capacity. "Please don't make me beg for it," I say in a hushed tone, slowly lowering to my knees.

"Don't start something you can't finish, Darkling. We only have so much time," he warns me.

I palm him through the fabric of his jeans, feeling him quickly grow under my strokes. "I can finish you."

By the time I pull him free from his pants, he's fully hard, his cock veiny and throbbing for me. I lick my bottom lip, my mouth watering at just the sight.

It's always like that.

For both of us.

He jokes that just kissing me keeps him hard all day, but the memory of his cock makes me clench my thighs with need. It's here, right now, in front of me. I stretch my mouth open, covering what I can of my teeth. It's impossible; he's so goddamn thick, my mouth is never ready to rip open for him.

I try anyway, sucking him as far down my throat as my anatomy will allow. That's when it gets tricky—that's when I have to compromise breathing to make it work. It feels like science—or maybe math—trying to calculate just the right moments when I can inhale sips of oxygen. It's impossible, though, because he doesn't let me pull back. He holds my head there, one large hand cupping the base of my skull as he fucks my mouth without an ounce of mercy. I gag, choking on him and my own saliva, my fingers gripping the fabric of his pants as I coat him in my spit.

"Your mouth, fuck," he moans.

He's close, and I might die. I move my tongue as much as I can, but with no control over my head, I'm at his mercy. Colorful dots fill my vision in the darkness as my brain struggles from lack of oxygen, my head swimming. I might die.

He's worth it.

Rest in peace, bitch.

Here lies Camila. She died sucking giant soda can-sized dick.

But instead, I lift my hand, placing it on his chest like we've previously communicated so he knows what I need.

He holds me against him for just an extra second before pulling back.

I gasp, filling my lungs with air in a rushed burst, and just as I do, ropes of cum land on my cheeks, my lips, my hair. With a single finger, I wipe it from my skin, sticking the digit in my mouth and licking it clean.

Demetri still has a hold on my head, he uses it to clutch my hair and pull me to stand. His kiss is wild, demanding, and full of need. "I love you," he whispers.

When my breathing slows, I finally speak. "If we get caught…" I warn him, unsure if this is a road he wants to go down.

"We won't," he assures me, always prioritizing my anxiety over everything.

"But if we do, if we get caught, we're not gonna be leaving here." I let out an exhale that feels like I'm trying to break a spell, break the curse of my own words coming to fruition before they can tear through whatever barrier keeps them from actualizing.