Chapter 13

My screams are all that echo through the room. Neo is a lot darker than I initially thought him. It seems I underestimated my prey all along—both of them.

He hasn't acknowledged me as much as he's worked. I'm strapped to what looks to be an electric chair. I don't even want to know where he got this fucking thing from. Even my forehead is strapped down. I'm naked, my body sweating against the leather chair from the pain.

A small window was uncovered at the top of the basement wall, but Neo has since covered it in black spray paint. Before he covered it, I could keep track of the days that have gone by. I believe it's been about four to five days.

I haven't seen hide nor hair of Lyla, but I know she's here.

She fucking brought me to this monster and then left me in his hands to toy with.

All I can hope is that she comes soon and ends this.

I know he's saving me for her, even if he doesn't say as much.

He's on the second hand now. Strategically, he's been removing my fingernails one by one and adding them into a small mason jar. I don't know what he intends to do to them. He likely keeps them to prove to himself on the bad days that the animal who took his precious little psycho is dead.

"Just fucking kill me," I say for probably the hundredth time today. He doesn't give any sign he's heard me, and I fight back tears that well in my eyes.

He's on a rolling doctor's chair and rolls over to a table of instruments for a second to grab something. He rolls back toward me once he's got what he's after. The noise of the wheels on the concrete scrapes against my gray matter, making my teeth grind.

It's a sound that'll probably follow me to the underworld.

Let's be honest: Hell is where I'm headed.

Eventually, I'll meet these two fuckers there.

But I have a head start.

He stretches his back out before hunching over my hand to set to work. As soon as the scalpel turns sideways and slices under the first fingernail, I feel faint.

The room spins, and my stomach clenches with each new facet of pain. Cold and calculated, Neo works until he removes my pinky nail and drops it into his jar.

I'm barely conscious by the time he's finished.

He looks over his work before setting down his scalpel.

A breath of relief wafts from me. One that was too loud because Neo eyes me with dark, unfeeling eyes.

"Please, end it. I'm fucking begging you," I slur.

It won't be long before my body will succumb to the torture this man has put me through. At least, I can hope.

When I think he will leave, he spots something on a shelf next to the bottom of the stairs. My heart skips an entire fucking beat, possibly ten of them.

He turns and looks at me over his shoulder, a smirk curling his menacing lips. "Would you look at that?" he says, and it's the first fucking time he's spoken to me since he brought me down here.

Grabbing a blowtorch, he turns and walks back toward me.

I wiggle the best I can, but the leather straps binding me hold me in place.

His smirk grows darker, ominous even.

The flame touches my chest as Neo's eyes light. Not from the flame, either. From pure adrenaline and fucking thrill.

I think I'm unhinged, but he's on another level.

My screams of pain seem to fuel him, and he turns the torch up. The scent of my flesh burning is nauseating. But I have nothing in my stomach to throw up.

As he works, I grow hoarse from screaming. He finally broke me. Tears rush down my cheeks. My lips beg him over and over to stop. To please kill me.

Soon, I feel the tug toward unconsciousness, the allure so fucking intoxicating.

I close my eyes, letting my shocked body plummet into stupefaction.

Searingpricking at my eyes rouses me. My chest aches. My nail beds are throbbing. All the pain is almost too much even to breathe through.

I have to wonder if she was worth all this.

Even though I know the answer is no already.

Once I realize what's happening, the need to scream again is on the tip of my tongue.

Neo is leaning over me, scalpel in hand, readying to cut right over my eye. His left hand lifts the lid off my eye, his right slicing through the thin membrane of skin.

"Can't have you falling asleep again, can we?" he says, as if to reason out what he's doing, even if to himself.

"You're a fucking psycho!" I seethe, spit and snot mixing as I cry in pain.

He stops, looking down at me, his scalpel still halfway through, cutting my eyelid off. "You should've thought of that before you touched what didn't belong to you."

His eyes return to his task, and just like that, he goes back to work.

The time he takes to finish the job is agonizing. Not only does he remove both of my eyelids, but he then stitches the wounds together as if he's done some life-altering surgery.

The entire time, I've been screaming.

It's then that the fucking world tips on its axis. When the door at the top of the stairs opens, she strolls down the steps.

She's in tiny shorts and a sweater. She has slippers on her feet as if she's having a cozy day at home, which I interrupted.

"Shut him up," she tells Neo offhandedly.

He strides over to her, gripping his blood-coated hand in her hair, tipping her face backward.

Their eyes lock, and the same palpable energy I saw in the alleyway the night I first encountered them comes flitting back. I have no choice but to watch them.

"Stupid girl, if you want him to shut up. Make him. Don't order me around," he says.

My stomach sets on edge. Because where he's cold, she's fucking glacial.

His other hand comes up, his bloody thumb brushing over her lips as she releases a soft exhale.

It seemed laced with exhilaration.

When they collide, I swear I feel hell rumble beneath my feet. It's as if the Devil himself knows these two shouldn't be together.

Her tongue sweeps into his mouth, and he grips her tighter, hand fisting in her hair.

He lets her loose, and she goes to the tray of instruments he's been working from, looking over them slowly as if she's impressed with the spread.

"Heat this," she says, handing him something I can't quite see.

I shift as much as I can in my chair.

Fuck, what I wouldn't give to move.

Everything aches.

"Please, you don't have to do this," I say. "I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry," I cry.

She looks at Neo.

He rolls his eyes. "Yeah, he's grown a conscious now. How sudden, too."

"Too little too late. Typical," Lyla says, turning and smiling at me.

Her smile is sweet, but her eyes light with stony loathing. "Let's see what we can do about that tongue, hm? What do you think we'll write on your jar?"

"Lyla, listen…"

Neo growls at the use of her name, and I stifle a whimper.

She straddles my naked lap, and a shiver rips through my body at the feel of her over me like the angel of death has finally come.

I send a prayer to whoever will listen that she finishes the job.

"Clamp," Lyla says, holding her hand out to Neo.

He slaps a clamp into her hand.

"Open up wide," she tells me, and I think about disobeying. There's no fucking point. Not when Neo is still behind her, toying with his fucking torch of doom.

He turns it on and off, psychotic eyes watching as the blue flame grows larger and smaller as he does so.

"You two are fucking sick!" I say in one last futile attempt to get them to look at what they're doing.

"And yet, you tried to pretend to be us," Lyla says, wrenching my mouth open as my body quakes in fear.

Once her clamp is on my tongue, she lets it dangle, my tongue pulling out of my mouth from the weight of it.

She smiles at me, her eyes suddenly exuberantly lit. "It's a shame, you know?"

"What is, stupid girl?" Neo asks her.

"That I have to cut his tongue out. You did promise I could ride his face after we killed him."

Fear ripples through me.

That she'd kill me and then debase my corpse in such a manner makes bile rise to the back of my throat.

"I think we can figure something out," Neo answers, and Lyla shrugs, grabbing onto the clamp and wrenching it down.

My screams start before she cuts through my tongue. It doesn't take long. Never does.

But before she stands, she uses a cauterizing gun to stop the bleeding in my mouth. The same bleeding I thought would finally kill me.

How fucking long are they going to toy with me?

She lifts the clamp with my tongue she'd cut off. "If this doesn't do the trick, I guess we cut his vocal cords next."

I shiver in pain, my entire body reeling.

She stands, still straddling me. But before she backs off my lap, Neo's there. Standing behind her.

He takes the tongue from her and puts it into a jar.

"That was beautiful to watch, stupid girl. You've come so far. To think, the last man I had in a chair for you, you didn't want to kill."

His words ripple through my brain. How many people has she killed?

She leans back into him.

"Do you think we should kill him?" Neo asks, shoving his hand stained with my blood down the front of her shorts.

She's covered in my blood spray and looks like a warrior goddess who's just returned from battle.

She writhes against his hand. I'd get off to this if I weren't in so much pain. Think of every moment afterward, too.

But all I can do is keep from passing out.

Can one pass out without eyelids?

I know the exact moment he shoves fingers into her cunt because she lets out an intoxicating little gasp.

Her eyes look down at me as he fucks her with his fingers, watching my pain.

"I don't think so. For what he did, he owes me more than his tongue and a few fingernails," she says, followed by a guttural moan of satisfaction as Neo quickens his pace.

"Whatever you want, my stupid love."

That's when I see it. The light that glows inside her. She seems soulless without him. But I think she lost her soul because of him. Bargained it away to love a man who I can only assume is Lucifer's son.

"Don't stop," Lyla says, and Neo drops his lips to her ear.

"Come for me, stupid girl. I don't have all fucking day."

She breaks, her hands gripping my shoulders as she falls forward and comes on his hand.

It's disgusting.

It's perfect.

It's torture.

When they're finished, they leave me in the basement, shutting the lights off behind them.

I'm left with no eyelids, no tongue, and a new appreciation for the art of torture I now know I only dabbled in.