Body Tox (The Bodies duet #1)

Chapter 28

I pulled off the blankets, and he had a fucking smile on his face. I put my head on his chest, and his heart was silent.

I’d won.

I’d done my job, and I got an amazing orgasm out of it…so why did I feel so empty?

The blankets were soaked. Absolutely sopping wet, and the warmth was disappearing. His body was getting colder. A nagging feeling of that cold settled into my chest and an ache spread.

“What the fuck,” I groaned, kicking at Asher’s body.

That frozen smile on his face made me mad…and feel warm all at the same time.

We were made to fight each other. We were pitted against each other. Maybe I shouldn’t hurt him. Maybe we should go after the asshole who thought it would be a good idea to make us kill each other…

Maybe…I was wrong.

I growled, sitting on Asher’s chest and shoving my fists into his sternum, pumping over and over. I put my lips on his, the taste of my come lingering on his mouth. Giving him breaths and pumping his chest over and over until finally, he let out a cough, curling on his side and choking up the liquid in his lungs.

His breathing was shallow, but it was there, and when I put my head to his chest, I could hear his heart fighting to beat again, growing stronger and stronger. His cheeks were that flushed pinkish red again, and he opened his eyes—a glazed look appeared on his face.

“I killed you,” I said, hopping off his chest and getting into his vision. “Sorry.”

He was breathing heavily, and his eyes were searching for me. He was finally focusing, and that crooked smile returned. He couldn’t speak. Every ounce of strength he had was to breathe and cough.

“Good way…to…go.” His voice cracked on a hoarse wheeze.

I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

“I did warn you,” I said sweetly, and his smile was beautiful.

“I was wrong, though. You aren’t my enemy. The organization trying to murder us is. That’s who we need to go after, Asher. Not each other.”

I gave him the time he needed to breathe and process.

After a while, he sat up on his arms. “Says the…woman who…killed me.”

I laughed, blowing him a kiss. “You’re welcome. Now, you can say you are a zombie. The kids at the orphanage would love that.”

He watched me, probably trying to figure out if I was going to murder him again.

“I am serious, Pretty Boy.” I sat on my legs, the chill coming back. I needed to be close to him.

“What do…you…want to do? Kill…the Debt Collector?”

I pondered that. I didn’t even know who the fuck he was. I had never met him. I just got strange texts and calls when a hit was made.

I only met anyone from the organization the day I was recruited.

“How did you get…recruited?” he said. His breathing started to normalize, and the choking finally came to an end.

The memory wasn’t pleasant, but I guess I did owe Asher that, at least.

“My ex.” I couldn’t really say more because the fear and pain of that night still stung.

He studied me but didn’t press.

“I was recruited a year ago,” he said. “I was told…to save some girls.”

Save girls?

That didn’t make any sense. He was an assassin told to save people?

“I have only been told to kill people.” I shrugged. “What girls did you save? Why?” He stared at the ground, deciding how much to trust me.

“The Debt Collector would tell me to ‘get the information, get the girl.’

When I was recruited, I was told there was one girl in particular I needed to kill and some I needed to save, but it was up to me to find them. When I failed, he sent the same text.”

“What information? I was shown photos with their eyes covered in a red stripe and a name. That was it.”

He rubbed his head, his body still swaying a bit.

“How many targets have you had?”

I thought back to the unimportant faces on the screen. “Fifty or so?”

His eyes widened, and then he turned a pointed finger to himself. “Fifty-one.”

“I brought you back, whiny ass.” I rolled my eyes. “Want me to try again?”

He looked down at my crossed legs, and I blushed.

“Okay, well, I was given rescue missions more than anything else, and those were always about the church.”

Now, it was my turn to be confused. “The church? Why the church?”

“It’s an occult, Echo. The priest is a fucking whacko. He sacrifices women.” I nearly gasped. That weirdo gave me the creeps, and now I knew why.

He was an occult member.

“An assassin playing savior is whacko,” I said instead.

He rolled his eyes, using the shelving unit to lean his back against, holding his ribcage like it was hurting him.

“I will tell you my story if you tell me yours,” he said, ignoring my insult.

I thought about that, but I flipped my phone to a video in my hidden folder instead.

“Easier to show you.” I quietly handed the phone over to him.

His brows knit together, an expression playing on his face I couldn’t read. My own words echoed back to me from the speakers.

“Blood for blood.”

I waited for him to say something. He didn’t. He just stared at the black screen after the video stopped and the light dimmed.

“That was my initiation. His name was Alex, my ex.”

“What happened? Diamond not big enough?” My body became tense, anxiety setting in. Asher seemed to recognize the change in my posture, so his expression mirrored mine. “Sorry. What happened?”

“That man was a monster.”

“Echo, I saw this video before. I went through your stuff back at the mansion.”

“You…what?”

“I…I was in your closet one day when you were with Cali Grace.”

Realization dawned on me. That faint scent of mint in my closet…it was him.

“Like what you saw, you peeping twat?” I snorted.

He looked down, his hard-on an obvious sign that he really enjoyed it.

I leaned into him, my face so close I could smell my come still coating his chest and face.

“Too bad you murdered my poor Cali. I am sure she would have just loved having fun together.”

“That was an accident.” He bit his lip and crossed his legs.

I ignored him. “Cali was a good person, by the way, asshole. I take back my sorry for killing you. That was for Cali.”

He laughed, and the sound was a wheezed croak that had him holding his throat. “Well, I guess that’s fair.”

I looked over to the boarded windows, the broken boards having seen so much history, from wolves to battering weather.

“The storm seems to have calmed down a little bit. Maybe we can get back to the church.”

“You want to go back after I told you about the occult?”

I shrugged. “Well, the best place to get information on that is the creepy priest himself? Maybe he won’t enjoy being poked as much as you did.”

He laughed that wheezy sound again, and I stood up, leaving the soaked, now cold blankets on the ground and walking over to grab my pants that were yanked off and thrown.

Asher’s eyes rolled down my curves and back up to my face.

“Down, boy,” I whispered with a giggle, shimmying into the broken, crappy pants.

He stood up and walked over to me, smacking my ass so hard I yelped, the burn igniting on my skin like a flame in the shape of his hand.

“That was one of your lashings, Little Wraith,” he warned, pulling his shirt back over his delicious, tattooed body.

“Blood for blood, remember? I will collect.”

The church was cold and as dark as we left it, but now wet with melted snow from the broken glass on the roof.

“Let’s go investigate the church before it opens.”

Asher was back to his annoying self, his body just as quick as it had been. He had downed some moonshine bottles stored up here in the attic. It was not very godly to have liquor, was it?

“And what do you expect to find exactly, Nancy drunk?” He hiccupped and swigged more of the bottle.

Asher wasted like this made me giggle. I knew he was in pain in his chest on my account, so I couldn’t exactly yell at him for self-medicating, but still, it was hilarious.

“Don’t test me, Ned. Now on, come—I mean, come on, we go!”

Rolling my eyes, I walked behind him, following his footsteps down the winding stairs into some room with a bunch of candles and another door.

This door led out onto the top balcony, and the sky outside lit up the vast cathedral.

“If it weren’t for a sacrificing lunatic running this place, it would be beautiful,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Ha, I never thought churches looked like anything but the homeland of delusion mind-controlled drones.”

“Not a fan of the big man, are you, Pretty Boy?” I said, giggling.

He shook his head adamantly, making his hair bounce. The action gave him a boyish look in his drunken state.

“Fuck no. The only man in charge of me is my dick, thank you much.”

I snorted, walking over to the balcony and searching for a way down. There were two staircases on opposite sides, and both led to the center of the place, right to the slightly lifted altar, huge cross, and a bazillion large ass candles still lit around them.

“Where to, Ned?” he said to me, and I randomly pointed to my right, skipping in that direction.

The stupid storm was acting up again outside, and the electricity was fuzzing out. I hoped we weren’t going to be freezing our asses off here like the abandoned gas station.

“Don’t worry. We’re warmer naked…” Asher sang, guessing my thoughts.

“Yeah, sure, drunkey. C’mon.”

There were some doors along the bottom floor, but they were locked. I continued walking to the other door. It looked like someone may have left it open from exiting in a hurry. I whispered loudly to Asher, who was spinning in a circle at the end of the stairs and staring at his hand like it was the best thing in the world.

I noted to myself that drunk Asher was a hell of a lot less annoying than sober Asher.

He seemed happy and living life with his little dancey dance, so I pushed the door open, making my way inside the dark, slightly colder room. The light from the lightning storm outside lit up the space periodically, and the strobe effect made me nauseous.

Big industrial filing cabinets were sitting in the room’s back corner. They stood out from the abandoned candle holders and a desk with dust on it.

The filing cabinets didn’t have a speck of dust on them, and if I had to guess, I’d say they were strategically put in this room so others wouldn’t think to go shuffling around.

What creepy secrets would I find in this holiest of hellholes?

I kicked the metal with my foot. No huge booby trap swallowed me up like in old Western movies. I kicked it again, mostly just enjoying the ting of the metal sound. I tried to peek out the door for Asher, but he was off dancing somewhere I couldn’t see from the ‘little corner of secrets.’

The filing cabinet was locked, and it would not budge.

I sighed, waiting for the makeshift strobe light to shed some light on a weapon I could use to pulverize this cabinet. The old candle holders were metal. They should work well enough.

I smacked the gold metal on my palm, testing the weight and durability.

“Meet your maker cabinet,” I yelled, a bit tipsy from sipping Asher’s adult happy juice.

The metals clashed together in an awful sound. It was timed perfectly with a particularly loud thunder boom.

I broke the lock clean off, and the drawer slid forward, untethered by the previous lock.

Some papers were damaged in my snoop mission, but I ignored them, yanking out a big red folder labeled: ‘Participants.’

Furrowing my brow, I squinted, waiting for the lightning to bring the words into view. There were pictures of girls, maybe college-age, some younger than that. All races, faces, hair colors, and backgrounds.

At the bottom of each, there was one word of scrawled handwriting. It either said, ‘Success’ or ‘Failure.’

I kept swiping through the folders, and the dates for these girls were dating back over a decade. One image caught my eye. A blonde girl with bouncing beautiful curls and sad, gray eyes was so familiar to me that they made me bring the paper closer.

The lightning struck, and the room lit up. The girl’s image was clear now, her name written in red pen at the top.

“Evangeline Ballard.”

Evangeline…Ballard?

The girl who committed suicide was Asher’s relative?

Wait, that didn’t make any sense? He was an orphan, and she was too. Were they abandoned there together?

Asher said that the Headmaster was her adopted father.

Was that the truth? Was Asher the headmaster’s son?

Evangeline Ballard would be his sister then. The question remained…did he know?

I was about a year and a half through these files, and now the images were changing. The scrawled handwriting wasn’t the ominous success or failure but instead read, “Sired, yes. Father John.”

There were dollar signs with an attached page—a receipt of some sort.

A chill ran down my spine. The paper in my hands felt wrong. It was a darkness I couldn’t explain.

I kept reading.

“Sired. Yes. Father Jacob.”

“Sired, yes. Father Matthew.”

The word ‘Sired’ was written over and over on each page and receipt. One after another after another…I felt sick, and it only increased as I went further back. There were pictures of…babies.

“What the fuck?” I said, standing up and dropping the files out of shock.

I stepped back, unsure what the fuck I had just found. I shook my head, trying to process what the fuck was going on.

Were those girls…sold?

Lightning struck, the thunder making the room buzz with the brutality outside. I looked over to the scrambled papers strewn across the wooden ground, and one name caught my attention.

I picked up the paper and once more waited for the light to bring the picture into focus.

This girl was older, my age at least. This was a recent date, but receipts or experiment notes were not written at the bottom.

The whole photo was crossed out with a huge red ‘X’ over the watermark of the word ‘Terminated.’ It was barely visible under the harsh ‘X.’

Initials were posted at the bottom of the page: ‘AB.’

I furrowed my brow and looked over to the door, a shadow blocking my light of the outer hall. I expected to see Asher tipsy and dancing around like before. I could question him what the fuck all this shit was.

But what I saw was a black, hooded, cloaked figure. The grim reaper himself came to drag me to hell. I inhaled a breath to scream, but his hands, which were not corporal, wrapped around my mouth and stuck a dagger to my ribcage…my dagger.

I swallowed my scream, and my anger at being manhandled tamped down the fear.

“Mmmphhhh,” I mumbled through his hands.

Where was Asher?

I spied the desk with those dirty old candle holders lying on the top and leaned toward them, using my body as a deadweight. It worked. My captor didn’t see my action, and the sudden weight took him off guard. My body and his propelled forward, smashing into the table and scattering the metal candle holders on the ground with a crash.

The assailant cursed, getting to his feet and pulling me up. He swung his hand back to hit me and knocked me off my feet. I hit the ground hard enough to make me dizzy and shook my head, trying to grab a candle holder closer to me.

The asshole grabbed my feet and yanked me forward. I got the world’s most giant splinters shoved into my back and ass as I was dragged across the old fucking wooden flooring, but I snagged the candle holder and smashed it into the ground, the edge of the wood anchoring me.

Robed fuckhead grunted. He dropped my feet and walked to me, anger lit up on the bottom of his face from the lighting.

“Who are you?” I yelled at him, kicking at his hand when he tried to grab me again.

He leaned forward, the spark of light showing his menacing smile. This little shit wanted to play?

Fine.

I didn’t wait for his egotistical man speech. Instead, I reared the candle stick back and smashed him upside the head. I caught his eyebrow, not enough to kill him, but his fall told me he wasn’t getting up.

I smiled a cocky grin of my own and pushed myself up enough to crawl over to the bastard. His robed hood flew off his head, and I could see his face clearly when the lightning struck, lighting up the room again.

My world flipped upside down. The curled black hair, the dark lashes, and the dark black eyes staring at me were the source of my nightmares. This was my ex…the man I killed all those years ago. Fuck, he was the one who raped and tortured me for years…the man who started my addiction for spilling blood.

My shock made me drop my weapon, the fear freezing my feet in place.

Alex coughed and spit blood on the wood at my feet.

“Oh, silly little puppet. Did you really think you could kill me? I will haunt you to the very last breath, baby. You are mine to torment. I fucking own you, Eira. Mind, body, and soul.”

I couldn’t fucking breathe .

My vision was flashing with his hands and his words. Images flashed with that lightning, placing me under his brutal body, under his tools of pain.

I wasn’t in my own skin.

I was floating in slow motion to my past. Reliving the pain and the fear I had every day. Tears left my eyes, my face giving off zero emotion otherwise. He truly had haunted me. The day I took the video on my phone to send to the Debt Collector, his blood on my hands, the rain pouring down on me—his words, his hands, his abyss-filled black eyes.

I felt myself fall, hitting the floor and not feeling the impact, my body as numb as my mind as the images flashed over and over like an old-time movie projector screen.

Pain…fear…blood…defeat.

I’d failed.

His eyes drew closer, a backdrop in the flipping scenes of my past. His smile promised the pain it always did, and I lay there, my fight, my survival instinct frozen in fear to even try.

“We will have so much fun, little puppet. Don’t you worry. It’ll be just like old times.”

I closed my eyes, succumbing to the projector of my weak mind, blocking out his smile and endless black eyes.