Darkest Descent

26. 26

26

Alice

Hate and need were a strange thing. Especially when twisted up together.

Our father thought we’d died, so there was no more pressure. Nothing on the outside to manipulate us anymore. Hunter wasn’t sending any more videos. He wasn’t goading and teasing the man to try to get a reaction. He was doing nothing. Since he lost it on us again in the basement, shoving his way into both our bodies without consent, something in him had changed. When I’d woken in pain, unaware of what happened while I was drugged, it was to confusion. Neither man was forthcoming until I demanded answers.

I’d been furious at him when I learned what happened, what he’d done, but that fury didn’t linger for long. Though it sickened me, I understood why he did it, and I would have consented had I been conscious. It didn’t make it right, but nothing about this was right, anyway. I don’t know what that said for my own self-respect, but I didn’t have it in me to care that he’d fucked me without permission after all that had already happened between us. It was another trauma for the list. His ownership over my body was no longer a question.

Asher told me Hunter was distraught almost the second the call ended, and he cried, holding our prone bodies to his chest with whimpering apologies and promises to make it right. He carried us both to his bed, tucked us under his covers and disappeared, leaving us surrounded by his scent, his aura, but not him. I was a little resentful to have not seen Hunter weak like that, pleading and sad, but Asher assured me it wasn’t something worth seeing.

When the drugs were out of our system, my twin and I climbed from the bed, washed and dressed, checked over bodies - sore nose, ass and vagina, then went to find our older brother, worried for him. He didn’t know I forgave him, that it was okay. We had to get through this in whatever fashion we could, and the healing could come after.

We found him in the basement, staring at the stained spot in the center of the room, his knees hugged to his chest and a forlorn expression on his face. He looked lost in thought, and even as we approached, he reacted only a little, twitching at the sound of our voices, but not looking up .

So we left him there for the rest of the night, unsure how to process the emotions ourselves. Asher and I spoke about how fucked up we were, and about how much we missed him being at our side. It was strange in the bed without him, without the third part of our messed up trio. So as the clock ticked to almost 4am, with neither of us asleep, we decided to force it. Grab him with as much care as he gives us and yank him from his funk, force him out of the basement. He needed to apologize again. To explain himself. We needed to tell him it was okay.

We had too much shit to deal with to let him wallow. There was no time for selfish despair. Not yet.

The basement stairs were shadowy as we traveled down them, Asher a few steps in front of me. The door was open at the bottom, and no light came through there to help us along. Hunter was either asleep, or still sitting in the dark, feeling sorry for himself.

But there was movement in the air down there, something that raised my hackles, had my instincts firing off wildly. Something was wrong. I don’t know why, but my body was sending me warning signals, a sense of dread. I grabbed Asher’s hand.

With my heart in my throat, Asher gave my palm a squeeze and let go, stepping into the basement while I flicked the light switch on this side of the door .

There was a beat. A suck in of air.

“Shit!” Asher roared, fraught, racing into the room without me. “Hunter!”

For a second, I locked up, scared of what I’d see, terrified of what new horror I was about to witness. But when Asher bellowed for me, his voice harrowing, I moved, making it into the basement only a few seconds behind him.

And what I found made my heart fucking stop.

Hunter had hung himself.

His body swung from the beam he’d tied me to in our darkest moments.

His face was red and purple.

Straining. Bulging eyes. Even the injured one had pressure building behind it as he scrambled.

It wasn’t too late.

“Hunter!” I cried, flying into action and grabbing the chair he must have used to get higher, now knocked out from under him. I climbed it, shoving a frozen Asher out of the way to reach for Hunter’s neck. My fingers struggled to dig into the rope around his neck so he could suck in a breath, but it was too fucking tight. His eye strained, blood filling the healthy one, as he watched me fight to save him, his eyes so full of fucking life it wasn’t fair. “Please don’t,” I begged him. We weren’t through. “This isn’t done, Hunter. I need you. Please help me.” My voice was a low, desperate husk as I forced a finger between his neck and the rope, the threads burning me as I grew more and more frantic, ignoring the pain.

He couldn’t die. Not now. Not when we were so close.

Asher wrapped his arms around Hunter’s legs and lifted him, allowing enough slack for me to make the noose bigger, loosening it. I worked fast, my gaze darting back to Hunter’s every half-second to ensure he was still watching me. His eyes told a story I didn’t want to hear.

It felt like too long. Way too long. But when I yanked the rope over his head and he slumped onto me, his breath was like a song against my cheek. We tumbled backward, Asher catching our legs and lowering us in a mess to the floor.

I didn’t want Hunter to die. Despite all of it, I wanted him here with us. He couldn’t go before we’d healed.

Asher helped me settle him onto the nearest mattress, and my heart was in my throat when Hunter reached for us, his limbs heavy as I batted him away. He looked forlorn for a moment, trying to gulp and open his mouth to speak, but I shook my head.

“Just breathe,” I told him. “Slow and steady.” I settled behind him and pulled his head onto my lap. “Asher, please get some water and some painkillers… and a phone or tablet or whatever the fuck, I need to google what to do. ”

Asher nodded, and after pausing at the door to watch us for a moment, like he was confirming we were both okay, he sloped off. I hadn’t used my phone since we got them back. I had no desire to see what, if anything, was being reported about us. If my friends had contacted us. But this was important.

Looking down, I found Hunter’s gaze burning up at me. His eye strained bright red, veins burst all through the white, matching the one I’d stabbed. His neck was raw with rope burn, and there were seeping slices on his forearms, like he’d hacked away at himself before trying to take his own life. All the things he’d done to us… had it caught up with him at last? The shame? The grief? No. That was unacceptable.

“You aren’t allowed to die until you’ve repented, Hunter,” I told him, stroking his cheek. “You can’t go until I say you can.”

He gulped and managed a nod, his eyes telling me so much. I thanked whichever god floated around out there that he was still breathing, that we hadn’t been too late. For all he’d done to us, it was a miracle I felt grateful for his life, but I did.

We had plans.

Hunter started to talk when Asher hurried back into the room, a bag over his shoulder, a glass of water and Hunter’s phone in his tight grasp. Water sloshed over the rim of the glass as his hands shook. “It says to perform CPR, but he’s breathing…” Asher gasped, his eyes darting around in panic.

“Hand it over,” I asked, motioning for the device before he had a meltdown. “Help me give him some sips of water and I’ll find some proper advice.”

Turns out, there isn’t much to be done after saving someone from hanging. Either they’re dead or they aren’t. Hunter was still breathing, hadn’t lost consciousness, so it was a case of waiting out the ligature marks and the internal bruising. He would heal with rest and patience. He could breathe, make small noises, so there were no crushing injuries either. Just time needed.

“I’m sorry,” Hunter grunted out two days later, when we’d all piled into his bed, eating the last of the ice cream and watching a movie. The ice cream gave me flashbacks of how it felt being shoved inside me, but I moved past it. Fuck giving up ice cream. This was rocky road, too, and based on the stains on the floor, the one Hunter’d used as lube was vanilla based. But maybe one day in the distant future I would shove an entire pint of rocky road up Hunter’s hole, or something with lots of chunks and shards of chocolate.

Asher paused the movie, and we both turned to our big brother, surprised to hear his voice. It was husky, but clear.

“You don’t need to apologize for that,” I muttered, my eyebrows drawn together. “You—”

Hunter shook his head and forced himself to sit up higher, pushing away our attempts to help. “I’m not apologizing for trying to… kill myself.” He winced. “I’m apologizing for taking your trust again. For what happened.”

Asher met my gaze, frowning. I had fallen completely unconscious during the call with Dad, but woke up swollen and sore between my legs. Asher told me what Hunter had done, and in one of the most horrifying moments of my life to date, I found I didn’t care. Him simply fucking me was the least of it. I spiraled then, worried about what the lack of concern for my body meant for my mind, but it was another thing to add to that list.

The long fucking list of things to heal and fix.

Asher had been angrier, but then he’d seen it, heard the words spat between father and son over us.

“Hunter, there is too much on that list already for you to think something like that would destroy this,” I told him, admitting those dark feelings aloud. How twisted was I? But if it ruined our dad, I was all for it. “Please, don’t do that again,” I said, referring to the suicide attempt.

“I won’t,” he admitted. “As soon as it was too late, I regretted it. I need to see that bastard have his brutal ending.” He took a long, deep breath. “The reaction I had when the two of you walked in just a second after I pushed the chair from under me told me all I needed to know.”

“We all want to see his end,” Asher interjected. “And it won’t be possible if it’s not the three of us.”

Hunter smiled then, like he was imagining what could be ahead. We were halfway to planning it, had so much up our sleeves for what we might do to Dad, how we would reveal ourselves, how we would torture and kill him. It was all to come, and Hunter needed to be here for it.

“His life needs to end at the hands of all three of us,” I said, stroking Hunter’s stomach as I curled up into him, leaving the ice cream to melt on the bedside table. “So you tell me what you need to get past this, and we can put it aside until we have time to heal without him in the world.”

“We’re all broken, Hunter,” Asher continued my thought. “What you did to us shattered the last of what we had left, but we’re in pieces already.” Asher’s hand met mine on Hunter’s abdomen, and together we rubbed his skin, his stomach, and his chest. Hunter hummed and his eyes fluttered shut .

I was scared all my hatred for him would come rushing back once we’d completed our mission to kill Dad, to end his hold over us. But for now, these two men remained the most important thing to me. I needed them both like I needed air. Everything else could wait.

Asher and I slid our hands down to Hunter’s cock, grinning at each other when we found it hard and waiting, a bead of pre-cum at the tip.

Yeah. We were fucked up. Something inside all of us was broken. But we were broken together. And that’s all that mattered.