Locked In

13

THEON

Hudson Granger’s arm was looped around a girl at a club, his mouth frequently on her with his other hand squeezing her boobs. There were three clubs in South Highland, but this was the most popular. It was twelve in the morning, marking three hours that I’d been staring at Hudson, waiting for the right timing.

A woman—about the tenth one tonight—stopped before me, obstructing my direct view of him. I gave her an unwelcoming stare, one I learned unnerve people most times, but she glanced over her shoulder and smiled.

“I see you’ve been staring at him. He may be into threesome. If you ask him, he might let you in. And maybe luckily, I can join, too.” Her hand came up to touch my chest, sliding down to my stomach. “Damn, you’ve got a nice body.”

I was turned off. Just like always.

No amount of foreplay could turn me on as much as Ainsley turned me on. She could be saying anything unrelated to sex, and I’d be hard, my imagination working ten times stronger and dissecting possible ways to have her strung up and waiting with her ass in the air, pussy wet and begging to be invaded.

Sometimes...okay, all the time, I had to picture that I was fucking her and not some random girl whenever I was tired of my fist and needed a pussy to come into. Even still, I wasn’t always satisfied. So I stopped, because there was no torture compared to wanting someone and not having them.

I grabbed the girl’s wrist as she inched towards my zipper. “Weren’t you taught not to touch strangers?”

She blushed. “I didn’t have someone growing up.”

“Neither did I.” I seized her other hand as it came for my zipper again. “Now leave before you find out what kind of stranger I am.”

She was intrigued. “What kind of stranger are you?”

Perfect timing. Hudson was standing up with the girl, walking out of the door.

“The kind you see on the news, where females are often the victims.”

Lust drowned from her eyes as she staggered back, scouring my expression. I gave her the impression that I was dead serious, and she brisked away, her face a war ground of dread and disbelief.

I slipped out of my chair and followed Hudson to the back of the block where he had the girl against the wall, one hand on her neck and the other unfastening his belt.

There was a small bag with me that I brought specially for him, and I moved closer to them, reaching inside for the darts I had.

“I want to fuck your hole so bad,” he said, in haste to free his dick from his briefs. I picked two darts and aimed as he fisted it, the girl getting ready in position for him. Too bad for her, she had to look for another man to satiate her desire. Hudson was mine for tonight.

Squinting—because they picked a semi-dark place to make love outside the club—I tossed the dart as he was about to slide in, her left leg over his shoulder.

Bull’s eye.

He screamed like a bitch as he jumped back, staring down at the dart dangling from his length. Who knew I was still perfect at aiming.

The girl saw me first as I approached them, and she took off without another breath. Hudson’s trousers were around his ankle, his dick lying limp on his palm.

“You did this! Fuck! What the fuck! You fucking bastard!”

Grabbing his hair, I envisioned him laying his dirty hand on what was mine, and the anger came easily. I smashed his head against the wall.

I didn’t want to kill him yet. Since he left a mark on Ainsley’s skin, I would do more than just killing him.

It would help anyway. With the piled up frustration of seeing Ainsley everyday to going a week without meeting her because I had to force myself into control somehow, to needing her after witnessing her glorious nakedness with that breast piercing I wanted to bite so much...I ached for a relief.

One that sex with anyone wouldn’t give, but giving this bastard a slow death would help.

Taking him by his shirt, I dragged him across the ground to the slightly dense woods nearby, away from any source of light.

He wasn’t the first to lift a hand on Ainsley and bide his time on earth goodbye. There had been two before him—one was her boyfriend and the other was her boss in a frat club where she used to work in Melbourne. Although it should be a good thing that she was getting punished by someone other than me, but I had sent them to hell with a silly excuse of how I should be the only man to torture her, and not because it made me angry at all.

But I think I’ve been wrong all along.

I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to dismiss it as some half-conscious rambling, as though she hadn’t meant what she said—that she came back for me. No. For the last five years, I’d convinced myself that she didn’t care, that when I slipped over that cliff, she had seen an opportunity to discard me, and ran to save herself without a second thought.

And perhaps, a part of me had accepted that. I’d always known I’d give up my life for hers. But not like that—not without knowing she felt even a fraction of what I felt for her. That was the part that burned. Not her leaving, but that she didn’t hesitate. It made me feel like I was something she could easily shrug off. She didn’t have to care, didn’t have to stay—but she didn’t have to erase me either.

When I slipped and fell into the water and hit my head on the rock in it, I thought it was over. I didn’t wake up for a year. A whole year gone in a coma, my life on pause. And when I did finally open my eyes, I found out she had moved on, graduated, gone to college like nothing ever happened. Like I hadn’t been hanging off that cliff because of her. What crushed me even more was that there had been no police report, no missing person alert—nothing. She’d told no one. Not her friends, not the authorities. It was as if I’d never existed, like she was trying to wipe me out of everyone’s memory.

That was why I started it—the sabotage, the torment. If she didn’t want me in her life, then I’d make damn sure to force myself into it.

But now... now she said she came back? That she cared enough to return?

No. She had been sleep-talking. She had to be. Because God knew if she hadn’t, I had ruined her life for nothing. And she might never forgive or want to look at me again, and fuck if that wasn’t topping the list of the scariest things that could happen to me.

“What do you want from me? What did I do to you?” Hudson cried as I dumped him when we were far enough from the club.

“I want your life. Is that enough to answer your question?” I crouched beside him, barely making out his face in the dark. There was no moon tonight, and the stars were few. Bringing out a torch would be the same as begging to be caught attempting a murder. On the plus side, he was lucky I couldn’t see his face because the imprints he left on Ainsley’s face still churned in the back of my eyes.

“Who sent you? The boss sent you, didn’t he? I told him I’ll pay him his money! I just need a little more time after some bitch fucked up a contract I—”

There went my self control and gloved fist flying into his face. I didn’t stop at one punch, I delivered six more, each blow carrying a tidbit of the fury stuffing my chest.

“She poured coffee on you accidentally and you think you have every right to hit her,” I said after the last punch.

It took a while to get himself to speak, his speech distorted by something that could only be blood. “You shot a fucking dart at my dick because I hit a girl who deserved it? Who the fuck are you?” I sensed anger. He had the strength to be angry.

“Who the fuck am I?” Reaching for my bag, I replied to him. “I’m hers. And that girl you think deserved it, she’s mine. Tell me, do you know what ‘mine’ means?”

I picked out eight acupuncture needles, keeping one between my thumb and forefinger. Being someone with vast knowledge of the human body, I knew exactly what a sexy little needle could do when used right...or wrong. Acupuncture was supposed to be therapeutic, used to promote blood flow and ease pain—at least, that was the polite version. But there was a darker side to it. Inserted the wrong way, these needles could do more than just relax muscles—they could make them freeze.

A poorly placed needle in the wrong spot could stop blood from flowing entirely, locking the muscles in place and leaving a person paralysed, conscious but unable to move, like a puppet with its strings cut, as if their body had somehow forgotten how to move. The blood trapped, the nerves screaming, the entire body fighting for movement that would never come. If that pressure wasn’t relieved in time, the person wouldn’t just be frozen—they’d die, slowly. So fucking slowly. And they’d feel every agonising second of it.

I rolled the needle between my fingers, imagining the pain it could cause when pushed into just the right spot. Or the wrong one. “Mine means mine. It doesn’t mean yours. Just mine. Mine to do whatever I wish. Not yours to put your hands on.”

I dragged him to sit against a tree because lying down wouldn’t do it for me. He began to talk, tried and failed to get past me, took at least seven punches for that, and settled with pleading.

A brief recollection of how Ainsley had called my name on the phone made me simmer. Not only had she been anxious, but it was the first time she used my name. She called my name for the first time, she had been scared, her voice had been trembling, and the voice was stuck in my head. It was similar to the popular quote, ‘first impression lasts longer’. So I would never forget that sound till the day I died. Unless there was a better way to start calling my name. Moaning it, for example. If she moaned hard and frequently enough, I might just forget it.

Hudson, with no fight left more in him, relaxed against the tree bark. Positioning the needle between my fingers, I stared long at a point on his neck, needing my eyes to adjust to the darkness better. Then inserted my needle in his jugular vein.

He didn’t see my hand coming, and it was too late when he realised. He couldn’t move his neck again.

“Educational purpose: putting the needle there will disrupt your blood flow and hence, internal bleeding.”

Lifting his shirt, I placed another one deep in his abdomen, freezing him further. “That one can puncture your organs and damage, hence another internal bleeding.”

“What...what are you doing to my body? Stop...stop. Stop,” he said weakly, couldn’t manage more than that.

“I’m doing to your body what you did to my girl’s body.” The next needle went into his throat to shut him up. “Now that might cause swelling and not let you breathe well.”

Another one went to his lower back, near his spine, after I adjusted him. “That one will paralyse your entire body.”

The remaining four went into the joint in each arm and leg. It was a miracle I didn’t stab one into his dick vein. It was tempting, though the dart there was more than enough.

Standing up, I stepped away from his paralysed body and took my bag. It wouldn’t be long before he kicked the bucket. With eight needles in him, and a disrupted blood flow, it’d be a miracle if he made it ten minutes.

“In your next life, learn to keep your hands off things or people that don’t belong to you.”

Leaving him frozen, I disappeared into the night.