Depraved 2 (15 page)

There was a note of pitiful hopefulness in Kate’s voice when she said, “Really?”

“Yeah, we could take turns with it. I’ll use it another fifteen minutes, maybe, and then I’ll try sliding it your way.”

This prompted more tears from Kate, along with effusive professions of gratitude and additional apologies for her earlier behavior.

Hearing the woman’s monumental relief made Daphne feel good about herself, a rare thing despite her lifetime of self-love. “We’ll take half hour turns, okay? Give or take. That sound good to you?”

“Yes. Thank you. Only…do you think I could have my first turn now? I know you said you wanted a few more minutes, but my arms hurt so fucking much. Please?”

Daphne shrugged away a queasy pang of regret. She didn’t want to do this. Not really. And if she’d hesitated even a little longer, she might have reneged on the offer. But that didn’t happen. “Okay. We need to be careful sliding the chair back and forth. It could get knocked over or folded up real easy.”

With a last regretful sigh, she lifted her feet off the seat and maneuvered them into position to begin pushing the chair. She moved it only a few inches over at first and for a moment one of the legs got stuck on an uneven ridge in the concrete floor. But she rotated her pelvis and pushed harder. The chair’s legs bounced over the little ridge as it shot a few feet in Kate’s direction.

“Think you can reach it now?”

Kate twisted a hip and extended a leg toward the chair, her face contorting with the strain. “It’s too far.”

Daphne had been watching her closely and now had a deeper sense of how much Kate’s ordeal had weakened her. Her foot had been shaking uncontrollably while extended. Seeing this deepened the reluctant sympathy she felt for the woman even as it caused more second thoughts.

Still time to change my mind.

The chair would be out of range if she gave it just one more nudge in Kate’s direction. Right now she could likely just manage to swing herself over, hook a foot beneath the chair back, and drag it back into position beneath her. What stopped her was Kate’s ceaseless sobbing. Daphne had never heard anything quite like it. It was how she imagined a condemned person might sound in her last moments before being taken to the execution chamber.

Fuck.

Daphne rotated her lower body again and swung herself toward the chair as hard as she could manage. Her foot connected with the back of the chair and sent it sliding toward Kate again. This time it came to a stop almost directly beneath the other woman. Kate set her feet down on the seat and cried out in joyous relief.

Daphne heard a loud crack as she went into a twisting backswing. She gasped in surprise and turned her face upward. Hearing this made her wonder how strong the beam that supported the pulley-suspension system really was. It was as thick as a utility pole and was supported at either end by posts of a roughly equivalent girth. The lack of an additional support beam in the middle struck her as an obvious flaw. Over time even a piece of timber as apparently sturdy as the one overhead might weaken to the point of splintering without sufficient support. Years or decades of stress caused by holding up footless whales like the guy hanging on the other side of Kate would take a significant toll..

She might be able to hasten the splintering process by swinging back and forth as hard as she could. The prospect stirred some tentative excitement in her, but this was tempered by the knowledge that she couldn’t be the first person imprisoned here to ever think of this idea.

But it was still worth a shot.

Before she could begin the experiment, Daphne realized Kate’s sobbing had given way to quiet laughter.

“You okay, Kate?”

“Oh, I’m fine. Can’t say the same for you, you stupid bitch.”

The radical shift in Kate’s demeanor took Daphne by surprise. She was so baffled by it that some obvious implications temporarily eluded her. “What do you mean?”

Kate grinned in a way that was nearly diabolical. “You’re never getting this fucking chair back.”

The full weight of the betrayal hit Daphne hard. She had been tricked out of something valuable and it had been accomplished with infuriating ease. A part of her had known this was a possibility, but she had considered the risk very slight. They were sisters in bondage, sisters in suffering, and on a subconscious level her decision to take that risk was influenced by stories she had heard of women in similar situations persevering and ultimately prevailing against adversity by sticking together and watching out for each other. But obviously this wasn’t going to be one of those heartwarming tales of sisterhood and transcendence. The act of treachery stung, but nearly as bad was the callous, mocking way Kate had revealed her deceit, like a psychopath’s final twist of the knife after stabbing you in the heart.

Well, she had learned a hard lesson here, one she would not soon forget. She would never again put anyone’s interests or well-being ahead of her own.

“Mama Hunt likes me.”

Daphne wanted to ignore the duplicitous cunt, but the comment aroused her curiosity. “What makes you say that?”

“Because she said so. She says I’m special and that I may get to go live with her.”

Daphne laughed as she kicked her legs and swung back and forth on the chain. “When did she tell you this?”

“The day I got here.”

Daphne laughed again.

“Stop laughing at me!”

Kate’s high-decibel scream echoed in the spacious kitchen and the chair wobbled beneath her as she glowered at Daphne. Despite her desire to coarsen her heart, Daphne couldn’t help feeling another twinge of sympathy at the obvious terror and desperation just beneath the woman’s veneer of hatefulness. She had no doubt Vivian Hunt had implied certain possibilities for Kate. Hadn’t she done the same with Daphne upon her arrival today?

Yes.

And in each case it was clear the woman was just playing with them. She enjoyed planting tiny seeds of hope and savoring the additional level of mental torment this created in her victims. She was a sadist. A monster. If anything, a life as her personal slave would be even more of a horror show than what they were experiencing now.

But there was no point in saying any of this to Kate. It was all stuff she knew or sensed on some level, regardless of her current intense state of denial.

So, rather than continuing to antagonize her, Daphne opted to intensify her almost certainly doomed effort to weaken the beam. She was experiencing a significant level of pain in her shoulders, wrists, and elbows already, but she saw no reason to pace herself or do anything other than go all-out until she either accomplished her seemingly impossible goal or caused irreparable physical damage that would force her to stop. Making this thing happen would take nothing less than throwing herself into it with everything she had. She wouldn’t give up until she was free or dead.

“That won’t work.”

Daphne went into a backswing and stared down at the limp figure sprawled on the floor. The gloom blunted the reality of death and almost made the slightly built dead girl look like a cast-aside doll. She didn’t feel bad about what she had done to Lexus. The girl had been on the side of the bad guys. Knowing this, however, failed to prevent the touch of queasiness she felt every time she looked at her.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. I’m trying to ignore you. So please do me a favor and shut up.”

“I’m not even fucking with you. I know what you’re trying to do and it won’t work. I tried it my first night here. Everyone tries it, I think. That goddamn beam makes a lot of noise, but it doesn’t ever give.”

Daphne’s impulse was to dismiss Kate’s comments as another attempt to taunt her, but there was no hard edge in her voice this time. Instead there was just a calm, almost sad sincerity. She had good reason not to trust anything this woman said, but Daphne sensed she was being genuine for a change.

Shit.

After a few last half-hearted attempts, Daphne stopped kicking her legs.

She felt defeated, her all or nothing bravado revealed as empty bullshit.

Kate sighed. “Sorry to steal your hope, but it’s just impossible. Anyway…oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Someone’s coming again. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.”

Kate kicked the chair over.

Daphne’s eyes widened. “What the fuck? Why did you do that!?”

Kate didn’t say anything.

Daphne’s astonishment was such that the clacking footsteps out in the dining room didn’t register until several seconds after her ears began to pick up the sound. The kitchen’s double flap doors were thrown open an instant later. A hand slapped a wall and in the next moment banks of florescent lights began to blink on overhead, forcing Daphne to squint against the glare.

Someone gasped.

There was a babble of excited voices. This was followed by the sound of several sets of feet racing across the kitchen floor. The first people Daphne saw clearly when her vision came into focus were the butchers, Klaus and Horst. They were dressed in street clothes rather than bloody aprons, but it was impossible to mistake the big brutes for anyone else. Behind them were Vivian Hunt, a blandly handsome middle-aged man and woman in stodgy L.L. Bean attire, and a portly midget with a beret atop his head. As they came closer, Daphne noted an odd detail about the middle-aged couple. Clasped loosely in the woman’s right hand was the looped end of a leash. The lead was attached to a dog collar around the man’s throat.

The sight of them left Daphne flabbergasted. Outside of a Halloween or other type of costume party, she couldn’t imagine where she might encounter a more incongruous-looking group of people. The gorgeous Vivian Hunt with her fabulous fashion sense looked just as out of place as the rest of them, none of whom looked like anyone you’d expect to find in the kitchen of a backwoods redneck diner that featured human flesh as a menu item.

A tearful Horst knelt next to Lexus and scooped her into his arms. After quickly determining that she was indeed dead, he commenced to wailing and beseeching the heavens in the overwrought manner movies had taught Daphne to associate with various types of ethnic women. Seeing this mountain of a man reduced to such a state was disconcerting. It was also confusing—until she began to pick out certain pertinent bits of information when the man managed an intermittent moment or two of coherence.

Lexus, apparently, had been Horst’s daughter.

Oops.

Daphne’s chest tightened with fresh dread.

If they find out I killed her, I am fucked.

A hint of a smile touched the corners of Vivian’s mouth. She glanced at the kicked-over chair. Her eyes then flicked from Daphne to Kate and back again. And then she did a bit more looking at the chair, pursing her lips and squinting at it like it was that one maddening piece of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t seem to fit anywhere.

Which was sort of true.

Vivian reached into her purse and removed a stun gun.

Daphne’s stomach clenched.

Vivian approached the hanging women. “Well, well, well. It appears we have a mystery to solve. Who wants to be questioned first?”

14.

Sienna began to emerge from the state of ecstatic abandon that had gripped her in the aftermath of killing the boy. She was still writhing and clawing at the floor when the world began to coalesce around her again. That was how it felt, as if she had been away, floating in some other place of pure pleasure and white light, a place where she was only a mass of nerve endings forever sparking with unbridled erotic power. The first thing she saw when she came back to the world was the ceiling above her. At the same time she noted a long diagonal crack that had escaped her attention before. It extended from a corner of the room to about the ceiling’s midpoint and looked like it was nearly an inch wide through the middle.

Wow.

This place really is falling apart.

She felt serene in those first moments after her return, imbued with a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. But her face felt strange, its features arranged in a configuration so alien it took some time to identify it for what it was—a wide and radiant smile of perfect bliss. She began to freak out a little when the full weight of it hit her.

She felt…happy.

Sienna didn’t know if she’d ever experienced a moment of true happiness before. She was sure it hadn’t happened since childhood, at least. The emotion troubled her once she recognized it for what it was. She had no aversion to feeling good. It was always nice to savor the things that gave her pleasure. It was just that her idea of pleasure normally derived from things that gave other people nightmares. She liked the darkness that defined her life and personality. But something about this variant brand of pleasure seemed to run counter to all the things she cherished most.