She dug the iPad from her bag and stretched out on the bed with it beside her. Then she closed her eyes. Just for a few minutes. It was never her intention to do more than that. She certainly hadn’t planned to fall asleep.
She woke with her heart juddering madly, feeling as though each serrated breath was turning to ice in her lungs. The afternoon light had gone, and the street lamp from outside bathed the room in garish red-black shadows. The rest of the house was dark and silent. She was just about to call out for Garrett, when she sensed more than saw that she wasn’t alone. The red blackness was thick and heavy, like a bloodied mist floating in the room. It was the flash of a cell phone camera and the voice that brought it all back to her in one horrific moment. She hadn’t heard that voice in over a year now, but there was never any mistaking it.
‘Come on, Bird Woman, let me see what you’ve got. I know what a show you can put on when you feel like it.’ He moved out of the shadows and came to sit on the edge of the bed next to her, the tattoo of a cobra coiling around a skull practically pulsing from beneath his tight black muscle shirt and over his biceps. He reached out and opened the top of the robe until her breasts were mostly exposed. She shoved him and fought back the urge to scream. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she managed before his hand settled around her throat, big enough to choke off her airway, big enough to leave bruises in a circlet along the line of his thumb and up to his index finger. He had huge hands.
‘You can’t stop me, Bird Woman. I’ll do what I want. You couldn’t stop me then, and you can’t stop now.’ He moved in so close that his face was practically touching her, and there was nowhere for her to go, nowhere to back away from him. His breath was hot and wet, and she fought back the urge to gag. He only laughed and kept talking. ‘Really, it doesn’t matter what I do to you.’ He took another picture of her exposed breasts and then shoved the robe open further. ‘It doesn’t matter who I share you with, since you don’t even exist.’ He moved in closer still, his thumb pressing hard against the soft spot where her pulse hammered like a warning bell. With a deft move, he slipped the knot on the robe and the camera flashed again. ‘We both know Bird Woman won’t even exist in a few more days. She doesn’t even have a name, does she? You never gave her a name because you knew how short her life would be.’ His gaze felt abrasive as it raked over her body.
She wanted to move, she wanted to scream for Garrett, she wanted to run away, but he held her there effortlessly, the hand around her neck now moving down to grope and stroke and make way for the camera’s accusing eye.
‘Leave me!’ She managed to push the words up through her raw throat. ‘Go away and leave me alone. You’re not here. You can’t be!’
‘Aren’t I?’ His face was suddenly scant inches away from hers, his eyes obsidian black in the poisonous light. ‘When Bird Women is gone, when you have no further use for her and you discard her like you did all the others, just remember, I know who you really are, Kendra Davis. I know what you do, what games you play. I knew you couldn’t give it up. Does he know? Does Garrett Thorne know who he has playing his Tess Delaney? What a sickening, whoring coward she is? What a liar she is?’
He brought the camera close to her mouth, so close she thought he was going to force it down her throat, but instead he took a picture of her lips, then, with his thumb and forefinger on either side of her jaw, he forced her mouth open and the camera flashed into her mouth. ‘Ah, the pit of lies, the pit of evil. This mouth –’ He brushed his lips against hers then took another picture, the lens up close to her teeth. The pressure of his fingers on her jaws was bruising and the nail of his thumb drew blood just below her cheekbone. ‘This mouth knows nothing but lies and deceit. This mouth deserves no tenderness. This mouth is a pit, deserving nothing but to be filled by the vilest of cocks.’ The camera phone kept flashing photo after photo until the after-image of him was like a dark and gaping wound.
‘Kendra Davis, I know who you are. Kendra Davis, you’re not fit for anything else,’ the cobra on his arm hissed.
‘Kendra Davis, you don’t deserve anything else.’ The mouth of the skull moved in agreement.
The camera flashed, and she screamed and drowned out the sound of her name, her name he was never supposed to know. Kendra, Kendra, Kendra …
‘Kendra, goddamn it, wake up! Wake up!’
She woke with a gasp of blessed air. It felt like an eternity since she had breathed, and she found herself sobbing, folded tightly in Garrett’s arms.