Cold-Blooded Beautiful (The Beautiful Series) Read online

  Drunken hands grabbed at my buckle, fumbled with my belt, and unzipped my pants. Lowering herself to her knees, she smiled up at me.

  Shit.

  Every part of my body screamed.

  Shit.

  She had shitty brown eyes.

  All I wanted was green.

  She lowered her mouth to me and before she could lay one disgusting finger on me, I shoved her face away with an open palm, fingers splayed tightly and harsh. “I can’t bloody do this.”

  “What? Why? Call me Samantha. I’ll be whoever you want me to be,” she slurred. “It’s all good.”

  “No. Fuuuuck, I really can’t do this. I don’t bloody want anyone but her.”

  I left her there, half-naked, eyes wide. Lipstick smeared down her chin. Was it smeared when I met her? How could I think she looked anything like my Sam? My perfect Sam.

  I walked around aimlessly, drunk as all hell, and ended up back at my mum’s where I threw up my entire night into the wastebasket of the guest bedroom. My body crumpled to the floor and I lay there cold and alone, hugging a garage pail full of vomit. Closing my eyes, the room spun quickly around me, and I gradually fell asleep.

  The tranquil whispers of Sam’s voice rippled through my mind, “It feels like you can’t breathe, but you can. It feels like you’ll never get through this, but you will.”

  What if I just didn’t want too? Huh? Bloody hell, Samantha, what then?

  Chapter 10

  I wish I knew how much time had passed when I finally awoke. It would have been a bit easier to gauge how much danger I was in, but with the heavy burlap bag over my head, and the stench of vomit that lined the inside of it, I could not think one straight thought. My body felt as if it were sitting on some sort of hard surface, my hands were still tied around my back, and my legs felt bound together at the ankles and knees with something that made me itch with madness. Secured so tightly that I could not move, and when I tried, the pain and ache of my muscles and bones screamed out of me in tears, letting me know they must have been stuck in this position for a while. It felt as if someone had taken liberties with my body in a boxing ring. My head hung heavily to one side.

  Something a small distance away made a soft thump. I rolled my head in the direction I thought it came from. “Hello,” my voiced slurred slowly into the darkness.

  A loud grumbly laugh burst out from somewhere right over my head, so close and abrupt that my head flinched back from the sound.

  Bright light blinded me, as the hood was yanked up violently from my head, and I gasped for the fresh air that assaulted my nose and mouth.

  There, standing in front of me, wearing a smug smile was David. Shoulders back, proud strong chin jutting out and perfect posture, arrogant and cocky, radiating an air of superiority around him. The glint of a filthy serrated knife peeked out from behind his back, intimidating, and mocking me. He smirked at me when my eyes fixed on the blade of the knife.

  Rusty. Filthy. Staph infections. Tetanus. He knew exactly how to torture me.

  Slowly, he moved over me, dragging the tip of the knife across my throat, burning a small lick of flame in its wake. Tilting my head as far away as I could, I cringed, biting down on my tongue from the sheer disgust and hysteria that was taking over my body. I knew it was nothing more than a scratch, but the way his eyes were basking in my horror, my mind started to race into panic mode. I can’t let him do this. I can’t let him control me with fear.

  Calming my face muscles, I locked eyes with him and cleared my thoughts. I can’t let my emotions take over and chaos win. Focus. Stay calm.

  Slowly, he brought the blade away from my neck, dragging it gradually down the front of my shirt, over my breasts and stomach with just enough pressure to bite through the material. I wanted to run and scream, fight back, anything. All I could do was tighten my muscles, and clench my fists closed against the back of the chair. I knew he was seeing signs of my panic; my skin was probably pale as hell, my nostrils flaring, and beads of sweat breaking out across my skin, and the quickening of my breathing, as my chest fell and rose in terror. I tried to count, I tried to calm myself, so help me God I tried, but I knew David was going to kill me. I knew my hours on this earth were numbered, and I was not in any control. All I could do was fight back the tears. I wasn’t going to give him any.

  With the knife, he slowly sawed through the ropes between my knees and ankles, deliberately taking his time, smiling, knowing he had all the control. Then he stood and pressed his body against mine to reach to saw the ropes binding my hands behind me. One slip of that knife and the pain would be unreal.

  “Stand up,” he whispered into my ear before he stepped back.

  I grabbed hold of the back of the chair to help me stand, and sat down again quickly before he could see me fall. I couldn’t breathe. This man was an entire army in himself, and I felt like I had no armor against him.

  Then I thought of Kade.

  Oh, my God, Kade must be going insane right now.

  “Get down on your hands and knees, pet and crawl to the door.”

  This man was going to kill me. I wasn’t going to crawl for him anywhere. I had just enough energy for one laugh, before his fist met my temple and my world blurred with rainbows and jaw numbing pain.

  “You’re just as stupid as your brother was,” his hazy face whispered into my ear. Thick strong hands grabbed onto my hair and savagely yanked my head to face his. Strands of my hair snapped and pulled from my scalp, sending sharp needle-like stings over my skin. Low guttural sounds escaped through my clenched lips, causing him to smile heartlessly. “He tried to fight me, too,” he chuckled, darkly. “He thought he could outsmart me, just like you. It’s such a shame that suicide runs so rampant in your family, isn’t it? Especially when he was helped by me.” The wet slide of his tongue up my cheek made my stomach roll in disgust, but the acknowledgement of him playing a part in my brother’s death, made me scream and slam my head against his. Primal screams of anguish tore from my throat, senseless words and guttural shrieks, as if I could kill him with the sounds of my shattered heart.

  “You fucking piece of shit, David. You’re a fucking coward, you son of a…”

  His crushing fingers around my throat silenced my words. “Will these be your last few breaths, pet?” Pressing his fingers tighter around my throat, he laughed, “Your brother went quickly, a lethal mixture of a little Oxycontin to make him feel good, and a bit of Potassium Chloride to stop his heart.”

  Lowering my jaw down against his crushing hands, I squeezed my shoulders tight and pivoted on the balls of my feet. Slamming my hands into the crooks of his arm, I gasped for breath as his hands lost their hold on me. The weight of his body blasted into me, forcing me up against the wall, knocking the air from my lungs. The pain in my chest was like fire. The filthy blade of his knife was once again pressed hard against my flesh.

  “Tell me why you killed Michael! Tell me why you killed my brother!”

  “Don’t act stupid, pet. You and your brother were so righteous. Just like you, he wanted no part of our little extra curricular money earning. Your father and I have been building the SamMatt Pharmaceutical Empire for years. It’s a billion dollar industry, baby. I have everything. I am everything. He was trying to stop me, and he was collateral damage. You, though, I was surprised when you just left and didn’t try to stop me. Even shocked me a bit when you emptied all the accounts and hid my money. I always thought you were too strong willed, but I never knew how unintelligent you really were.”

  The burn of the point of the knife sliding along my jaw, separating my skin, made me squeeze my eyes shut and puff out a strangled gasp of breath. “What the fuck do you want, David?” I stammered, through my pain.

  “Oh, I want my money, pet. And I will get it eventually. I have every intention of getting every single penny. However, right now, I’m enjoying this. This beautiful torture we have between us. I love playing God to you, pet. Will you beg for your life, little one? B
eg me. You’ll either bend to me, or die. I will control you. Getting away from me will be fucking useless to you, because I’ll haunt your nightmares, pet. I’m going to make sure you never forget you are mine.” Placing his hot open mouth over my cheek, he bit into my skin, making me cry out. “You'll never be rid of me, pet. I'll always be right up here,” he whispered darkly, tapping me twice on my skull before slamming his fist into my head, blackening my world.

  A thick heavy blanket of warmth settled over my body, dragging me deeper and deeper into my darkness. No matter what I had ever been trained to do in my past, facing real danger-real fear, and knowledge that you are about to die, was sickeningly terrifying. You could sit back when it’s over and think, I should have done this, or only if I did that, but to no avail. Brutality is not prejudiced. Violence is never kind. When it strikes, it doesn’t give you a chance to understand it or change it. Tragedies overwhelm, overtake, and conquer. You have no control over it. You can just respond to it. Sometimes, your body is just too beaten to respond hard enough. I knew enough of seeing the effects of combat and violence firsthand, as a military doctor, but I was away from the violence. I was the one that dealt with the after effects of it, I was the surgeon, not on the field, I saw no action up close. The dying was brought to me in choppers, Hummers, and stretchers. Sure, they trained you for things. I knew at every moment I could die, you make sure you wear your boots with your correct blood type on them, and hope that no one needs to know the info, but this…this was a madman with a personal vendetta, with my named tattooed to it. I was no longer in the military. It had been years since I held a soldiers hand. I could barely remember the chaos of it, much for of the loneliness. That empty blackness that engulfed me was an easy out. Just floating in a sea of shadows and anesthetized emotions, waiting to feel again-and sunlight to warm my cold, cold skin.

  My eyes eventually fluttered open to the frightening thought of having the flu. My body ached everywhere, inside and out, as if I’d been wrung out. My eyeballs and the muscles that held them in their sockets pulsed to the throbbing pain that slammed inside my forehead. I didn’t remember how I got there, wherever there was, and my thoughts were too distracted by my aching pains to think it through clearly.

  Wasn’t I just at work?

  Didn’t Kade give me flowers?

  A sharp boom of panic thudded hard in my chest, as I tried to move my arms and legs, which I found to be too heavy. Panic surged through my chest, exploding in bright burst of light behind my eyelids, as I screamed into the empty room.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  Kade wasn’t at the hospital with flowers, David was. David killed my brother and made it look like a suicide. My father helped him with everything. They are going to poison me again. They are going to inject me with filth, and I have no way of fighting this. Panic surged up my chest and into my throat. My limbs shook violently, my own heartbeats drowned out the sounds of my screams.

  Still no one came.

  Stay calm and focus. Where the hell am I?

  Scanning the small room, deep red paint peeled from the walls in long curls. It lay in crimson colored piles along the filthy tiled floor, looking quite similar to splatters of fresh blood. In a few places along the damp walls, rusty water dripped down like a small rushing river, pooling into a puddle of corrosion and decay. The floor tiles held thick spider veins of mildew and mold, growing black and chalky white. A hideous mattress, ripped to shreds, coils popping through, was slung haphazardly in the corner of the room, next to a cracked porcelain bowl that seemed to smell as if it held fifty years of feces. Panic set in. Gagging back vomit. The smell hit me so hard that I lost the entirety of my stomach, gagging until the burn of bile scorched my throat, but my stomach still convulsed.

  I crawled up to my feet, pulling myself up by latching on to the sill of the boarded up window, and weakly made my way to the only door. The knob was locked still. Taking another survey around the dust covered room, I nodded to myself, and a cacophony of loud high pitched hysterical giggles poured from my lips. The noise that sputtered from my lips fed my panic. It flared itself into gulps of air I couldn’t get, and black spots formed in front of my eyes.

  There was an open shower stall in one corner of the room, with a ripped curtain that dangled from one hook. Dark mold grew from it creases and it smelled like rotted earthy remains. With shaky hands, I pulled on the curtain, and with no more than an ounce of pull, it tumbled down, collapsing in a puff of white ash. I gagged and covered my face, wondering what toxins I was inhaling. Mold spores?

  Turning the spigot on, a downpour of red rusty rain drizzled weakly from the showerhead. I let it run until the water was clear, and stepped into the icy water to wash off the blood. I stared down between my bare feet at the filthy broken tiles, and watched the water spiraling around the drain. Circling and circling; pouring itself in. The chill of the water felt good against my skin, it numbed the bruises and aches to a dull roar. Yet, I could still feel the ghost of David’s hands and heavy fists on my skin. That would never wash off, would it?

  Panic again. Leaning back against the cold tiles, gasping for breath, my knees gave out. My body slid down the wall, broken chipped tiles slicing bites into my skin, and I landed painfully hard against the floor. I lowered my head between my knees, and let my sobs break free. It was okay to break down, because there was no one here to see me cry.

  When night fell, the only light in the room was that which filtered dimly through the boarded slats of the windows, from the one lone light source outside. It made striped shadows across the walls and gave the room a morbid flavor.

  Sharp spiked cramps racked through my stomach as I crawled towards the toilet bowl, where I wretched and heaved until I thought I would split in half. My head swam and throbbed in sharp pains so that I could barely see. All I could do was feel, feel the scorching burn of my insides in my throat, and the tight convulsions of my body trying to expel its filth.

  Somewhere behind me, a soft click and rustle. Light flooded the room.

  With his deep laughter, David was instantly behind me, grabbing me by my hips, and pulling me flush against his body. Even without the recognition of his laugh, I would have known it was him the second his precious Clive Christian cologne hit my senses. Citrus and sandalwood. It was suffocating.

  His arms slithered up across my chest, pulling me tight, and burying his face in the crook of my neck, “My little wifey. It’s been too long since I sunk my meat inside you,” he chuckled, darkly. “You know, for a brief second, I’d thought you actually died. But, I knew, baby. Tiny little bothersome cockroaches are hard to kill, aren’t they?”

  “How…how did you find…”

  His laughter tore at my insides, stabbing sharp razor-like cuts through my ear canals. “A little mishap with unsealed documents. You greedy little bitch, still wanted to be a doctor, in this little tiny redneck town, they sent your new name and social security paperwork to our home, pet. Seems like they didn’t believe you when you tried to prove you were in danger.” Laughing against my skin, his tongue ran the length of my face. “And really, pet, when one is trying to change an identity, you shouldn’t let people twitter thousands of pictures of you in his little economically awesome car.”

  The harsh burn of a needle pierced through my flesh, and quickly spread a strange heat through my veins.

  NO! FUCK NO!

  I could feel the tense sinewy muscles of his arms locking me in, and my stomach convulsed again, heaving nothing but air. “What did you give me,” I choked, gasping for air.

  “No…no…shhh…shhh…my little cockroach. No questions, all I want is too hear you struggle, Sam. All I want to do is watch you suffer, now.”

  His hands moved quickly, in a blur, fisting and tangling into my hair and dragging me onto the filthy mattress. The brutal pull of the strands burn and tear my eyes, as I fall hard against the coiled spring and metal that poke out from the top of the bed. They scrapped and scratched into my s
kin, biting burns and stinging flesh.

  He turned his back and began to unbuckle his belt.

  And for a minute, I seriously surrendered.

  Fuck this shit, you win. I’m done.

  But then, my mind fills with Kade.

  My gorgeous, dangerous, Kade, who had survived a massacre by the hands of his best friend when he was just sixteen. David had taken everything away from me. The perfect marriage I thought I’d had. My Dignity. My career. My identity. My freedom. My family. But I can’t let him take me from Kade. I can’t let him hurt Kade.

  Cautiously, I slid my body against the wall, slowly, inch by inch. Instantly, he’s in front of me, his hands closed, clenched into a tight fist, slamming into the wet drywall, so close to the side of my face I could smell his skin. “You can’t leave, pet. I haven’t run out of uses for you yet,” he whispered.

  I didn’t flinch. I would not let ANYONE try to terrorize me with their fists. I will not let him hurt me without a hell of a fight. Underestimate me, go ahead. I needed an opening; I needed a clean, clear strike. I needed patience, but the edge of my vision was darkening, and my limbs weren’t responding to my brain. I moved sluggish and awkwardly. Whatever he’d given me, was some sort of paralyzing agent.

  “You’re not going to get out of this alive, Sam, unless you tell me where the money is. When you tell me, then we can negotiate your life.” He stepped back. “You don't have to bruise the skin or break the marrow to hurt someone. Oh, but I so want to. To bruise your skin. Your perfect skin, with your perfect mind, with your wild and carefree ways, you're like a wild rare little flower, and I want to rip off your pretty little petals.”

  I wipe the tears and mucus from my face with a slow heavy hand. I’m standing in a pool of my own vomit, as I slowly slid down, not able to hold my own weight. My body felt broken and covered with a thick blanket of weight. I find myself wishing this were just a movie. The end of a scene, where the audience thinks the heroine is just about to succumb to her terrorist. However, movies and books don’t usually end that way. The gorgeous hulking alpha male comes charging in just in time, and she doesn’t end up taking her last wet gurgled breath, bleeding out into her own bile. But, this isn’t some dramatic scene in a movie, is it? It’s real, and it won’t end pretty.