Dark Truths: Kiss Her Goodbye #2 Read online

  Dark Truths

  Kiss Her Goodbye #2

  Rebecca Royce

  Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Royce

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Other books by Rebecca Royce…

  Foreword

  Dearest Reader,

  In Hard Truths, I asked you to take a walk through the darkness with me and give me three books to find the light, to find the happy ever after. I warned you that the heroine, Everly, would have to go through a lot of pain before she found her happiness and that the path to her happily ever after would be messy. I remind you of that again. This is Everly and The Letters. It was never going to be easy.

  This is book two. This is what happens next.

  Thank you for reading Dark Truths, and I’ll see you on the other side.

  RR

  Preface

  “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

  ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Chapter 1

  I was an ant he waited to squash. Upstairs, the sounds of the next batch of torture being set up caught my ears. The squeaking of moving furniture, the random echo of a man’s laugh somewhere in the distance, 1970s disco blaring from the kitchen. In the six months—I was pretty sure it was that long, although I couldn’t exactly tell—that I’d been here, mostly trapped in his dungeon, he told me again and again he would someday squash me.

  It wasn’t lip service. He would squash me. I was nothing.

  Shivering was a strange action. Like an orgasm, it was a loss of control of my own body. Or a sneeze. A cough. Funny, my mind had gone to sex first. Since the moment I’d discovered sex, I’d been obsessed with it. Even in my current condition, shivering on the floor of a basement with a bag over my head, devoid of light, with only the sounds of this hellhole around me, I still thought about pleasure. Not that I deserved to think about pleasure. I was nothing. An ant.

  Then again what was I supposed to think about? Even ants had to think about something. Didn’t they? I had nothing to occupy my time or my thoughts when I was alone. No light. No conversation. No touch except for pain. Why shouldn’t I dwell on better times? On the feel of a man’s cock inside my pussy, bringing me to completion, maybe more than once. Not that I’d had many experiences like that in my twenty-two years. I was pretty sure I was still that age. It might have been that enough time passed that I was twenty-three now.

  Happy fucking birthday to me. Not that I had a birthday. Ants didn’t have birthdays. I didn’t think. Maybe they did in cartoon movies. To me it was more like birth, preparing to be squashed, dead.

  The dungeon door creaked open, and I quit breathing for a second. In however long I’d been in this place, I’d come to identify the different gaits of the people who hurt me. I’d read once that a baby could tell the sound of his or her mother’s footsteps coming down the hall, that the child knew the difference between Mommy and anyone else.

  I’d picked the skill back up. Only it wasn’t my mother I heard—my dead mom, whom my father killed, wouldn’t be wandering down the hall—but instead it was Benjamin Gray, my captor who held me here until he was done with me. I was payment for a man named Judson Smythe’s seat on the Alliance council. As I’d learned in my months here, it was traditional to give over a daughter of the Alliance as sacrifice to satisfy a debt. As my father owed The Letters a debt, Judson—J—and the others had seen no problem in kidnapping me from where I went to college, keeping me with them with the pretense of eventually letting me go while they also screwed with my head and let me think that they liked me. Three of them had been my lovers.

  Not that I could regret that. They’d been super-hot and brought me incredible pleasure, the likes of which I’d not known. All of that aside, I hated all five of them with a passion. Or I would if I had any passion left. I was an ant, and ants didn’t have passions.

  The five Letters. For weeks I’d believed there had to be a mistake and they’d come rescue me. Derrick—D—with his wounded eyes, sad past, and spoken words of devotion. Before he’d retired, he’d been a professional baseball player. I’d seen him kill a person with a bat and I’d envisioned him charging the door to save me, holding only his bat. Yeah, that hadn’t happened.

  Kade—K—who controlled satellites showing him where just about anyone in the world was at any given time thanks to algorithms he invented, hadn’t magically appeared. I kept waiting for him to pop in a la Doctor Who in a blue box and take me out of here with him. Well, obviously that hadn’t happened. The blue box fantasy had been a particularly ridiculous one in a desperate time. I knew that sort of. But my ant brain was small. Sometimes I thought stupid things.

  Trace—T—had been my first lover in the group. He’d killed people in front of me, shot them to death. But he wasn’t my savior. He didn’t come charging in to say he’d never let anyone hurt me again. He had a cruel streak. It was possible he wasn’t even thinking about me anymore. T probably forgot I existed.

  And in the end Warden—W—who’d been kind and sweet to me even as he’d turned out to be the kind of person who wrecked people’s lives by draining their bank accounts, hadn’t destroyed Benjamin financially and demanded I’d been returned.

  Judson—J—hadn’t used his considerable influence in the world to find me, to save me, to demand my release. I was next to nothing to him. Someone he’d probably already forgotten.

  No, The Letters—and that’s all they could be to me now, not the names, not the people I’d mistakenly thought I knew—had left me here to be tortured and die.

  My father had, too. His betrayal, first by killing my mother, and now by not getting me back from The Letters or helping me here, was so raw I couldn’t fathom it. I was lost. I was nothing. And only Benjamin Gray knew what my fate would be now.

  He ripped the hood off my head and stared down at me. “I wondered if you were asleep, Prisoner.”

  That was his name for me, sometimes. It was ant or prisoner. At least I knew where K got his ant references from these days. He hadn’t made it up, he’d just taken it from his fellow Alliance member, Benji-boy. I blinked. Those thoughts only got me in trouble. Ben was really good at reading my thoughts. I was nothing. I was an ant. He didn’t hurt me as much when I remembered that.

  I didn’t respond to his statement. He didn’t want answers from me unless he demanded them. Otherwise it was better if I didn’t speak.

  “Up.” He hauled me by the arm. “The initiates are here. I want you to come upstairs and clean the mess.”

  I still shivered, and Ben tugged me up against him. He liked when I was frightened, hurt, or sick. That was why he delivered so much pain. The longer he kept me in agony the more he enjoyed the experience. He’d never raped me. For that, I could be grateful. Ben didn’t like sex. Not with women or men. He didn’t ev
en like to jerk off.

  I’d listened to him explain this to his six initiates one night when I’d first arrived. He told them all sorts of things before he beat them or had them beat themselves. The activities they had to go through to become Alliance could drive a person crazy. I might have been more sympathetic if I wasn’t also being tortured. At the end of it, I’d be dead, not made a holder of the keys to the world. My sympathy to the six men, who were roughly my age, going through their own hell, could only extend so far.

  The Letters must have endured it themselves. It was at Ben’s hands—he’d told me enough times—that they’d all lost their humanity.

  A cycle of pain.

  “You’re shaking.” He sounded gleeful. I’d learned the various tones of his sick voice. This one was happy. I kept my gaze on the dark ground while he dragged me up the stairs. It wouldn’t help if I tried to walk. In fact, he’d like it less. This was all about power. His over me. “I didn’t beat you that hard yesterday, Ant. I’m wondering if you’re finally wearing out. I might need a new model to replace you. The boys want another seat on the Alliance. They’re not getting mine, that’s for sure. But I might stay out of their way if they hand me over another prisoner to play with you. I must admit, you’ve been fun.”

  The lights from the upstairs in the house blinded me as I left the darkness behind. I held in my gasp. I knew this pain. It would pass. Should I fight back? I had in the beginning, a lot. I’d never been a wilting flower, and I’d been bound and determined to give as good as I got. The problem was that there were seven of them and one of me. Ben let the Initiates take their turns hitting me. Ben himself really didn’t need any help. I was almost six feet tall and I had been strong when I’d gotten here. It didn’t matter. He was stronger. At the end of the day, there wasn’t much I had been able to do.

  I was an ant. I was nothing.

  Yet, sometimes I still forgot. I remembered that I promised myself I could give it one last go. That I could somehow permanently injure Ben, scar him on his face, so that even after I was dead, he would always remember I had gotten that shot in.

  He’d always remember the ant who had bitten him. If he was done with me, maybe it was time.

  “Master Ben,” one of the Initiates spoke. I thought it was the redheaded one. Who knew anymore? They didn’t have names or faces just fists. Of course, if it was the redheaded one, he was the one who didn’t regularly beat me. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to try to avoid it. Ben was so caught up in his power play he hardly seemed to notice. “I think she’s sick. Look at her. When did you last feed her? We can’t continue to use her for Alliance purposes if she’s dead.”

  I closed my eyes. Ben would take that out on me.

  “You’re right, of course. But as I was just telling her, I’m done with her. So we’ll make tonight a goodbye celebration.”

  He shoved me across the floor into the hands of the redheaded Initiate—yes, I’d been right about which one it was—who caught me before I stumbled to the floor. “Clean her up. Then bring her down. You’ll never forget tonight.”

  Tears flooded my eyes. I wouldn’t have thought I had them left. Yet, there they were. In the end, I hadn’t scarred Ben. I hadn’t done anything. I’d wept and been pathetic. Nothing to be remembered. My life… meaningless.

  Redhead walked me carefully away from the group. It had been so long since I’d not been dragged I almost couldn’t make my legs work properly. They shook from disuse or maybe malnutrition. What did it matter?

  When we’d reached the bottom step, he stopped. “Everly.”

  I blinked through my tears. It had been so long since I’d heard that name. That was my name. Yes, it was. That was what I used to answer to.

  “I’m so sorry it took me so long to find my courage. You have to understand, I was raised to be Alliance. It was my right and my destiny. Even with the schism, I believed if I hung on through the training I could take my rightful place. But I cannot tolerate what’s happening to you. So I went to them. I answered the call. And… I wish I could have gotten you out before tonight. Tomorrow would have been better, but it obviously has to be tonight.”

  I didn’t understand. Was this a trick? Did he want me to answer?

  “More things would have been in place tomorrow but tonight will have to do. In the end, even if they’re not the winners, I can’t live with this.”

  I tried to speak and failed. So I tried again. “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. And they’re going to kill me when they see how bad off you are. You weren’t in this bad of shape the last time I saw you. Fuck. It doesn’t matter. Put your arm around my neck and hold on.” He looked over his shoulder. “Do it now, Everly. You have no reason to trust me, and I don’t think you’re really retaining this information. I think… I think… shit, don’t make me knock you out. Just do it.”

  What harm could it do? What else could happen that hadn’t happened? If this was a trick, then so be it. This Initiate had kind eyes. Maybe… maybe I should do it.

  I put my arm around his neck.

  He scooped me up.

  And like his life depended on it, he ran.

  I didn’t know what happened after that.

  It was like my mind just… stopped.

  * * *

  The sounds of beeping machines caught my ears. A long beep, then another one.

  “The IV is out. We need another bag.” A woman’s low voice spoke. “I’m going to change it, but I think she’s waking up.”

  I somehow managed to open my eyes. They felt like they’d been glued shut.

  “Yes,” another female voice answered. “She’s coming to. Everly? Can you hear me?”

  There was that name again. My name. That was twice. Someone else had used it. The redhead. He’d… what had he done?

  I stared at the two people in front of me, knowing I’d never seen them before in my life. They were middle-aged women, each of them with graying hair. One of them was rounder than the other. Those weren’t great descriptions, but it was all my tired mind could muster.

  “I can hear you.” Was this a trick? I was in a white room. It looked like a hospital, sort of. The curtains on the windows—they were lilac; my mind was finally catching up to my surroundings—and the soft-looking petal cushion on the chair next to the mahogany desk gave the impression of it being homier than any hospital I’d ever been in before.

  I had an IV in my arm and sticky monitors on my chest and neck. My throat ached but that wasn’t new. When was the last time something hadn’t ached?

  “Good. Good.” The woman walked over carrying a blood pressure cuff that she quickly put on my arm. The familiar squeeze from past occurrences of medical care barely caught my attention. Where was I for fuck’s sake? Had Ben decided to heal me only to hurt me? No, there was something. The redheaded initiate. I didn’t dare open my mouth and speak. I would answer direct questions nothing more.

  “Still high.” The woman taking my blood pressure looked over her shoulder at the other one. “Call him. You remember the instructions.”

  The plump one nodded quickly before she patted my feet that were poking out from a sheet. It should have been covering me but had scrunched up at the end, revealing my sock covered feet. The room smelled fresh, clean.

  It was like I could take in a few impressions and then I had to stop. Not too much all at once.

  “Well, you’ve given us a scare.” The nurse—I was pretty sure that was what she was—spoke to me again. “When you got here, we weren’t sure you were going to wake up.” She paused, staring down at me. “Nothing to say? Do you know where you are?”

  How could I possibly have known where I was? I risked speaking. It was a direct question, and if she was going to beat me, it didn’t really matter what I did and didn’t do anyway. “No.”

  “No, you have nothing to say, or no, you don’t know where you are?”

  Couldn’t she just take the no for what it was, an answer to both her querie
s? Did we have to be so fucking specific about this?

  “Everly?” A man entered who, like the nurses, I’d never seen before. He was tall, close to my father’s age if I had to guess, and wearing a white lab coat that I usually associated with doctors. There. That was good. I’d made another impression.

  The nurse scowled at me a second before she turned to the doctor. “She’s not really answering much.”

  “She just woke up, and she’s been through trauma. Knowing much more is above your pay grade in this instance. I’ll take it from here. Thank you for watching her.” He nodded at her and she crossed out of the room. The man paused before he spoke again. “I think Jazz is frustrated that she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her patient. Usually, she’s a much more patient nurse. We took away her ability to really treat you by not telling her anything that happened to you.” He walked toward me, grabbing a bag that looked like it should be hooked up to the IV. As I watched, that was just what he did. “Are you hungry? We have some serious antibiotics going through your IV and this is hydrating you. Do you feel like eating?”

  I didn’t understand any of this. “Where am I? Who are you?”

  There, I’d vocalized my questions. He stopped fiddling with my IV and stared at me. “Didn’t I say? My apologies. I’m Garrett Caldwell. I’m a doctor. You’re in my private clinic. When you got here, I ran some scans on you after we got you stabilized. You don’t actually have anything broken. Ben was always great at that, torturing people in a way that left no permanent damage so that he could do it again without having to wait for you to heal. We’re treating a bacterial infection in your lungs. Otherwise, I’m afraid it’s the whip marks on your back and the cigarette burns on your body.” He sighed. “I share one of those sets of scars myself. He does love that whip. Every Initiate gets it, and so it would seem, prisoners he intends to kill. I’d never seen that before. But he wasn’t torturing people other than us during my initiation.”