Chapter 5

The way the sweats were stretched tight across her groin hinted at the contours of her soft lower lips. He had seen her naked all night, he had seen her fucked every which way, and it hadn’t affected him the way seeing her bound in this submissive pose was affecting him now. He felt a definite stirring in his loins when the view was combined with sound of her teary plea.

He violently shook his head and abruptly left the room wondering what was coming over him. He went to the kitchen to let her stew for a bit as he tried to get a grip on himself. He leaned against the counter and took a deep breath before he grabbed the Chef’s knife from the wooden block and headed back to the weight room. He leaned against the doorframe and looked at her face as she whipped her head around at the sound of his return. He kept the knife hidden behind his back for the moment.

“Believe it or not, you were dead or near dead. And something ... something brought you back and healed you. Look, your bruises are nowhere near what they should look like. Nobody heals that fast on their own. And your throat. You were strangled and your windpipe nearly crushed. That slimy fucker was not a weak man. Yet here you are, breathing and talking no worse for the wear.”

He shook his head. “Something is going on and I’m going to find out just exactly what.” He said as he advanced with knife at ready, the wickedly sharp edge glinting under the room’s bright lighting.

Echo watched something in his eyes change right before he left the room. A subtle shift, but it spoke to her instincts on a visceral level and it quieted her. Because a rabbit goes still and quiet if it thinks a predator can see it. It wants to blend in with the snow, the grass, the little willows, and sometimes it seems to forget that it’s a rabbit at all. It just becomes part of the landscape.

Echo couldn’t hide here, though. She couldn’t even run or fight. All she had were her words, and when her captor returned, fed her lies about dying as IF he could mess her head up anymore, then came forward with the big, silver knife, those words of hers seemed useless.

So instead she took to screaming furiously. “AAAAAHHHHHH! NO! NOOO!” She screamed to break his eardrums, to shatter glass, to wake the dead. The fear itself blossoming inside of her body felt like a living entity, a painful one that lit her nerves on fire with horrible anticipation.

Jason flinched and attempted to cover his ears at the piercing sound of her shrill screams with partial success. It felt like she was tap dancing in high heels right on his eardrums. Working on instinct, he rushed to her face and slapped his free hand over her open mouth. Thankfully, the agonizing sound immediately changed into a relatively muffled one. The sonic vibrations radiated down his forearm in an oddly ticklish sort of way. He clenched his jaw and gave her a hard look as she still continued to ineffectively scream.

He leaned into her ear and growled, “Shut. Up. Before I just ram this shirt down your throat.”

In a slow and deliberate motion he placed the knife edge side up at the base of her neck, right against her spine. The cold steel pressed against her flesh, a very physical reminder of what set off her initial panic. His careful motions underscored his intent to not prematurely cut her. In a smooth fluid motion, he ran the ultra-sharp knife down her spine and parted cloth like it was warm butter. Two more deft cuts along the shoulders, the T-shirt was now just a useless scrap of cloth acting as a barrier between her skin and the PVC material of the bench. Savagely he ripped the ruined shirt from underneath her quivering body and balled it into his fist.

Echo thought he was going to kill her with that thing. Her fear of the knife in his hand was all that dominated her mind. She dreaded the pain, but more than that, she dreaded the permanence of the kinds of injuries a blade like that could inflict. Even if he didn’t kill her, would she ever be the same?

She could taste the salt on his skin once his palm muzzled her, and that made her feel ... reduced, for some reason. The expression of her fear, the screaming, was inadequate now. If she was going to die a violent, horrible death, she didn’t want to be quiet. Other insane, fleeting thoughts rode out in her mind. If she bit his palm, would that stop him, or make this worse? Could she pull her hands right through the handcuffs? But if she managed to do that, wouldn’t her hands be useless?

Screams reduced to panicked whimpers as she felt the blade against her skin, then heard it shearing through the fabric of his t-shirt that she wore. She worried her head left and right, trying to shake his hand from her mouth so she could beg, plead, scream some more, but as soon as that cool air hit her back, she locked up. “Mmnn-mnnhhh!” she cried against his palm.

Her shivering torso was in plain view now, the sides of her ribs moving in and out rapidly. The bruises along her shoulder-blades were darker now. They looked painful. Tender to the touch, most likely.