Page 138 of Shattered In Darkness

Brody fucks me like an animal. Like the last man left alive. Kneeling over me, hands on my hips, he pounds into me, driving me down into the cold, the filth, until I don’t know where my body ends and his begins. The angle—it’s deep, merciless. Every thrust slams my back against the dirt, hay scraping my skin, but I want more.

He yanks my legs up, throwing them over his shoulders. My ass barely brushes the ground. I’m exposed, wide open, stretched so full it sparks under my skin. He leans into me, cock drilling in and out, hips snapping.

Grinning down at me, his lips peeled back. “Touch yourself,” he rasps. His voice is rough, straight to the core. “I want you to play with your pussy while I fuck you. Make yourself cum for me.”

My breath shatters. I reach down, fingers shaking, soaked already. I circle my clit, just the way I do when I’m alone and thinking of him. It’s shameful, so dirty, but right now, that’s all I want. He watches. Eyes glued to my cunt, the way my fingers work. He slows, just a second, to grind all the way in so I can feel every fucking inch of him. Too much, almost. I whimper, back arching. My wetness is everywhere, coating him, messy and obscene.

He says it again, slower, voice like the devil. “I want to see you cum. I want you to do it while I’m inside you. Show me. I want all of it, Lola.”

I move faster, filthy circles, pinching, desperate. My body shakes. The world narrows to the burn between my legs and the thick stretch of him pounding into me. Shame and power, tangled up. I’m falling apart.

Looking up, Brody’s eyes are wild, hunger burning through. He’s stroking his cock as he does it, watching just to see how greedy my body can get.

“Fuck, you look perfect,” he hisses. His hand slams my thigh wider. “Keep going. That’s my good girl.”

I’m so close. My cunt tightens, spasms. My breath rattles in my lungs.

I lose it. Every muscle locks, goes stiff, then melts. White heat spins in my skull. I sob out his name, choking on it, my pussy clenching around him. It pulses. Fuck. It clamps so hard around him, I come messy, wet, shaking.

Brody doesn’t slow. He keeps fucking me through it, pounding in, jerking my hips up, forcing me to open wider, take every inch of him.

He pulls out at the end—just at the brink—and finishes himself, grunting, spilling over Marcus’s dead torso. Claiming victory. Planting a flag on the fucked-up ruins of my history.

I sprawl out, dazed, shaking, broken open in the best way. Brody laughs. A dark, vicious sound.

For the first time in years, I feel whole.

We pull on our clothes, hands still shaking, giggling under our breaths. Blood coats everything. Brody wipes his mouth, then he gets to work. He grabs the axe from the wall. In the moonlight, he looks like a myth, a story they tell to scare children.

He hacks Marcus’s body apart. Careful, efficient, messy. Arms, legs, head. He throws the pieces out into the snow, each limb splattering red across the white drifts. The earth soaks it up. The cold devours it. Everything vanishes under the falling flakes.

I watch, eyes dry, feeling the monster inside me finally go quiet.

When he’s done, Brody joins me outside in the storm.

We stand together under the moon. Blue-white, turning the carnage into a painting. We hold each other, arms tight. The world is all blood and bone and endless black.

There’s no sound but the wind. No witnesses but the darkness.

48

BRODY

White sky and black roads. Every mile closer to the city, I can feel my chest getting tighter with something hollowed out, left to rot under the ribcage.

I keep the heater blasting, but my knuckles ache from cold and old bruises. Lola sits next to me, eyes fixed on the horizon.

Snow rattles off the windshield in chunks, gray and wet, smearing the view. The tires shudder over ice at the edge of every intersection. The city skyline appears at first light, all washed out, like something you’d see in the bottom of a cracked TV.

I grip the steering wheel and try to keep myself from looking at her, because if I do, I might crash the fucking car. I know what she means to me, now. Just a pulse in the dark, something worth breaking the world for.

I watch every street, every passing car, every flicker of shadow under the streetlamps. New paranoia, old instinct.

Rubbing my thumb over the back of her hand, she jerks a little, startled. Bruises bloom purple all over my skin. I should care more about the pain, but it’s nothing compared to how her hand feels tucked against mine, like she trusts I’ll come back. Like she needs me here to finish it.

We cross river bridges and four-way stops where the only movement is snow swirling in the gutter.

By the time we pull into Richard’s driveway, the day’s grown grim and merciless. Gray sky, gray house, gray everything. The kind of place you could die in and no one would ever see the body.