Page 16 of Karma (Deranged Drifters MC #23)

Chapter Sixteen

Griffin’s Beach Lex

I could scream. Maybe someone’s close enough to hear me. But I can’t see any other houses around. All it’ll do is give myself away. Fuck, I can’t outrun bullets. Think, Alexis. Think!

“AL-EX-IS!” Phillip shouts. “That wasn’t nice!”

How in the world is Lex going to get out of this? There has to be a way. There’s always a way. She had a sadistic mobster ex-fiancé. She took on a car. Has been kidnapped more than once. Tortured. Beaten. Almost died. There. Is. Always. A. Way.

Just as Lex plans to move to another tree, a large hand grips her arm and yanks her back into the clearing towards a house in such disarray it’s barely standing.

Of course, my serial killer half-brother would have the stealth of a horror movie villain.

To her left, she sees a shop in decent shape.

That’s where he has at least one wall wallpapered with my face. Where he’ll do whatever the hell he has planned for me. Whatever it takes, do not go in that shop.

Blood drips from his forehead, and Lex swears his eyes have turned completely black again. Just like the day he walked into her house and sat at her kitchen table.

She’s seen bad before. She’s seen terrible. But Phillip? He is pure evil.

How did Nina find this place? And where the fuck am I?

Her back scrapes on the gravel when her feet trip from underneath her, and she tries to swing, hoping to hit him somewhere that will force him to release her. Maybe the back or the gut. But, like the typical villain, he grabs the tire iron and uses it to help toss her in front of him.

She lands on her back, forced to release her weapon, and she fights the panic as the wind gets knocked out of her. Feeling like she’s drowning on top of what is surely inevitable death nearly paralyzes her.

“Don’t worry,” he calls as he walks over to her. “We’re not dying out here.”

Gasping for breath, she wants to scream at him as he bends over her. His figure blocks out the sun, and blood drips onto her chest from his forehead. She expects it to burn her. It has to be pure poison that runs through his veins, right?’

“Oh, sorry. I forgot you didn’t grow up here. Zane knows his place, though.”

Picking her up, he holds her tightly against his body, one arm around her waist while his other hand firmly holds onto her hair. She finally catches her breath but has no leverage to fight him off in this position.

“You see that spot right there?” he asks, turning them to a spot next to the metal shop. “That’s where I’d hide and watch the comings and goings of our father. How I learned his routine. It’s also where I’d wait for Zane to run around to talk to him.”

There’s no reason to tell me any of this. He’s definitely going to kill me.

“And this house,” he says, whipping them back to face the dilapidated structure that looks like it may have been painted blue once upon a time, “is where I helped kill Zane’s mother.”

“Margaret,” Lex says. “She has a name.”

“She’s a bitch who had to die,” Phillip says, and yanks her hair painfully. “He didn’t deserve to be happy after leaving my mom and me.”

He tosses her to the ground, and she lands on her side. She’s thankful she doesn’t lose her breath again, and she pushes onto her back to see him straight on. The gun isn’t in his hand, and she glances over to see it lying on the ground beneath the car still. Right where he dropped it.

That’s my out. I have to get to that gun.

Kicking her legs out once he’s close enough to her, she trips him, and he falls onto the dirt beside her. Scrambling to her feet, she moves towards the car. All she needs to do is reach the back of the car, and she can save herself. She can kill him and drive back home.

His long arm reaches out and grabs her foot, pulling her back hard enough that she falls forward, landing on her stomach. Her cheek scrapes on the small pebbles and rocks beneath her, and she feels the warmth of blood.

“You are a fighter,” Phillip says and laughs. Flipping her over, he straddles her and smiles. “I have to say, we have a lot more in common than I ever expected. I wouldn’t make it easy for me, either.” He bends down to whisper in her ear. “It wouldn’t be fun if you didn’t fight me.”

The way he looks at her when he sits back up fills her with more fear than she’s ever felt before.

If given a choice, she’d rather be tied up in that basement with Scarface again.

At least she knew she had a chance of being rescued.

Here, she’s out in the middle of nowhere with a psychopath who seems to be getting off on the fight she puts up.

The Slashers didn’t scare her nearly as much as Phillip does. They seemed human no matter how much they hurt her. But Phillip? He has a void in his eyes she’s only ever read about. He’s the type of person who only feels when he hurts someone.

Someone like him becomes desperate to feel anything, especially when he experiences the pleasure from inflicting terror and pain on another living thing.

It becomes a high, and it’s a craving he can’t quit.

But just like all drugs, each kill needs to top the last to give him what he seeks. He builds up a tolerance.

He punches her, and she sees stars. His other fist hits her side, and they repeat in succession as she tries to deflect and stop him. It only fuels him, and she reaches up to claw his neck and face, drawing blood as she collects his DNA under her fingernails.

Please let me fall unconscious. And stay unconscious. I don’t want to know what he’s doing to me. Not like how I remember the torture in the basement in Black Valley.

The blows suddenly stop, and he climbs off Lex.

It surprises her, and she tries to get to her feet to crawl back towards the car.

Thoughts of the gun disappear as she focuses on getting in the car and driving away.

Or running him over. Maybe both. But she’s stopped when his boot kicks her ribs hard enough that she flies a few feet and lands on her side with a horrifying crack.

All she can do right now is curl up to protect herself from another blow. Her hand feels along her side, checking to see if that crack was a full break. At least one rib is broken, and it hurts to breathe in.

“I’d say you shouldn’t get in the way of my plans, Alexis,” Phillip says and walks away from her. “It makes it that much worse for you, but I fucking love it. It’s so much more exciting for me. So far, you’re even feistier than Nina was.”

Walking away from her confuses Lex. He continues for a few more yards before turning around to run at her in a full sprint. He’s going to break as many bones as he can before he takes her into the torture dungeon.

She flips onto her backside, and she lifts her leg when he’s too close to stop. He’s not the only one who can use his momentum to inflict pain, and she has a sense of satisfaction when her heel digs into the soft flesh of his balls.

Hands cupping his junk, Phillip falls to the ground, coughing and groaning. But when she turns to look at him, she’s terrified. He stares at her and smiles.

This sick fuck doesn’t just like others being in pain. He gets off on feeling it himself, too.

She knows he won’t stay down for long, and she also knows she can’t make it to the car. Not with her rib broken. She needs another plan. If he yanks her down when she runs again, the fight will be over, and she isn’t ready to be done yet.

Desperately looking around, she finds a rock bigger than her fist, and she crawls to the dead grass to grab it.

The pain in her side disappears as her adrenaline kicks in when he crawls towards her like a predator laying low before jumping on its prey.

Which is exactly the roles they play. Predator and prey.

Lex swings the rock up and hits him in the face as he pounces on her. He falls to the side, and she takes control. Getting up, she smashes it down onto his face, breaking his nose as blood splatters. Over and over again, she continues to hit him, hoping he’ll fall unconscious soon.

Phillip reaches out and grabs her wrist, squeezing and breaking it, forcing her to drop the rock as she cries out. Taking hold of her, he lifts his foot to her chest and tosses her backwards hard enough that her head bounces on the ground when she lands.

The evil grin appears again, made even creepier with his teeth and face covered in blood, and he says, “Oh, I am really going to enjoy killing you. I haven’t had this much fun yet, and even though you’re my sister, I gotta say… I’m so fucking hard. See what you’ve done to me?”

Her entire body refuses to move no matter how much she screams to, and she can’t ignore the arousal in his jeans.

Bile rises in her throat as he jumps on her, straddling her chest, and he grips her head with both hands on either side.

She can’t even raise a hand to stop him before he begins lifting her head towards him and slamming it onto the ground. And again. And again.

He releases her, that sick, bloody smile on his face again, and he lifts his fist up. She’s able to move her head as he slams it down, and he punches the ground beside her. A grotesque crunch sounds as he breaks his knuckles on the hard ground.

“Bitch!” he shouts, but it’s not anger. It’s excitement in his tone.

Phillip punches her with his other hand, and her cheekbone cracks. Consciousness barely hangs on by a thread, and she has no more fight left in her. Even as her four kids pop into her mind, she can’t stop him. She’s done. This is the fight that finally takes her out of this world.

“I never fucked any of my victims before, but you keep changing my plans. The others were so unclean, so I’d just jerk off next to them when I got hard. But you? I think we’re meant to be, Alexis.”

“Fuck. Off.”

Smirking, he punches her, and her head turns to the left and stays there. “Oh, I believe we will.”

Everything about him sickens her, but Lex is completely helpless. All she can do is brace herself for another blow, praying it’s his fist that hits her rather than Phillip touching her with any other body part.

She squeezes her eyes closed, prepared for the hit, but she’s tossed to the side, cursing internally as the other side of her face scrapes against rocks that feel like shards of glass. All she can think about in that moment is who the hell would have rocks this sharp.

Opening her eyes to see what the hell happened, Lex sees a large shadow on top of Phillip. No, not a shadow. It comes into focus, and she recognizes Undertaker.

Where the hell did he come from?

“You sick fuck!” Undertaker shouts as he straddles Phillip just as Phillip did to Lex moments earlier. His fists rain down on his face. “Who’s the bitch now, motherfucker?”

A shadow falls over Lex, and she wants to cover her head to brace for another hit or kick. She wants to, but she can’t move more than her eyes. It sounds like a voice calls her name from a distance, but as she finally settles on the person blocking the sun from her face, she’s shocked.

Her brother stands over her with a worried expression on his face. The other one.

Damn, Zane and Phillip really do look alike.