Page 73 of Promise of Destruction (Destruction & Vengeance Duet #1)

sixty-eight

Declan

Panic sparked in her eyes when I told her I was going to break her more, but I'm not sure what she was imagining I meant when I said it. Whips and chains and pain? BDSM isn't my thing.

I don't care what people choose to do in their own bedroom, but there's too much control sharing in BDSM practices, too intimate a knowledge for your partner.

Too much trust, too much need for a strong foundation.

I fuck whoever makes my cock jump, usually.

It makes for quick interactions, no foundation to build upon.

And it works for me. I don't like whips and chains, anyway.

Not only because they remind me of my benefactors, but because I prefer to cause pain and pleasure with my own hands, my own body.

When I walk out, the panic burns brighter.

"Declan, wait!" She calls out after me, but her words glance off my shoulder, falling on deaf ears.

I can hear her struggling, hear the headboard rattle against the wall as she tries to pull her hands free of the leather, as she tries to pull the belt free from the bedpost. She's not getting out of that; she's too weak to even try for long.

The IV the doctor gave her earlier can only do so much.

Two cups of coffee may have helped to keep her from jetlag, but the crackers she nibbled on the plane aren't going to sustain her for long.

She's going to pass out soon, from exhaustion, from physical exertion, from mental fatigue, from lack of real food. It will serve as a factory reset, I hope, when she wakes up with another needle in her arm.

Her screams follow me through the guesthouse as I peruse the space, judging Remington Boudreaux's accommodations.

The refrigerator is stocked with fruit, cheese, and bottles of water.

I help myself to a bowl of pineapple chunks and sink into a leather chair in the sitting room, kicking my feet out onto the coffee table.

I sigh, taking my phone from the waistband of my boxers, which I slipped back on just before I left Soren tied up in the bedroom.

I discard it on the stand beside me and open my laptop.

Her screams are incessant, a beautiful melody as I listen to her submitting to exactly what I wanted.

I don't know if she thinks I'm going to come back with a knife and carve her up like some sort of sculpture or if she thinks I'm going to leave her to rot.

Either way, she turns from screaming for me to pleading for help from anyone, from the universe, to whatever god has forsaken her for so long.

I don't go out of my way to hide the fact that I'm there, but I don't bother turning the TV on to drown out her screams. I saw how secluded we are from civilization when Dimitri drove us out here.

He and the housekeeper are gone, and the large estate seems to be empty.

I know there's no one around for miles to hear her scream, so I let her knock herself out— literally.

Her screams turn at some point to sobs, and then eventually she quiets, her throat giving out on her.

A short time later, I'm confident she's crashed entirely, but I stay situated while I review the information that I know about her.

The doctor sent me her medical records earlier, and I'd been waiting on the results from the bloodwork they ran. Doctor Kent got me her file when it became clear that the OB wasn’t going to give me anything.

She’d watched me warily at Soren’s appointment, and I know what she thought of me.

That I was her pimp, her captor, her nightmare. She’s right on one of those counts.

The files were sent hours ago, but this is the first I've had a chance to sit and review them. And what I see isn't a surprise.

Kent did me the courtesy of breaking down the medical jargon, sending me a succinct summary at the end after I’ve sifted through charts and numbers, red and green lines that look like stock market analyses.

Anemic, possibly due to malnutrition. Suspected eating disorder, anorexia nervosa as suggested by total blood count. Blood sugar was low, blood pressure was low. No presence of any disease, including STDs. Suspected dehydration, evidenced by shrunken veins.

I’m not shocked by any of it. She hasn’t taken care of herself, and her blood work confirmed that.

I’ve also never seen her drink a glass of water despite the first time I watched her get one from the sink in her kitchen.

She always seems intent on drying herself out with copious amounts of coffee…

caffeine which could be dangerous with an irregular heartbeat.

Her file doesn’t state that, but I saw how the doctor scrunched her face up when she was listening to Soren’s chest, how she moved on and then came back to check it a moment later.

If Soren can’t take care of herself, I’ll have to do it for her. I’m not letting her go and get sick because she’s got some weird hang ups about basic healthcare. I know she isn’t a fan of doctors —she sure as hell doesn’t want to be hospitalized because she neglected herself.

Closing the tab with her medical assessment, I navigate back to the scene that made her pissed off at me. The photos of her husband. There are so many of them. This man didn’t just step out on her for an affair with a secretary—he’s a serial cheater.

Photos of him with blondes and brunettes and redheads, women with their heads shaved or women with blue hair. Women being subject to the whips and chains, tied with thick rope in uncomfortable positions.

Did he use those things on her? Did he tie her up with ropes like that, the mother of his child, and bend and twist her into different shapes so that he could fuck her from odd angles?

Did he hit her with that riding crop he seems to have used to mark other women?

Did he shock her with the stun gun he's holding in a couple of the stills?

Make her wear a leather hood while he pounded her from behind over their sofa like some of the women are wearing?

Did he pretend she was someone different while he did these things to her?

My blood boils as I view the photos. Vincent D'Anerio had a perfect wife, a beautiful, precious thing that he left unattended so he could go fuck other women.

But as I scroll, my anger turns to suspicion.

Suspicion turns slowly to rage as I realize the truth of these photos.

Because Vincent D'Anerio didn’t just forsake his wife for the opportunity to live out his kinks with extramarital affairs.

The angles of many of the photos left faces obscured when I first looked, but now that I see them, I realize something awful.

The looks on their faces. The pain. The fear.

It’s too genuine, without a trace of pleasure.

I don't think his partners in these photos were willing.

In fact, when I reach ones where the women seem to be on the verge of collapse, where his hands around their throats are tight and the color is gone from their faces, I’m sure they weren’t.

Disgusted, I close out of the tab, getting rid of the images that are now going to haunt me.

I knew Tony D'Anerio was a thug, so I hadn't had high hopes for his nephew to be an upstanding gentleman. But I also didn't expect him to be involved in... this .

When I met Jonathan Boudreaux at the bequest of my best friend and college roommate, I didn't like the man.

It doesn't take a psychic to see that everything about the man was sinister, despite his polished and refined look and the easy-going smile he'd learned to perfect.

And when I learned what sort of things he was into, I hated him more. I wanted nothing to do with him.

I walked away, even in spite of Wes trying his hardest to make me reconsider.

And I like to think that if my mother had never collapsed, if it hadn't gotten as bad as it did, that I wouldn't have done what I did.

But I did. I sold my soul, right along with my software so that Jonathan could use it to sell women.

.. or rather, to erase from existence the women that he sold.

It's been the source of my shame since the day I did it, but I knew when I created it that it was an invention that would be used to bring pain and suffering to someone somewhere in the world.

I didn't expect it to weigh so heavily on me.

.. it wasn't like I was creating an atom bomb or a nuclear warhead.

It was simply a facial recognition software, cutting edge.

It can analyze footage from any video device anywhere on the earth whether on an encrypted connection and behind firewalls like IDs from the DMV or on some seedy revenge porn site or from a satellite camera a thousand miles away.

Not only can it run all of those photos, but it can also grab them and analyze them for differences, calculate heat signatures, and then search the entire world wide web to bring up any file pertaining to that mark.

And then, with the press of a button and an authorization code, it could delete the entire thing.

.. erase an entire person off the face of the planet.

Or at least, delete their entire digital footprint.

.. yearbook photos, newspaper articles they were mentioned in, court records with their name, social media profiles, even birth certificates.

If it's digital, it can be deleted with the right software.

It seemed like a great tool for our military, and I built it for the purpose of selling it to someone who could use it to identify and prevent terrorism from anywhere in the world.

But when the ink was still wet on the contract I signed, Jonathan asked me to demonstrate the software.

It was an interactive demo... He snapped his fingers and some big thug brought a struggling woman into the bar to watch as I searched her face from the cell phone photo he snapped. I'll never forget her name.

Lily Vanacore's entire life popped up on the screen... her social media pages, her search history, photos of her in a ballet costume dancing on stage. The tape over her mouth didn't allow her to scream, but she tried as she sobbed, seeing her entire life on the computer before her.

I hesitated, and it wasn't Jonathan who pulled the gun on me. It was my own friend... who clearly wasn't a friend after all. He held it to my head and demanded I follow through.

And I did. Like a spineless fucking bitch, I did what he told me to.

I wiped Lily Vanacore off the face of the earth, the little ballerina who was a former child beauty star.

In five minutes, I watched her grow up through a series of photos her doting mother had posted before the tragedy that stole her life.

And in a single minute, I deleted it all.

No sooner had I done it, the big man knocked her out with a blow across the face.

She fell to the ground, and the big brute picked her up and walked away with her.

Jonathan thanked me for my business, left me with the information for the offshore account and my suffocating guilt.

Wes was the one who explained why they did it.

He was the one who explained that I had helped them get away with murder. .. or human trafficking at least.

They didn’t always kill people… killing them was wasteful when they could make money off of them. But I know what fate awaits the people who are erased from the system using the weapon I created. It’s eventual death, and that’s probably a fate kinder than what precedes it.

Soren called me a murderer, and she wasn’t wrong. There’s blood on my hands… rivers of it. It’s why I don’t sleep, what keeps me awake for long nights as I contemplate my place on this planet, wondering whether my useless existence warrants the effort of maintaining the illusion.

I grew up on the outskirts of the city, just another poor kid who flew under the radar most of his life, another kid with a single mom just struggling to survive because her husband died fighting someone else’s war.

It wasn’t until toward the end of high school when I started to gather attention because I decided to throw a ball around on a field every Friday night.

Football was a good release for me, physical and exhausting.

I did well, but I wasn’t anything special.

Nobody scouted me, my name didn’t appear in articles or anything.

It’s what made it so easy to disappear when I went to college, to re-invent myself.

I thought I’d reinvent myself into a powerful man, independently wealthy and unassumingly heroic. So fucking na?ve.

When my mother died despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars of experimental treatments and I was left with only a small sum from the initial payment, I chose to invest it in Boulder Tech…

a wise investment that I luckily cashed out just before it hit the public that the CEO was running a prostitution ring.

His demise was my gain, and I used the cash to create Evergreen Industries, filling the hole left in cybersecurity by their demise.

I’d feel bad about slandering him and destroying his company if he didn’t work for thugs like Jonathan Boudreaux. If anything, I did him a kindness by implying that his scheme was anything other than the human slavery it is.

Evergreen Industries is still early on the scene, which is what made Soren’s attack on me in her silly little paper feel especially raw. It’s no different than what I did to Viraj Shah, but the difference is that Shah was a predator.

I’m simply an opportunist.

Soren Palmer put herself in my path… and now that I’ve clipped her wings, she’ll never escape me. It’s hypocritical, and I’m self-aware enough to realize that. But in the last few years of darkness, Soren is a fire that burns bright.

She burns for me … she just hasn’t figured that out yet.