Page 59 of The Invite (The Massacre Ball #1)

Nessa

An insistent drilling in my head makes my eyelids feel too heavy to open.

I part my lips to speak but only a hoarse noise comes out.

My throat is parched, mouth dry like I haven’t had a drop of water in so long. I shift but my body protests and I cry out at the unexpected sharp ache. I freeze, realizing my arms are twisted uncomfortably behind my back, but I can’t tell why or who did it.

Despite the headache, I recall last night's events. How can I forget? They were among the most special memories of my life, until now.

What I can’t remember is where things went downhill.

Or how.

Confusion dots my head underneath the pounding.

A sixth sense warns me that in the next few seconds, I’ll be waking up to a nightmare. But I can’t avoid it, nor can I panic. Turning my head, I use my shoulder to scrub my eyes and crack them open.

The surroundings are a blur. Clarity swims in and out of focus.

Am I in… a basement?

A rotten smell permeates the air. Dust collects on the surface while old drain pipes run along the ceiling. I haven’t been here before.

Where am I?

Where’s Johnny?

A scraping noise pierces the deafening silence, followed by a fat rat running past me. My head snaps toward the direction it came from, and I scream, “Ahh!!”

Oh god!

Oh god!

Oh god!

“Johnny,” I choke out, tugging at the restraints. “Johnny!”

One of his eyes is swollen shut, while the other has a gnarly bruise like someone repeatedly punched him.

His head hangs to his chest like he can’t hold it up.

As I look closely past the tears forming in my eyelids, Pain curls tight in my stomach, sharp and relentless, as I notice he’s unconscious and lying naked in a pool of his own dried-up blood.

Helpless, my gaze roams down the rest of him and ugly sobs wreck my soul at the violence inflicted on his limbs. His once beautiful body is now a canvas of black and blue injuries.

Who would want to hurt him? Or me?

Unlike him, I’m in my shirt and pajamas that are caked in dirt with little bruises on my knees.

I can’t even tell if Johnny’s alive. With his palms nailed to the arms and legs tied to the metal chair, it’s hard to tell whether his chest is moving. Oh Lord! Is he missing… fingers?

“Johnny! Please… wake up.”

What kind of heinous animal have we stumbled upon?

Why can’t I remember how he and I ended up her—

No. No. No!

It… it wasn’t yesterday that I was happy.

That… that was FOUR days ago.

Johnny and I have been stuck here ever since.

Bile rises in my throat when the dreadful reality slams into me, making my stomach drop. The drugging, the dragging down the staircase, and the endless torture that followed—it all returns.

I think I passed out when they electrocuted Johnny while making me watch with a gun to my head.

It’s all my fault. I got us into this mess.

A groan yanks me to the present and I sigh in relief that he’s alive. It means there’s hope for us to make it out of here safely.

“Johnny,” I call for him, keeping my voice down so our captors aren’t alerted. I made the mistake of underestimating them before. “Johnny.”

He cranes his neck in my direction. I sob when I see the recognition in his eyes despite his awful state. His mouth opens to speak but instead of a sound, a mixture of blood and saliva spills out.

I almost crumble to the dirty floor as it dawns on me that he can’t talk.

My gaze travels to the right of his chair and nausea builds as I see his cut-out tongue lying on the ground.

I cringe away. Saltiness lands on my taste buds. It takes my muddled brain several seconds to recognize it as my tears, which seem to be unstoppable. They feel welcomed on my parched throat.

“Oh look, both of you are up,” a chirpy voice says, masking the evil underneath. But once you’ve seen the real face of the devil beneath the enchanting, beautiful one, you never forget it. “Good morning, love.”

I lurch away and curl into a ball as another set of footsteps approaches me. Instead of fighting my captors, I become a coward.

“Ahhh!” I cry out when a fist yanks my head up by my hair at the roots.

“Are you ready to end poor Johnny’s misery?” Evil asks in my ear. “Or do you want us to continue? We can bring him to the brink of death again and again until you say yes.”

A loud and excited clap makes me jump in fright.

“What’s it going to be, love?”

A resounding crack fills the air and I turn my head in time to see Johnny groan and cough out more blood. Another mean punch lands on his other eye, causing it to shut. Before he gets hit again, I shout, “Stop!”

“Then do it yourself.”

“Just take the gun and shoot him, love.”

I shake my head but the grip on my hair tightens. I whisper, “No.”

I’m thrown to the floor with a disgusted grunt.

“Wake him up,” Evil says. “Get me the pliers.”

“No… please,” I plead. “Don’t hurt him!”

They don’t listen.

And the next day, I say yes.

***

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry.”

A heavy weight around my waist pins me down.

“No… Let me go!”

The grip only constricts me further, followed by a faint voice.

“Please… no more,” I sob.

“Shh… it’s okay,” the voice consoles.

“I did what you said.”

“Open your eyes, Ness.”

What? Who’s that?

A warm hand curls over mine, lacing their fingers with my clammy ones. “Come back, honey.”

The soft and commanding voice penetrates through the fog like a knife.

With a cry, I jerk awake.

My heart jackhammers behind my ribs and I gulp in deep breaths. My whole body is covered in sweat. As I blink back the haziness from my eyes, I glance at my surroundings and the panic doubles when I find myself in an unknown room.

I can tell it belongs to a man from the dark undertones and masculine vibes.

A movement along my arm cuts through my inspection, causing my head to snap toward it. The inked wrist I know all too well banishes the memories of the previous hour leading to the moment I submerged into darkness.

Augustus.

I feel his body heat and quiet intensity behind my back. It calms me down immediately and eases Evil’s shadow enveloping me.

Did he bring me to his place?

Under the dim lights, I study the large room encased with new eyes, taking in the high ceilings with the walls painted in a light gray shade. Random knickknacks are thrown on a low coffee table with a dark red beanbag chair in front of it.

Right across the king-sized bed is a luxurious fireplace with a plasma screen TV mounted high above it. It looks like a room well lived in, unlike my place which has the gloom of a graveyard.

What if his mother or sister catches us?

Ever so slowly, I turn around once my breathing has calmed down. When Augustus’s face comes into view, I forget about my worries. His eyes—always so menacing—are unreadable for the first time.

I’m scared to learn what’s going on behind them.

I take in the rest of him. He’s shirtless and wearing low-hanging black sweats. The softness against my skin and his strong scent in my nostrils tell me I’m in one of his hoodies.

How long was I out?

When he continues holding and watching me, I break the tense silence by whispering, “August.”

“You blacked out on me again, Nessa.” His tone is raw and bleeding as he grits out, “And on top of that, I find out your night terrors isn’t a one-time thing.”

I nod at his statement, unable to keep up my defenses. Strangely or maybe foolishly, I don’t want to hold them up. I’m just so tired.

As I shudder from an aftershock, Augustus grabs the blanket lying at our feet and tugs it over us. Sliding an arm underneath my head, he looms over me, and asks in a concerned tone, “Tonight wasn’t the first time, was it?”

I have them every now and then. However, there was a time when I had them every night. In a broken whisper, I confirm to him, “No.”

A crushing pain tightens at the corners of his eyes. Inhaling deeply, he collects himself, but it doesn’t work because he angrily barks, “I hate that I can’t protect you from the demons in your head.”

“You do, August.” He stills. Caressing the snake slithering up his arm, I softly smile at him. “When I’m with you, you become my entire focus. There’s no room for anyone else, especially not my demons.”

The helplessness bleeds from his gaze. Once again, he amazes me with his tenderness by pressing a kiss to my forehead.

“What was it that triggered you?” he prompts.

“The basement.”

I avoid them at all costs. Finding myself in one without a heads-up just made me slip into the past. Hallucinations were a common occurrence after the tragedy I went through.

It took years of therapy and medication before I healed enough to live without depending on the meds.

Nevertheless, certain triggers can never be fixed.

You’re not scared of knives anymore.

“Tell me who hurt you, Nessa,” he softly demands. “Let me in.”

I can sense his struggle to keep his wrath at bay and I haven’t even begun to tell him the harrowing tale.

“My boyfriend and I were kidnapped when I was sixteen.” Augustus’s entire body goes rigid. His eyes go round, and that’s before I shatter his illusion of thinking I’m so innocent. “And I had to kill him to survive.”

A lone tear leaks out of my eye as I relive the night as if it were yesterday.

Augustus recovers fast at the sight of my pain and wipes the saltiness away.

He stays quiet as I bare the ugliest and murderous side of me.

I was no better than my remorseless captors.

If I close my eyes, I can still hear their victorious and cackling laughter when I gave in to their wretched demand.

In the end, they got what they desired.

Turning me into a soulless killer.

Lying down, Augustus twists and cradles me into his warmth. His strength seeps into my pores and I tell him everything.