A loud scream echoes through the speakers. Something familiar tingles at the back of my brain. Tears blur my eyes, but I open them, and for a minute, I’m not sure what I’m looking at.
Woods?
My vision swims, but I can make out tall pine trees and gnarled branches. Daylight streams through the canopyoverhead. In the distance, a large wooden building appears, but then the camera pans out and drops, moving in quickly like whoever is recording is too excited to stand still.
“Let me see.”My blood chills when I hear his voice. I heard it so many times when I was younger, muffled by the closet door.
“Watch,” Rune grates out.
The camera turns upright, and bright sky and emerald green leaves fill the screen, but then it adjusts and centers on two forms, blurring for a moment then focusing.
Two figures I recognize.
“No,” I breathe, frozen, unable to look away.
NO. NO. NO.
“This is what happens when you betray me.” Rune’s voice is far away, barely threading into my thoughts.
The camera zooms in more, capturing the scene fully, then pans over the two bodies tangled together on the forest floor.
Rune. But younger.
Fifteen years, to be exact.
Rune’s jerky strokes match the brutal pumps of the younger version of him. The one driving wildly into the body beneath him, the camera catching every horrid detail. The dirt on his clothes. The pale gleam of her skin as she claws at his bare back. The red hair fanning out over the forest floor, no longer vibrant like mine, but matted and dirty.
The camera swings, and then her face comes into view. I shake my head, my hand flying to my mouth to keep in my scream.
The camera zooms in on the knife, held brutally against pale skin. A thin trail of blood leaks to the ground.
When the knife digs deeper, sliding across her neck, she screams.
Wet heat hits my face.
I shove back, my ass slipping from the chair. I hit the floor. Her scream cuts off. Turns garbled and wet. I scramble backward, swiping Rune’s cum from my cheek, trying to get as far away from him as possible.
Away from the sick video and his throaty laugh.
My heel slips as I stand, and I catch myself on the edge of the desk. I don’t hear what he says. Barely see as I run from the room. There’s just noise in my head mixed with her garbled choking and his mocking laugh. I choke on a sob, then fling the door open.
Cool night air hits my face, and I rush down the stairs, the concrete drive scraping my bare feet.
My hands clamp down over my ears, trying to block out the sound, but it’s all I hear. Hear her screaming so loud, I feel it in my own throat, ripping out of me raw.
Rune killed my mother.
He slit her throat as he raped her. The day she went to his lodge, excited and energized. The last day I ever saw her. One of the few days she was ever nice to me.
He killed her for calling a hit out on his wife.
And he had Zane record it.
Chapter 56
Viper
15 years ago, September, Age 17
