He cinched the leather pieces around my wrists and ankles.
I was tied to a massive wooden torture device.
He reached into his trouser pocket to remove a butterfly knife. His white silk shirt was stained with gore. I wasn’t sure if it was mine or the recently deceased Bruno. The coppery tang of blood stung my nose and the back of my throat. It was a familiar scent from the operating room.
This was different.
Dante took the knife and slit my shirt, cutting it off me completely. My breasts were bare to him, but he didn’t even spare them a glance. With a few flicks of his wrist, he then sliced off my jeans, leaving me in my underwear and boots.
“You’re not just a smart doctor, are you?” Dante asked, grinning. “I know what he feels when he looks at you…”
His finger danced across my collar bone before sliding down my sternum.
“I’m a collector,” he said. “A collector of hearts. I enjoy looking at the physical organs of people I’ve tortured. It’s such a lovely reminder of the fact that no matter how much they want to die, their hearts betray them and beat on, pumping life through their veins against their will in the worst moments of their existence. Is there anything more beautiful than betrayal? I don’t think so. I have several hearts in jars on my mantle. Butyourheart…is better left inside your chest.”
I was nearly naked, strapped to a torture device incapable of escape. I’d been vulnerable before with my wrists strapped to a table, but this was different.
This would be another violation. A different sort of sick pleasure he was about to partake in.
I wasn’t strong enough to look him in the eyes while he raped me.
I closed my eyes and waited for the sound of his zipper.
It never came.
When I heard his footsteps retreat, I cracked my eye lids open. He’d walked to the iron gate and was holding out his hand.
Someone handed him a branding iron, the end it of it angry and red, sizzling and popping as dust from the air lit on fire upon meeting the metal.
Dante turned to look at me.
His steps were slow, like the steady beat of a war drum.
“I’m not going to kill you, Princess,” he said softly. “Alejandro doesn’t want that. No. I’m going to send you back to your boyfriend broken and branded. Tell them, Princess. Tell them all that you’re only the beginning if they ever cross Alejandro Garcia again.”
He pressed the branding iron to the skin above my left hipbone.
I smelled my own burning flesh.
My screams mingled with his laughter.
In the distance, I heard the caw of a crow.
I wasn’t dead.
I just wished I was.
* * *
Time ceased to have all meaning.
The burning of my flesh accomplished what the breaking of my hands hadn’t. It fractured a piece inside my mind. It split my psyche apart, searing Dante’s image within me forever.
Dante had infected my mind. He’d taken up residence there. The smell of sandalwood cologne on his skin mixed with the scent of my charred flesh would stay with me.
I screamed until my throat was raw.
I hung on the massive wooden frame like a scarecrow in a cornfield.