Louella immediately poured herself a scotch after limping from the car to the house. She’d been used to the point of worrying about her welfare, but they were clearly adept at taking their victims to the brink of injury without really injuring them. Although she’d contemplated joining an underground S&M club, she never quite got around to it. Her little session with Valkyr and his men cured her of all curiosity on that point. It wasn’t for her. She preferred to be the one in charge who was doing what she wanted, when she wanted.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought she’d caught a glimpse of Valkyr’s face when she could finally remove the shirt from her eyes. She could have sworn she saw it transforming from a hideous, distorted looking thing with red eyes to his normal, handsome brown-eyed self. She shook her head as she poured a generous amount of the burning liquid down her throat. She’d clearly imagined it. She had no doubt it was the result of the way she felt at that moment.
She’d had sex with men to get what she wanted constantly, but it was always on her terms. She was never out of control of the situation. She’d heard that Valkyr was bad news, she just didn’t realize how bad because any dealings she’d had before were done through her team of lawyers. Unfortunately, this deal needed to be kept hush hush to the point that she was forced to seek him out herself. Now that she knew the extent of his wickedness, she intended to stay clear of him.
She had no intention of killing anyone in the future. She found it messy and unsettling. In fact, it was the only thing she’d ever done that actually chiseled at her conscience. Or, lack of it. Even so, just to be safe, she decided to make inquiries on the down low for someone else who offered such a service. She never wanted to see Valkyr again.
A sigh of remorse left her as she thought about the reason she’d had to pay such a high price to that undesirable kingpin. If she had followed her aunt when she collected Davina’s things to take to her instead of taking her driver to the guest house for sex that she really didn’t need since she’d just had it with her gross lawyer, she’d have been able to stop her from finding the journal and taking it to her. She really thought she’d hidden it so that no one could find it. What dumb luck that Tillie managed. Even worse, she’d read it and knew the truth.
Killing Tillie had been a spur of the moment decision, but, looking back, Louella could see no other resolution to the problem. She simply couldn’t have anyone freeing her sister and ruining her plans. She could only hope that Tillie hadn’t mentioned it to Maria. She doubted she had, since Maria was touring Tuscany and wasn’t expected back for a few more weeks.
She heaved a sigh. Now she had to go to the institute and pry that journal away from Davina. Why hadn’t she just destroyed it instead of hiding it? Aunt Tillie would still be alive if she had. Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. Well, she couldn’t bring her aunt back, but as for burning the ledger…. as soon as she got it back, she’d rectify that mistake.
She felt terrible about stabbing her aunt to death with a very sharp letter opener, but it was the nearest weapon at the time. It was a horrible, messy, and probably quite painful way to die. She’d made several deep piercings into Tillie’s neck and chest before she managed to jab it into her right eye and ram it into her brain. She recalled what an easy target it made as Tillie stared with eyes wide open from shock and disbelief.
She always had a fondness for Tillie. Remembering her recent method of payment for the cleanup and disposal of her aunt’s body, she decided she’d been punished sufficiently for her deed and shook all guilt from her conscience.
With a sigh of resolution, she poured herself another generous glass of scotch and tossed it back before heading for the shower. She needed to wash away all signs of ever being touched by Valkyr and his goons.
As she lathered her body in the shower, she thought about what happened in his office. It didn’t surprise her to discover the hidden bed in there, but it was strange that he would let his men have her before he took his turn. It was an odd way for a leader to behave, if you asked her.
She’d hoped that they would simply use her for release and then call it good. Instead, they sought pleasure in bringing out sex toys to use on her as well. This was more for Valkyr’s enjoyment, she thought. Perhaps he needed to see all this happening to her to become aroused. She’d heard of men with afflictions like that. It made more sense as to why she’d never been able to manipulate him with the sway of her hips before. He clearly needed much more than that to awaken his desires.
She was extremely put out that none of them used protection, but he cleaned her after each one of them finished with her with a soothing douche that he claimed was filled with a spermicide while insisting that they were all disease free. She mumbled to herself what she’d do to each one of them if anything came of her little encounter as she grabbed a loofa and vigorously scrubbed at her flesh.
She was thankful that she couldn’t see the them during the ordeal. They weren’t repulsive. In fact, they were all quite handsome. Besides, she’d slept with worse for the sake of getting what she wanted. It was only sex, after all. It was just the fact that, although she’d given consent, it was made while under duress. Had the threat of him not helping her not been looming over her, she would have adamantly declined. Not seeing their smug faces helped in emptying her mind. In fact, she was considering getting an eye mask to wear while with Derek. It might make being with him more palatable.
As she stepped from the shower and pulled on her robe, she thought she heard movement in her adjoining bedroom. Tiptoeing to the door, she opened it just far enough to peek into her bedroom. A small gasp left her lips as she stared at the semi-transparent image of her recently murdered aunt. She was walking around the room as if looking for something. Although, Louella couldn’t imagine what that might be.
This wasn’t the first time she’d seen a ghost, so the concept didn’t frighten her. It was mildly unsettling that the ghost happened to be the woman
she’d killed just hours earlier, though.
She quickly wrapped her hair in a towel and stepped into the room. “What are you doing here?”
Tillie wore a stunned look on her face. “You can see me?”
“Why are you here?” Louella repeated.
“I’m not really sure. I woke up dead. Someone killed me, but its fuzzy as to who it was.”
“Seriously?”
“There are men manhandling my body, you know. They’ve put it in a tub and are pouring acid on it. I couldn’t stick around to watch so I closed my eyes and wished myself away. I ended up here.”
“Well, go somewhere else, will you?” Louella barked as she pulled a teddy from her dresser drawer.
“Louella Mitchell! Is that any way to speak to your aunt?”
“I’ve spoken worse to you when you were alive, and you know it,” Louella said as she quickly put on the teddy and then flopped onto the bed. Completely uncaring that she had nothing on her bottom as she stretched across the bed, she reached into the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out the remnants of a joint. Positioning herself on the stack of pillows behind her back, she lit it and took a long, deep hit. Blowing the smoke in her aunt’s direction, she asked, “Can you get high from my second-hand smoke now?”
Tillie laughed. “That would be a hoot, now wouldn’t it?” After a moment, her expression grew more serious. “I wasn’t ready to die, you know. In fact, I
was in the middle of revising my will. Such a shame.”
Louella flicked an ash from the joint off
her chest. “That’s a shame. Who’d you leave your estate to? Did I get anything?”
“I was in such a state of angst after
reading Davina’s journal and realizing what you did that I marched to my lawyer and left everything to Davina to make up for it.”
Louella smiled. “Fortunately, I have power of attorney over all of her affairs.”
“Maybe so, but not this. I made sure that my lawyer maintained that right as long as she was being held prisoner in that vile place,” Tillie hissed. “Why would you do such a thing to your sister? She never killed that boy and you know it. Isn’t it bad enough that he loved her and left her?”
“So, if you’d already made the change, why are you saying you were in the middle of rewriting your will?” Louella asked, ignoring her aunt’s last question.
“I thought better of it,” Tillie said with a sigh. “You were always such a good girl. I was hoping you’d come to your senses and do right by your sister. I was going to change my will back to include you in it.”
Her aunt was a wealthy woman, but Louella’s inheritance superseded Tillie’s wealth; especially when combined with Davina’s. She wasn’t worried about the last-minute change in Tillie’s will. She’d just contest it and get things shifted back. It would take time and money, but it was worth it.
She took a long, last hit on the nub of her joint. “It was super bitchy of you to take me out of your will.”
“And, it was super bitchy of you to kill me,” Tillie hissed in reply.
“Ah, so you do remember.”
“It just came to me. I’m beginning to question which twin is really the bad apple.”
“You always were slow at catching on.”
Davina closed her journal. She’d read through the night as the pages slowly unfolded the events of the year. Very little happened from January to April, other than the continued sightings of the couple on the edge of the forest. She wrote that she was convinced that the couple was the spirits of her parents. She’d never seen a spirit before and had pictured them to be less opaque than the couple she kept seeing. Even so, they had too close a resemblance to her mother and father to be anything but their spirits returned to her. There was also the matter of them disappearing whenever she tried to get close to them. She read the paragraph again.Although I’m convinced that the couple I keep seeing is my parents, I’m a bit frightened by it. I’ve never seen a ghost before and I don’t know as I care to. They were killed in a car crash, but at least they aren’t appearing to me all bashed up lik
When Davina returned to her room a few hours later, she was shocked to find Louella standing in the center of complete disarray. “What have you done?”“Where is it?” Louella huffed.“What are you talking about?” Davina moaned as she raced to salvage journals that were tossed in a way as to damage the binding. “You’ve destroyed my room. Damn, even the bed’s been pulled apart. What’s wrong with you?”“I know Tillie brought it to you. Hand it over,” Louella practically growled.“You need to leave,” Davina said in a tone that caused Louella’s brows to raise in surprise.“For someone who’s locked up in the looney bin by my authority, do you really want to threaten me?”“What difference does it make? You’ll never let me out, anyway,” Davina said vehemently.“True,” Loue
Louella slipped her cell phone back into her handbag and scowled. She’d contacted that mealy Dr. Covington and asked to get her sister moved to another room. She’d hoped that the journal would surface during the shift; especially if she had a small crew packing her sister up who was on the lookout for it. The doctor had adamantly refused to cooperate. Not only that, but he’d chastised her for trashing Davina’s room while lecturing her that her money for Davina’s stay didn’t give her carte blanche with the institute.Since she could think of no other way to root out the journal, she was determined to get her sister moved. Without Dr. Covington’s cooperation, she had no choice than to call in the aid of her lawyers.She’d hoped to pay a visit to Derek’s office to discuss it, but when his secretary put her call through to him, she discovered that he was just leaving a client lu
Davina’s hand flew over her heart as she read the page in her journal that told of her love affair with T. J. Oh, how she wished she’d retained the memories of such a touching moment as what she’d written. Her words were descriptive enough, but they still didn’t bring the full impact of the love she shared with him to the surface for her heart to savor.December 2It’s been months since I met T.J. (I told him I keep a journal and record him as T.J. because of my spawn sister and he thinks it’s cute. ‘smile’) and returned him to his camp in the woods. Since then, we’ve met up in the city and done such fun things like go to the zoo, walk along the river while watching the sunset, wonderful candlelight dinners, a few movies. It’s been beyond fantastic. I haven’t invited him home for obvious reasons, so we’ve had to steal our kisses wherever and
Theo made his way down the hall to the wing where Davina’s room was located with the medications she was expected to take. He’d managed to convince, Nancy, the floor nurse that, although he was an orderly and not a nurse, he was capable of taking the meds that they’d portioned out for her to her room and waiting to make sure that she took them. Since they were overstaffed, Nancy gave him little resistance.Turning his head in all directions as nonchalantly as he could, he checked to make sure that no-one was watching as he slipped into the wing’s supply room.After dumping her meds down the drain of the utility sink, he pulled a packet of pills from the inside pocket of his lab coat and placed them in the small, paper cups he’d just emptied. Then, after peeking out to make sure the coast was clear. He stepped back out intothe corridor and continued to her room.He found her sitting in the chair by her
Davina paced the garden of the asylum that was designated for the patients to enjoy from one o’clock until four o’clock in the afternoon. She hadn’t seen Theo in three excruciating days. She knew it was because she’d run after him like she had. Nancy probably had him assigned to a different floor. She supposed that she could understand the nurse’s concern to a degree. Having a woman who was deemed mentally unstable yanking at locked doors while seeking an orderly had to look suspicious. Actually, it was. But, not in the way Nancy thought. He said he’d figure out a way to get her out. Since she was positive that Dr. Covington was on the take from Louella and had no intention of ever deeming her healthy enough to release, Theo had to be scheming a plan and she couldn’t stand one more minute of not knowing what it was.They’d not only moved Theo to a different part of the asylum
Davina was hesitant to follow the men out of the clearing. After all, she barely knew Theo; not to mention she’d just done some type of crazy teleporting which she didn’t even know was possible. Had he really called her my Davina? This was all too weird.“I will explain everything to you, I promise. Just trust me a little longer. We need to get your head clear again. Please,” Theo whispered as he took her elbow and gently coaxed her to go with him.“My head isn’t so messed up that I don’t understand that we teleported into this clearing,” she said. Then, with wrinkled brow, she touched her temple with her free hand and added, “Or, maybe it is. We did teleport, didn’t we?”He smiled and nodded as he nudged her forward. “We did, and I’ll explain it when your head is clear enough to understand.”She dug her heels into the soil to prevent him from
Louella slammed the telephone receiver into its cradle as she released her frustration with a scream. Those bumbling idiots at the asylum had lost Davina! How could that happen? She’d selected them because of their reputation for being unscrupulous enough to allow the almighty dollar that was paid by the family to influence how well they treated a patient, or how long they kept them. The institution was basically no more than an outlet for families of wealth and power to rid themselves of troublesome family members under the guise of mental health. In its thirty-four years of being in business, no one had ever escaped; until now.This was a disaster. She needed to act fast. With the journal in her sister’s possession and her sister now free to seek help, there was no telling what would happen next. She didn’t understand why things were going so badly. Other than murdering her aunt upon impulse, she’d taken the time t