Literotica.com Edition
The author wishes to thank and acknowledge the following:
To everyone who, knowingly or not, inspired or helped in realizing my vision. To Brandi for loving me and putting up with me. To Clive, for teaching me to reach into their very souls. To Tom Raimbault and Sherrie for all the help and moral support.
J.C. Paul
Prologue
"I love you," Marcus said, with all the sincerity he could muster. He held up his left hand and patted the air to suggest she should put the gun down, but all she saw was the empty paleness in the absence of his wedding band.
"Say it again?" The innocent supplication of the request contrasted with her tempestuous eyes. She tilted her head and pulled back the hammer. Her anger grew with each fervent heartbeat. The gun made a sharp click that dared Marcus to speak another word to her.
"I love—" he tried to repeat but the thunderous report drowned out his voice. The vicious copper clad slug tore through his throat and forced his words out the back of his neck. It sprayed a more candid message onto the wall behind him. Marcus clutched at his hemorrhaging neck with both hands as he fell to his knees and onto his back.
"Capricious CHILD!" Gina screamed, "Do you even know what it means?"
"You can't comprehend it! Don't you ever say love again!" She walked toward his suffering prostrate form. His right hand still clutched his steadily gushing throat while the left pawed uselessly at the floor. He couldn't respond. He had little time left. Blood sputtered out of his mouth in place of pleas for mercy. It pooled around his head and dotted his face. If she was going to make her point, she had to move fast.
Gina knelt down beside him. For an instant when their eyes met again, her face softened. His eyes full of fear and doleful resignation, he brushed her arm with the tips of his blood-covered fingers. He really had loved her once, but she was right, every word. A tear rolled out of his eye. Her face became as stone.
"Love isn't a feeling, you worthless asshole!" she yelled. Her writhen face contorted into an almost inhuman caricature as it shook with fury. "Love doesn't feel! It Does! THIS is love," she spat at him, as she shook the weapon. She pushed the barrel hard into his wound. He writhed and gurgled in agony as she continued her invective. Through bloody gnashed teeth, he tried to form a plea for mercy.
"THIS is my love for you." Now she forced her words through her clenched jaw to fight off her own sobs, "It is more kind and merciful than anything you've done for me. TAKE my love. Take it all and DIE!" She squeezed the trigger again.
The second blast shook Marcus out of his sleep. He thrashed in the bed, struggling with the sheets until the quiet dimness of the bedroom came into focus. His chest heaved as he looked around the room. There was nothing threatening or spectacular to agitate him further. The crimson numerals blinked at him from the alarm clock. 5:28 AM. Cold drops of sweat fell from his pale unshaven face. His hands rushed to his throat and he was relieved that it was intact and his quivering hands absent of blood. Just as he began to regain his composure he looked down to see Gina's eyes peeping up at him in quizzical aggravation. He could scarcely have reacted with more alarm if there was a rattlesnake coiled on the pillow next to him. He scrabbled away from her and fell out of the bed.
She knows! Oh God, save me. She knows!
The Seventh Circle
According to Dante, the seventh circle of Hell is peopled with the brutal, cruel, sadistic, vicious and violent. From shooting rampages to serial killings, some suicides but mostly murder, to rend a human soul from its body casts their own into such nightmarish chaos as to plunge themselves beyond hope and drown in the inescapable fury of a river of blood. Adulterers only go as far as the relative comfort of the second circle, where they're caught up in the never-ending torrent of a whirlwind. The truth is to desecrate the sacred trust of a devoted lover rends souls just as well. Dante was wrong. Either sin could prove the lynch pin that cascades us all into oblivion.
We all have our own circles. Plumb the depths of the human psyche and you will find at least seven levels or circles of the self. The first six make up what Jung called the persona, the mask we wear for the world to see. It's mostly us, the real us. We decorate our own masks in a manner we find pleasing and we hope pleases the world. It holds at bay the prying fingers that curiosity may tempt to descry beyond the mask to our real face. The seventh circle is verboten to all but ourselves. Rightly so, it is where we store the unspeakable horrors of the past we wish we could discard, secrets nobody can ever know, and secrets we wish we didn't know about ourselves, thoughts we can't even allow to complete in our own heads. Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, our most trusted confidants, even they to whom we've sworn to devote our lives must never transgress past the sixth, but curiosity and pride are powerful motivators to seek the truth no matter what it is. The pursuit of knowledge is the downfall of man. Truth and knowledge comprise the sickening, the despicable, the vile and revolting, seething and purulent answer to questions we wish to Christ we'd never asked.
Marcus sat alone at the breakfast nook, coffee still too hot to drink, and some slick pitchman on television babbling about the power of oxygen. He had slipped out of the bedroom unusually early though he was not at all groggy. His hands were shaking and his eyes wild as he stared at the morning's headline.
CASANOVA SLASHER TAKES FIFTH VICTIM
COSTAL WASHINGTON GRIPPED IN FEAR
'Police still have no leads in the horrifying and brutal murders of now five area women. The name of the latest victim is being withheld pending notification of her family. Late Tuesday evening a motorist discovered the mutilated body of a young woman in her mid twenties. Police say the killing bears the calling card of what is being dubbed The Casanova Slasher. So far, the killings have frustrated the efforts of detectives with a lack of fingerprint, fiber and DNA evidence. All five victims have been area women in their mid twenties to early thirties found along the side of remote roadways stripped of clothing with multiple stab wounds to the torso and neck, the bodies adorned with a bouquet of red roses. SEE 'SLASHER' A4'
Reading the story gave Marcus something to look at, something real to grasp in his hand and assure him he was awake and sane. The nightmares still swirled in his head, and he didn't even know how he'd gotten home let alone into the bed he'd just lurched out of. Unbuttoning his shirt had been as far as consciousness would allow him to undress, though he had no memory of it. Marcus had left it open as the top three buttons were missing. What had he done last night? They called it E or X. That's not so bad, but was that all? God only knows what else was in those pills and how many had he taken? What he could remember of what he'd done was bad enough. How could he explain this to Gina? How could he make up a convincing lie when he didn't even know the whole truth?
A cool hand touched Marcus' neck, slid around and down his chest, followed by another on the opposite side. A blonde curl of hair distracted Marcus' eyes from their purchase and the angles of a woman's face pressed against his temple.
"Mmm. Morning, baby," Gina purred in his ear, "Rough night? Guess what."
"Roses," Marcus blurted the first word that entered his mind.
"What?"
