Angela held her breath and put a hand over her mouth and nose before squatting down beside the body to confirm one last detail of the vision she got from Owen’s eyes. As expected, there was a delicate gold chain hanging from between Carrie’s lips, part of it dangling down to coil in the mud by her cheek.
The fine gold chain held a small locket with the photos of her two children. Owen had forced her to swallow it after she had shown him the photos of her two kids in the locket, one in each half, to prove to him that she had children who needed her. She had mistakenly believed it would make her worthy of sympathy. Owen had forced her to swallow the locket to show her he had none. When he pounded his big fists into her gut as she lay on her back on the rocky ground, she had vomited it back up into her mouth.
Angela rose up beside Owen as he gestured to the body. “There’s your fucking proof. Just like I told you.”
She couldn’t even remember how many times growing up when that could easily have been the way she ended up.
“Okay, I believe you. Let’s get back.”
As she walked beside him, looking over at the size of him in the hazy moonlight, she was all too aware that she was alone out in the middle of nowhere with a monster. A monster who had already killed four women for the thrill of it. They had fought for their lives. They had been no match for him.
Not only did he weigh probably twice what Angela did, but much of that weight was muscle. She felt like she was balancing on a tightrope as she walked beside him.
At the same time, it was a glorious rush of emotion.
As her pickup came into sight, Angela was acutely conscious of where her gun was. She often carried a gun inside the waistband at the small of her back, but dressed in shorts and a cropped top, she had no practical way to hide a gun on her—to say nothing of it being illegal to carry a concealed weapon—so she’d left it in the truck. She knew that to get to it now, she would have to get into the truck before he did.
That was only one more detail swirling in the storm of things already thundering around her mind.
“You seen the body,” Owen said as they walked toward the pickup. “Now it’s time for me to take it the way you like it.”
“I don’t want to do it in the mud,” she told him in an assertive tone.
He didn’t like her tone. Not one bit.
The switch flipped.
In a heartbeat, he snatched a handful of her hair in his big fist and pulled her from her feet.
“I don’t really give a fuck what you want, you little cocksucker,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Now I get what I want.”
SIX
Angela clamped on to Owen’s wrist with both hands lest he pull her hair out by the roots as he dragged her across the rough ground. Her weight was no problem for him to handle. With the urgency with which he pulled her along, and with the way he was holding her by her hair, twisting her neck around, she could only get in a half step here and there. Most of the time, she was off balance as she was dragged like a rag doll.
Angela didn’t say anything. She knew Owen had done all the listening he intended to do.
When they reached the pickup, instead of pulling her into the cab as she had expected—the cab where her gun was—he went around to the back of the truck. He dropped the tailgate with his free hand, hopped up, and with one swift yank hauled her up by her hair.
Owen threw her down in the bed of the truck. He was done with proving to her that he was no ordinary guy. He had switched into psycho mode and was now intent only on what he wanted. He would now dictate what was going to happen. She knew that she shouldn’t expect anything less of him. She had told him, after all, that she liked guys who took what they wanted.
Angela was acutely aware of how very alone they were, and that no one would hear her screams any more than they had heard Carrie’s.
In a flash he was on top of her, pawing at her.
“I like your tits,” he said in a breathless pant laced with lust. “I don’t like those big, fake, plastic tits most whores have these days. I like real tits, like yours.”
“Kiss me,” she whispered urgently into his ear.
He pushed a knee up between her legs, forcing them open as he pressed his mouth over hers. His breath stank of alcohol.
Angela pressed her mouth back at him, encouraging him. He responded by pushing his tongue into her mouth. She didn’t resist. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants, letting his uncomfortable erection spring out before going for the zipper of her shorts.
As his tongue probed deep into her mouth and his hand was busy fumbling with opening her shorts, she reached down to the top of her right boot, her fingers searching blindly.
Once she found what she was looking for and had a firm grip on the handle, she abruptly clamped her teeth down on his tongue as hard as she possibly could and pulled her head back.
Owen cried out in surprise, anger, and pain. His immediate instinct was self-preservation, so he leaned forward, going with her to keep his tongue from being torn open by her teeth should he jerk back.
At the same time as she clamped down on his tongue with her teeth, Angela yanked the knife from its sheath in her boot. She rammed her left forearm against his throat, abruptly pushing him back as she kept her teeth tightly clenched on his tongue, leaving less than an inch between their lips.
In that instant of an opening she swept the knife up between their faces and severed his tongue.
Owen fell back from the sudden release of tension, gasping in shock and confusion. Being as drunk as he was and the blade as sharp as it was, he didn’t feel it immediately. She could see by his expression that his intoxicated brain was scrambling to process what had just happened. Angela spit out his bloody, detached tongue.
As the pain began to register, Owen screamed, but it came out as more of a gurgling cry than a scream. One hand came up to cover his mouth as he tried to make sense of what had just happened. Blood seeped out between his fat fingers to run down his chin.
As he grasped what she’d done, anger flashed to the forefront of his mind. He grabbed her by the throat with his free hand. Angela stabbed the blade into his arm between the humerus and his bulging biceps, then pulled forcefully, severing the muscle in half. By the volume of blood spurting out, she knew she’d cut the brachial artery. The warm, wet blood flooded across her chest and bare midriff.
Despite the severity of the injury, his big hand managed to clamp her throat in a death grip. Angela gritted her teeth against the pressure of him trying to crush her windpipe and slashed the straining tendons on the inside of his wrist. As the muscles drew back up into his forearm, his fingers went slack. His arm finally flopped down onto the bed of the truck.
When he made the mistake of taking his other hand from his bloody mouth and again reaching for her throat, she slashed the inside of that wrist, then cut the bundle of tendons at the inside of his elbow before he had time to flinch back.
Just that quick, both his arms were largely put out of commission.
Angela leaned in. “Aren’t you glad I didn’t wait any longer?”
His eyes wide, he stared at her, confused by the question. He didn’t know what she meant.
She grabbed his shriveled penis hanging from his open pants. “Aren’t you glad that was your tongue in my mouth, and not your dick?” She showed him a grim smile. “See? Things could always be worse. And believe me, they are going to get worse.”
Finally realizing the full magnitude of the danger he was in, Owen raged and managed to prop himself up on one elbow as he banged his heels on the truck bed, trying to gain traction to scramble to his feet so he could at least stomp her to death. Before he could get his drunken balance, Angela turned the knife in her hand, holding it like an ice pick, reached around, and drove the blade into his left kidney from behind.
Owen stiffened from the shock of pain. It locked his breath in his lungs. It stiffened his legs out straight. Eyes wide, he couldn’t even scream.
Everything had happened so blindingly fast that he was not only bewildered, but now in the grip of immobilizing pain.