Staring at his extended member, he regarded the flesh as if from a vast difference. And then he stroked the blade of the chisel.
The sensation translated immediately to his arousal, the thing kicking. Wanting more.
Picking the chisel up with his business hand, he held it in front of his face. So clean, so precise, its dimensions declared by sharp, unforgiving edges.
Down below, at his hips, he found his cock with his other palm. As he began to pump himself, he stared at the blade. Harder. Faster. Sharper. Cleaner. Until he couldn’t tell where his thoughts about the chisel ended and the sexual instinct started. The two blended together, tendrils that started separate twisting up quick, forming a rope that tethered two things that should never have had anything to do with each other.
Sex and death.
Abruptly, there was a great surge within him, a rising heat and sense of urgency, and he opened himself to the twisted passion. Turning the chisel in his hand, he watched how the light from overhead played on the blade, winking, flashing . . . flirting, seducing. As he might have with a lover, his eyes went back and forth from the chisel to his cock, a momentum kindling, intensifying.
His talhman pulsed under his skin, the need to kill a second side of him that he suppressed as much as, and for as long as, he was able. Harder. Faster. Rasping breath, his. Pounding heart, his. Pressure in his veins, the cords of his neck popping, his head falling back as his lids squeezed shut. But it didn’t matter that he couldn’t see the chisel. He had a rich forest of images to wander through in his mind, a promenade of bloodied, torturing pleasure that was everything he couldn’t feel down below.
Building . . . building . . . building—
Until . . .
Clicking. He became acutely aware of the clicking as his fist went back and forth along his shaft. And then he started to feel the burn of friction and not in a good way, in an abrasive fashion. Further below his stroking, his balls stung as they crawled up close to his body, like they were trying to discharge themselves in whole if they had to.
Stimulation turned to strangulation, as that which had been called forward was denied exit. Buildup became pent up. Culmination became frustration.
The alchemy he had created now turned against him, the abandonment with which he had released the hold on his head gone now, a gritted grimace righting things such that he saw himself in the mirror.
His reflection was ugly, the features that were harsh when composed now tormented by a sickening denial he was well familiar with. And then there was the chisel, right by his mouth, like a lover he had been kissing. And his hand pumping, the head of his cock purple from the squeezing and the dry rubbing.
Pain now. But like the pleasure that had come from thinking of killing, the origin of the agony was all mixed up. Was it the yanking on his cock? Or something so much deeper . . . going back to very beginning of him.
The very origin of him.
Giving up, Syn tossed down the chisel, disturbing the orderly lineup of hammer and rope and duct tape. With a grunt, he fell forward and gripped the edge of the countertop. His breath wheezed up and down his throat and whistled through his teeth, while sweat dripped off his chin, landing on the top of one of his bare feet.
There was nothing worse than chasing a release.
You never could catch.
The following morning in the Caldwell Courier Journal’s much diminished newsroom, Jo’s knees went loose and her butt smacked down into her office chair. As her hands started to tremble, she made like she meant to put the glossy photographs on her desk instead of having fumbled them into gravity’s greedy clutch. The stack of images fell in a fan, different angles on the gruesome face repeated until it was like her vision was stuttering: The eyes open in terror. The features frozen in a scream. The exposed teeth like those of a wild animal.
No longer anything human.
“Sorry,” Bill Eliott said. “Didn’t mean to ruin your breakfast.”
“Not at all.” She cleared her throat and shifted the top image on the pile to the bottom. “It’s fine, I’m—”
Jo blinked. And saw the all-wrong body glistening under police lights on the backs of her lids. As her throat closed like a fist, she thought about