HOSTAGE (To Love A Killer) Page 2

  “But what if it is?”

  “Quiet!” Shouted her father.

  Hunter jumped, startled.

  Grizzly extracted something from his back pocket, a black object. One side of it glared with a metal edge. He unfolded the metal, and Hunter realized that it was a knife.

  Grizzly held the knife firmly in his enormous hand.

  The girls began to whimper at the sight. They clenched each other tighter as best they could, fighting against the plastic ties that restrained them.

  Intense panic coursed through Hunter. Her heart raced, pounding hard in her chest. She couldn’t seem to steady her breath. Grizzly leaned further down towards her, slowly savoring every inch he gained. She watched his hands, their white-knuckle grip around the handle as Grizzly pointed the knife tip millimeters from her neck. She was certain this would be it. He could kill her so easily, slit her throat, or her wrists, letting her gradually bleed out. She couldn’t believe her father would do this, or that any father would be capable of such a thing, but the relation they shared was only by blood. Grizzly was a monster. The idea that he was her father was a joke.

  Abruptly, Grizzly grabbed her face, squeezing her cheeks between his massive fingers, holding her in place. Hunter let out a low, miserable moan, terror stricken for what might come next.

  “Killing you would be a waste, Hunter,” he said. His sour breath seeped from his mouth, causing Hunter’s stomach to wretch with nausea. “I’d rather play a game.”

  Hunter glared at him through her tears, her jaw clenching, her teeth gritting with disgust.

  “I think you’re a soldier, Hunter. I think that’s why you’ve strung that bullet around your neck. It’s your trophy. I can’t kill a soldier I need. But you’re going to have to prove yourself. Prove that you’ll be of value.”

  Hunter couldn’t help shake her head in disgust, though imperceptibly, at her father’s twisted mentality. He was a madman, a psychopath, but unless she wanted to be killed right here and now, she would have to listen. She would have to play along.

  “I’m going to let you make the choice, Hunter,” he went on. “You can either come home, come back to the farmhouse and submit to me, join me like you belong. Or you can return to the farmhouse to stop me. Whichever you choose, I’m giving you until the end of the week to come back. That’s three days, Hunter. Three days to return and join me, or return and stop me.”

  She didn’t want to have to ask. She didn’t want to play into all this, but she had no choice.

  “Stop you from doing what exactly?” she said finally.

  He smiled wide. This was entertaining him. He was sick.

  “Your little sister’s getting too old for the barn. I’m thinking about making a little film, nothing special, just a short video. I’d like to record her passing. She is, after all, my daughter.”

  “Oh my God,” Hunter said under her breath. She couldn’t fight the shock that was seizing her. She had done everything within her power to block Blair from her memory. It was too painful to remember that she had a little sister. It was too excruciating to know that Hunter had left her behind to save herself.

  Grizzly seemed to be eating up Hunter’s horrified reaction. His eyes were glued to her, wide and unblinking, as though he didn’t want to miss a thing.

  “Snuff films,” he whispered. “It’s going to be a new direction. It’s the best way to end the girls. Most of them are too old, you know? They’re no good for the other videos at their age.”

  The huddle of girls began to cry. They knew he was referring to them as well as all the girls up at the farmhouse that had gotten too old.

  Grizzly rose to his feet.

  “Like I said,” he continued. “Come back and join me or come back and stop me, but Hunter... We both know you’re coming back.”

  Not a moment after he stood, the front door of her apartment opened and three large men stepped through, stomping across the room. Without a word of instruction, they each grabbed one girl at a time, roughly lifting them to their feet, and dragged them out.

  In an instant Andy, Devon, Margot, and Jenna were gone. They would be locked in the van in no time. They would be back in New Hampshire, at the farmhouse, returned to a life of torture in just nine hours. It would only be a matter of time before each would be murdered on video as Grizzly had promised.

  Suddenly the apartment was dead silent.

  Only Hunter, Ash, and Grizzly were left. Hunter didn’t know what to expect next. Grizzly could leave her here with two dead bodies, her hands tied behind her back, and an ever-growing fear that she and her sister were doomed as the minutes ticked by, but he didn’t. Not at first.

  Grizzly did something she could have never expected.

  He grabbed Ash and slammed him against the wall. His head hit first, disorienting him terribly. Suddenly Grizzly held the knife at Ash’s throat, forcing him to the ground. In an instant, Grizzly secured Ash to the radiator. Not with plastic ties, instead Grizzly clamped cuffs around Ash’s wrists, chaining him against the metal rungs.

  “You’ve done your job, Ash,” said Grizzly. “I don’t need you anymore.”

  Ash didn’t say a word.

  “I know you miss killing, sweetheart,” Grizzly said, turning to Hunter, looking her straight in the eye. “Consider this a gift.”

  Grizzly dropped the knife to the ground. It bounced then spun to a stop on its side. Once it had, Grizzly kicked it, sliding it across the floor to Hunter.

  She stared at it for a long moment. It lay directly in front of her knees. If she twisted her body, she could grasp it with her hands.

  It crossed her mind to grab it. Could she slip her hand through the tie, freeing herself of the loose plastic, and charge towards her father? She could kill him right here and now, but she was petrified, paralyzed with fear.

  Grizzly wanted her to kill Ash. He thought she would appreciate the opportunity.

  Maybe she would. On some level, Ash had betrayed her, and he deserved to die. But Hunter also knew deep down that Ash was only a pawn in her father’s game. She was torn.

  She could feel Grizzly’s eyes on her, lingering, enjoying the dilemma she was being presented with. It sickened her. She wasn’t prepared to deal with the darkness that was being stirred up inside her. She wasn’t equipped to handle the possibility that she may want Ash dead. She may need him dead in order to regain enough strength to face the farmhouse and the evils that lay in wait for her there.

  Finally, her father turned to leave. He walked across her studio apartment until he disappeared around the corner. Not a moment later, Hunter heard her front door open and shut. Grizzly was gone.

  But the nightmare was just beginning.

  Chapter Two Hunter found herself trembling, as a wave of immense relief washed over her. She lowered her head into her knees for a moment and allowed her body to shake off the deep tension that had gripped her. Being in her father’s presence had been beyond terrifying. It had brought up a wealth of memories, memories she had done everything within her power to forget.

  The memories kept coming, even after he had left, they were unstoppable. It was a very deep well. Hunter collapsed into a ball, her legs turning to rubber and her body quaking as the force of pent up adrenalin dissipated from her body in a riot of shivers.

  She was also hiding from Ash. The way she kept her head down helped to avoid his gaze. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, even though she could feel his eyes on her, feel his need to be forgiven. If that’s what he wanted, it was too big a request, or did he want to feed her another vague string of lies? It was getting too hard to tell whose side Ash was really on. Hunter was beginning to think Ash could only be on one side, his own, whether or not that aligned with hers was probably irrelevant to him. Hunter needed to decide what to do. She knew it was imperative to do so, but she wasn’t ready to face the knife her father had left her. Not until she had calmed down. The feeling of wanting Ash dead was still with her.

  “Hunter, I
can explain,” said Ash from the corner of the room.

  “Is that why you had me circle around in the hallway and wait outside the apartment door?” She demanded, her voice furiously deep. “So you could regroup with him? Get my father up to speed? You were working for him the whole time?!”

  “That’s not true, Hunter,” he said. His voice was deep and smooth, silken.

  Hunter remembered when that voice had wrapped around her, soothing her to sleep. There had been a time when she had believed he was on her side, that he was her protector. There had been no greater feeling. Had all that been a ploy?

  “Lorne didn’t know I had abandoned my contract to bring you back. All he knew was that I had lost touch. I thought I could buy some time by playing him and acting like I was still following through with my contract to bring you to him.”

  Though he couldn’t see her face buried in her knees, Ash could tell she wasn’t listening, and if she was, she didn’t believe him. Her brown, wavy hair lay fallen at soft angles around her shoulders and knees. Her pale skin looked milky smooth in contrast, and he wished he could crawl to her and wrap his arms around her. He wished he could lift her angelic face up, chin between his fingers, and kiss her.

  There had been so many things he could have done after discovering Grizzly here in the apartment, and clearly the option he ran with had been a poor choice, but in the moment Ash had decided the safest choice was to get Hunter as far away from her father as possible, into the hallway, and try to take him down alone. But when he had entered the apartment, he realized that to be adversarial at all would risk the girls’ lives, so he had shifted tactics. Grizzly had acted as though Ash was still working for him. He hadn’t shown one iota of confrontation. So Ash had played into that.

  “Look,” he said, as he attempted to scoot closer to Hunter until the cuffs around his wrists clanked against the radiator, stopping him from moving further. “I don’t expect you to understand any of this, but I tried to make the best decision to keep everyone alive.”

  “You’ll say anything,” she said, softly, her voice hollow with hopelessness. “You’ve been playing whoever needs to be played to keep yourself alive. It’s still a betrayal, Ash.”

  She wanted to stay mad at him, ride the angry high, and let it carry her through the act of killing him, but Hunter knew that deep down that wasn’t what she wanted. As she lifted her head slowly off her knees, she found it impossible to lift her gaze as well. Was she finally ready to look at Ash? All she wanted was to see a glimmer of love behind his eyes. She wanted to see that she meant something to him. She didn’t want to let go of what they had, no matter how fucked up things had become between them. It was then that Hunter realized she could kill someone she loved, but she couldn’t kill someone who loved her. If she could find evidence that he loved her, she wouldn’t allow herself to be compelled to murder him out of rage.

  As she lifted her eyes, remembering how he had told her he was falling in love with her; Hunter braced herself for the truth, no matter how heartbreaking it could be.

  “I shot Travis in this room,” she said turning furious. “I put us in a position where it was only you and me and all the girls against one man, my dad. We could’ve taken him out, Ash. Grizzly could be dead by now, the world a better place. What were you thinking?”

  The burning anger of her words extinguished all hope that she loved him, and Ash began to break down, crumbling into regret.

  “I don’t know how to do this, Hunter,” he said. His tone sounded defeated. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to be with you. I don’t know how to be with anyone. I’m damaged.”

  All of a sudden, Hunter popped her hand through the plastic tie, freeing it. She hadn’t been aware of steadily working her wrist through it this entire time. It was an odd moment to accomplish something so exciting.

  The pain of Ash essentially giving reasons to end things trumped all else.

  It was too confusing, too sad to hear that he didn’t know how to be with her. Hunter’s heart sank, plummeting to her stomach. Her eyesight went soft, blurring her vision. The sting of his words propelled Hunter into a foggy state as she receded inwards. It was as though she was hiding inside of herself, blocking the world out.

  Because of that, she didn’t realize she was reaching forward. She didn’t notice when she grasped the knife handle firmly in her hand, but Ash did.

  “Hunter?” he asked, growing scared that she was becoming unreachable. He watched, as her eyes seemed to go blank, as though she was becoming vacant and empty, beyond her senses.

  She lifted the knife, twisted around herself, and cut the plastic tie from around her left wrist.

  Hunter felt like she was losing it, slipping into a dream. Clouds of confusion filled her eyes like a gray haze that filtered out everything around her, distancing her from reality.

  This was what it used to be like, Hunter was clear headed enough to realize that much. Life had been so stressful at the farmhouse that she seemed to float through the day in a dark haze, far removed from everyone and everything around her. It had been like nothing was real. She had to view life in that manner. If she had allowed herself to believe what was happening to her and the other girls, if she had taken it for reality, she would’ve gone mad. Eventually, she had gone mad anyway, hadn’t she?

  She had forgotten what it was like, though, until this very moment. She had been so afraid of her father that it brought on this clumsy effect, just like it used to when she had been a little girl.

  Hunter didn’t know how to shake this off. She felt herself slipping away, and she didn’t know how to stop it.

  Ash’s heart began to race in a panic as Hunter slid towards him across the floor, pointing the knife straight out. Whatever visceral, animalistic, reaction she was riding out in order to recover from being exposed to her greatest abuser, was not going to end well for Ash if she continued to slide towards him. She needed to snap out of it.

  The knife’s tip glided slowly through the air guided by Hunter’s hand. Ash backed away until he could back up no further. His head pressed against the wall, but she kept extending the knife. It was nearly at his throat.

  Ash stared intensely into Hunter’s eyes, but the light had gone out behind them. She was empty. It was as though she had slid downward, inward, and was hiding in the far recesses of her mind. Did she even know she had a knife in her hand? For a split second, he got a flash of the possibility that Hunter could rise out of her fugue state, discover his dead body, and never forgive herself if he didn’t stop her from going through with this. Was this how all those little girls had died? Had Hunter killed them, carrying out the mercy killings, in a dissociative haze? Was that what she had meant when she had described it as “going crazy”?

  Ash was not about to let that happen now. For her sake and his own, he needed to get through to her, jar her out of this.

  “Hunter, can you talk to me?” he asked as the knife tip pressed into the side of his neck. It was deadly cool.

  Her eyes looked so sad. She looked like a scared child. There was something about the way she held her face, tipped down, that made her look ashamed. Was she lost in some kind of memory? She didn’t seem to hear him at all.

  “Hunter I need you to respond,” he said again, making his voice soft and caring, gentle in hopes of luring her back to the present. “Hunter, we’re in your apartment, in Brooklyn. You’re safe. Everything’s going to be okay. You’re holding a knife. Can you put the knife down?”

  Hunter’s gaze seemed to float around absentmindedly, which terrified Ash, until it landed on the knife. He watched as Hunter slowly began to register where she was, what she was doing. He could see she was still in a state of confusion, but at least she appeared to be coming back.

  “It’s my job,” she whispered.

  “What’s your job, Hunter?” asked Ash immediately, hoping to engage her further and draw her out.

  “He left me here with this,” she said, referring blankly to the knife in
her hand. “It’s my job.”

  “To kill me?” he asked.

  Hunter slowly nodded.

  “No it’s not, Hunter. You don’t have to do this. You’re overwhelmed,” he said.

  “If I don’t do this, they’ll bring me to the barn. This is my job and if I don’t do it, things will be bad for me.”

  Suddenly Ash realized that if Hunter was in a memory, or playing out some kind of habitual response to her abuse as though she was still a child, then the memory was revealing that at some point Hunter had traded being abused by the men with killing the little girls. Her father must have offered her the trade when he discovered she had killed a few girls on her own anyway. Was that why Hunter had escaped all those years ago? She hadn’t escaped abuse; she had escaped being forced to kill.

  All of a sudden Ash realized that, yes, that was the reason. She hadn’t escaped to avoid the barn, to end being tortured there. She had escaped to put an end to her role in killing.

  Grizzly had said that he needed soldiers.

  That’s what Hunter had been to him, what she had been doing for him. He had already turned her into a killer, and he needed her back.

  Hunter was a killer just like Ash, and she didn’t even know it.

  “Hunter, that’s not your job anymore,” Ash said, desperate to make eye contact, but she wasn’t fully present. “Hunter, do you understand me? That’s not your job anymore.”

  Hunter pressed the knife harder against his throat, and Ash felt the blade slicing into the shallowest layer of his skin.

  “Hunter! That’s not your job anymore,” he repeated.

  Her brow furrowed and her pupils sharpened, retracting.

  “It’s not?” she asked as though drifting through a fog, unsure which way was out and which way was deeper into the sea of lost thoughts.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “Come back to me, Hunter.”

  “I can’t go back into the barn,” she said in a whisper, pressing the knife deeper in.

  Ash felt a hot trickle of blood roll down his neck. If he didn’t get through to her soon, she was going to carry out the memory. She was going to kill him.