“Shhhhhhh, Rebecca. That sound really goes through me.” A bored female voice filters through my hazy brain, and I try to work out where I’ve heard it before as a hand slides into my hair and yanks my head back. “You should have stayed away. You need to keep your hands off things that aren’t yours.”
“You’re deranged.” I spit as something sharp presses into my throat. A knife.
“Becca is mine.” A growl tickles my ear, and I’m straddling the line between excitement and fear. An ‘artist with a kink,’ isn’t that what Ruby called me? That was an understatement.
“Christ, that’s disgusting.” A booted foot presses against the semi in my pants, and I resist the urge to groan. “I can tell how much you want her every time you touch her. That little show you did together was perverted. You need to learn to keep your sticky fingers off things that don’t belong to you.”
Ruby watches us both, the anger flaring to life every time her kidnapper touches me. Damn, if only I could reach my camera, I’d give anything to capture that look. The possessive, greedy, furious look that brings her whole face alive.
“You think you know Becca, but you don’t have a clue. Not a single fucking idea.”
It hasn’t escaped my notice how she keeps calling Ruby ‘Becca,’ but I’d seen the lengths she’d go to in order to protect her identity, so I was assuming this was just another wall Ruby had built around herself.
“She is mine. I know her better than anyone. I know everything about her.” The bitterness of her voice fills the room, hanging heavy in the air.
That’s when it dawns on me. “You’re her roommate, of course you do.”
“Oh, finally, someone notices me.” She finally moves out of the shadows, and crouches before me with her knife pressed against my jugular. “I left her flowers, gifts, little notes, I waited for her to come home after her ‘club’ sessions and made sure she still ate regularly. And yet, not once did she put two and two together. I thought that if I just waited, if I just bided my time, it would all work out. Then you had to go and touch her.”
I can tell by her expression that she hates me, utterly loathes me, and that just makes this all the more delicious. Oh god, I really am a sadist.
“You might know her better than anyone, but she still chose me,” I remark with a smirk, unable to help myself from provoking her.
“Choose you! Pfft. Becca is mine. She may be obsessed with you, but it’s fleeting. If we had never gone to that damn exhibition, she would never have even looked at you twice.”
“What are you babbling on about?” My head still aches from the blow earlier, and the crazy bitch isn’t making much sense as she thinks about stabbing me and ending everything.
I look past her to Ruby, who is squirming, trying to free the rope on her left arm from the vice used to hold it in place. It’s shifting, but only slightly, so I need to keep the psychotic roommate talking.
“The stupid show about come faces, I mean, what kind of sick pervert are you?” She presses down on my dick once again with the word pervert. “And the one about the blood? What the fuck was that?”
Ruby...no, Rebecca, had been to my exhibits? Even the exclusive ones? My chest tightens as I process the new information. That explains why she wasn’t shocked when she’d seen those images in my flat, but why hadn’t she come clean about it?
The woman keeps droning on, the pressure on my neck easing slightly as she vents. She doesn’t even notice as Ruby manages to free one of her wrists and goes to work on the other one. “I mean, I tried not to be disgusted since she’s a Fine Arts student. I thought it was just curiosity, and with a brother-in-law like Hugh Trent, it was only normal to be interested in the kinkier side of photography. But you...you just couldn’t keep your dick in your pants.”
Hugh? CEO of DIX was her brother-in-law? I’d never seen them together, but then…Ruby told me she had no family, and I’d never seen anything to demonstrate otherwise. It was just always her and a few friends, including the crazy bitch in front of me. My mouth goes dry, just how many lies had she woven around herself? What was her truth? Ruby leans back, appearing as though she is still restrained as I call out, “I thought you were a med student?”
The woman scoffs, trailing the knife down my neck, breaking the skin. “Rebecca? No, she’s a photographer with a side dish of sculpting. I told you that you knew nothing about her.”
Even though I’d guest lectured at the college, I usually avoided the campus as a precaution. On the rare occasions I had, and I’d seen her, it never occurred to me that she was anything other than a medical student, since the School of Medicine and the Fine Arts building were near each other. I can feel the slick wetness on my skin as a trickle of blood follows the path of the blade as I whisper, “Why did you lie? You lied about...everything.”
The roommate seems to enjoy my discomfort as she leaves me, to remove Rebecca’s gag. Leaning against the bench, she waves her knife. “Go on. Answer him.”
She looks smug as she twirls the knife in her hands. “Tell him, Becca, and then I’m going to get rid of him. He’s ruining what we have.”
We both ignore her as our gazes lock. Swallowing, Ruby’s eyes don’t leave my face. “Because if I told you that I chose this university for you, to be close to you...If I explained
