Dark Days (Written Pictures #2) Read online

  Dark Days

  H.A. Kotys

  The

  Written Pictures

  Series

  This book is dedicated to BB, a source of inspiration….

  PROLOGUE

  You craft your life, build it piece by hard won piece, take control, take revenge. You overcome demons created by the damaged child and the cheated young adult you were until one day you are finally happy, finally content with your world.

  So when that world is torn apart so totally and with such vicious speed, it doesn’t seem real. How can it have been so fragile? How do you get it back?

  The maelstrom of the last hours had been beyond Raven’s worst nightmare. She crouched, forcibly doubled over in the crate, valve popping on the mask as she sucked in processed air. It was a harsh position, strapped tightly in a ball, and it would be added to by the torments that accompanied her on the journey.

  In the darkness Raven waited, knowing where she was destined. It struck dread into her, consigned as she was for delivery to one of the few she actually feared. Alexei – a man she had never met, and such was his reputation, had never wanted to.

  It already felt like she had been in the crate an age but when it lurched, she knew her journey was just beginning. Muffled voices mumbled something she had no hope of deciphering, but that didn’t stop her straining to try. All attempts to unravel the sounds were thrown to the winds though as she felt the crate first tip then flip over, making the webbing straps across her inverted body bite.

  How had it come to this? For a fleeting moment she had everything, she finally felt safe, felt certain, but what was her future now? Oh how wrong she had been. The only certainty now was that everything would be different. So totally different.

  Alexei and life with him would bring a whole new set of obstacles to negotiate and conquer. His reputation strode before him and that at least would see her prepared for the very worst, if one ever can prepare for such horrors.

  But she could not, would not, be held down for long. She would win through, come out stronger and take her revenge. Crush those who thought she was beaten. She would put herself beyond the chilly fingers of fate that had in the past always sought to claw her back. She was strength of will itself. She would win. She was Raven.

  Part 1

  Her Arrival

  CHAPTER I – This Way Up

  ‘This way up!’ the sticker proclaimed, but the mischief that was Mela had inverted it, ensuring that the crated ‘Wild Animal in Transit’ had experienced a torrid journey. Inside was no ordinary animal though. It had a feral sense of survival that had served her all too well, dragging her out of the gutter to a position of wealth, power and influence.

  As hard as her rise had been, her fall had been savage in its speed. It had ripped away the hard-won trophies of her scrambled ascent, an ascent from the squalid position she had found herself in after fleeing from a violent home as a fifteen year old girl.

  The ‘Wild Animal’ was strapped within the crate, upside down and held in a position none should endure, even as deserving as Raven was. Yet endure she did. Instinct told her this would pass, would ease and even as the crate thudded to a stop, the woman sealed within assured herself that the new strains were the nadir of her ordeal.

  There was no way to tell how far or for how long she had been transported, though she knew her destination to be Kazakhstan, and the beast known as Alexei. The first hour had been hell itself as a collar pulsed its shocks and twin intrusions of ice cold benwa balls and a butt plug constantly jostled for position in her abdomen. The chill of the balls had soon passed, warmed by her body, but the sloshing insistence of the mercury within had been a persistent, maddening, reminder of her new position – physically, and in life.

  Her insides were already sensitised by the Ralgex and itching powder concoction her captors had used to lubricate the butt plug. Yet for all her anger at being taken down, losing what she had fought for and only just gained, there were moments when the ingeniously sadistic nature of her confinement impressed her.

  Her feet veered between being either numbed by the acidic sting of the nettles they had put in her too-small boots, to pulsing in pain as an added sprinkling of grit gouged the skin each time her toes twitched. Damn, why wouldn’t they keep still?

  She had tried to stay strong in the darkness, not let what they had done win through, but eventually the mental torture had been too much. Raven had cried for the first time in so many years. A box placed behind her powered the shocking collar and, because that just wasn’t cruel enough, it also contained a small pneumatic cylinder. Two hours into her journey, it had started to expel jets of air. In her mind’s isolated state, those puffs were the movement of the rats that Jade had said were to accompany her on the journey.

  She had a morbid fear of rats from her time living on the streets. They had been ever present, stealing what little food she had stashed and once even exploring the taste of her arm. Raven hated them with a passion and they were one of the few things that could stop her in her tracks. Jade had used that, another weapon to break through the steely armour of confidence Raven threw around herself. Bitch.

  The first jet of air had caused Raven such shock. The second had been programmed higher as if a rodent was climbing her back. The third jet was aimed toward Raven’s butt, lighter and pulsing wider as if new-born young were trying to clamber after their mother. It was a hell that even Raven’s coldly clinical mind couldn’t shut out or dispel. And as the box entered a random mode to simulate the scurrying of countless tiny feet, she unleashed a pitiful wail that was the fracturing of her resistance to tears.

  There was no way to tell how long the torture had lasted. With every perceived touch, Raven expected razor-sharp teeth to sink into her and begin her end. That end never came though and as time crept past, the touches eventually faded as the cylinder was spent and she finally realised she was indeed alone within the crate.

  Regardless, the damage had been done. Long suppressed tears had flowed behind her mask and swept away carefully constructed defences. It was a blow that few could have struck and in that moment the despair of her position started to leech away the surety that had built remorselessly with her ascent.

  Her mind meandered as sleep wafted this way and that, first claiming her then ebbing away until reality became dreams, dreams became nightmares and nightmares connected back to her reality. It was a jolt to the box and a lurch in her stomach that snapped her back. The crate was being moved again and Raven’s world tipped left, the straps chafing at her skin in spite of the latex catsuit she was sealed in.

  Like a beacon, that stab of pain beckoned her back from the brink. Pain and malice had been enduring companions after all, her faithful servants through all the dark times she had at first suffered, overcome then inflicted. They now prodded her once again, cajoled her, carried her back to the light, igniting thoughts that the architects of her ordeal had sought to chase permanently away.

  Her way was clear before her, illuminated in the darkness of her close confinement. She would strike back with all the fury she could. She would inflict such bittersweet revenge that even her own sadism would stand back and gasp. She would get through this, whatever this turned out to be. And even as her head pounded with the constant inversion, Raven knew that revenge would be the proverbial ‘dish served cold’. She would delight in each delicious morsel.

  CHAPTER II – His Rise

  The chair’s tall wings framed Alexei as he sat in his opulent library. Once used by Tsar Alexei the dealer had said, it had caught his attention as a connection to his namesake, reaching out across four centuries from the celebrated nation builder to a time where an empire had fallen and a very diffe
rent one was being built.

  Alexei had checked, he always did, and the dealer’s credentials were impeccable, though the sources of his discoveries were mired in mystery. It had cost a king’s ransom, even though that was much less than what the dealer had originally wanted. The hint of revelations of illegal activity had first halved the price, then Alexei had halved it again before the dealer scuttled back to Moscow to track down less dangerous buyers for his dubiously secured inventory.

  Smoothing hands along the worn and faded scarlet arms, Alexei exhaled a self-satisfied sigh, feeling a connection to past decadence and past glories. His fingers curled around well-worn gold leaf swirls that still bedecked the chair with a rich, if tarnished, flourish.

  Beside him, on the desk once used by Medeleev to arrange the periodic table, sat priceless reminders of Russia’s glory - the sextant that guided Golovnin to Japanese incarceration, a telescope with which Wrangel had mapped the Siberian coast, and an early map upon which von Krusenstern had planned his route to circumnavigate the globe.

  He was a patriot to a country that had left him behind, retreating inward to its Muscovite core, leaving the eager republics to fend for themselves. Alexei was a child of one of those republics but his proudly Russian father had raised him to remember his roots, even as his Kazakh mother had taught him a culture of her own. That was before she had died at the hands of the fledgling republic’s militia during the firestorm that was the Soviet Union tearing itself apart from within.

  So now he acquired Moscow’s history, tearing its past away as his mother had been torn from him by its introversion. It was an inexplicable mix of revenge and pride that drove him to collect and as each item was bought and smuggled out of Mother Russia, he both honoured the mother that Russia’s abandonment had taken from him, and his late father.

  At the time she was killed, he had been the local secretary for the Party, an organisation representing over ten thousand workers. Head down, he had worked hard to gain a position that being a child of mixed parentage would never be easily reached. His father had been the manager of a steel plant, an appointment imposed by Moscow when it still cared, and it was through that patronage that Alexei had gained the foothold he needed.

  With a new government shakily acquiring power, he had used that position to secure his future, along with the transport concession for the steel output from his father’s plant, amongst others, and had swiftly choked his trucking competition in a creeping monopoly.

  When his father had died of supposed ill health in the autumn of the following year, Alexei had ascended to take his position, then used his stranglehold on transport to choke his competitor’s supply lines. He suspected their role in his father’s death and with his foot on their neck, soon took their plants too by wrenching concession after concession to secure passage for their vital raw materials until they had nothing left to give.

  Good fortune had always followed Alexei and when natural gas had been discovered, it was his steel and his trucks that ensured he held the industry by the throat. Raw materials, transport, labour, the only thing lacking was political power and he would soon secure that too. Western energy majors jostled like whores for his favours, even while they plotted his removal.

  The first attempt on his life was a bungled affair where his guard had been lowered by a bikini and a body – his retainers had got to her just in time. The second though had cost him the partial sight of one eye. When the perpetrator was caught and dragged before him, he thought nothing of removing the threat, killing one to one for the first time with the simple sliding of a knife across the mercenary’s throat.

  That set Alexei down a path darker than manipulative economic thuggery. The satisfaction he had derived from his kill pointed toward a new outlet for his grief and a way to drench his burning desire for revenge, even if never fully extinguishing it.

  They were so arrogant. How could they violate both his country and his home and just expect him to roll over and let them tickle his tummy with their dollars? It was after that that he vowed this would not be the last American to learn the error in crossing Alexei - it was that thought that smeared a smile across his lips when he looked at the rough-hewn timber crate sitting alone in the centre of the room.

  A chance comment during the early pipeline negotiations had pointed him to a man simply known as ‘The Algerian’. He had completed the picture as Lady Luck found another way to serve Alexei. The Algerian could supply women, American women, to first explore, then thoroughly consume - a way to satisfy two nagging hungers without the frivolity of building a relationship.

  He knew what the crate contained. The thought of its contents stirred more than satisfaction. Wealthier than he cared to count, the adornments of money surrounded him but what it delivered could never be enough. Luck though had smiled her allegiance and delivered opportunity. He now had the trophy of all trophies, secured in a faceless auction where he had spent a sum he would have trebled if necessary.

  An American woman was what he had bought, his first. More would follow now when the middleman had been tracked down but this was a woman to feed his soul as well as his body. She was the very embodiment of American arrogant power; a dominatrix known to be as brutal in her world as he was in his. He had bought her and would break her. He would love every second.

  And if she resisted? Then all the better. He had paid over two million for just that chance. She would be flogged, fucked and if she fought, flayed until she begged for his mercy. He would offer none then move on to feast on the next.

  He had seen the video already, she had witnessed a murder and just stood by. She was a dispassionate killer just as he. She also possessed a body that men would lust after. Alexei could already feel the growling pleasure he would take. He would first fuck with her, then just fuck her. She would be pushed until she crawled broken before him, then displayed for all to see.

  She would be broken. She would be broken by him. She would be broken to him. It would not be quick. He had not invested so much for it to be quick. He wanted one that would resist, one that would fight, one that would scream her defiance before screaming for his pity - then ultimately scream for his cock.

  But there would be no pity. He would take his remorselessly dark pleasures and as Alexei looked at the crate once again, he knew this would be the best investment he had ever made.

  He circled his rough hands slowly over the time-worn arms of his chair once again, luxuriating in the moment. Triumph. It was the single word that tumbled in his head, spiralling away before smashing its way again to the forefront of his mind. He was a winner and he had won, again. His prize had arrived and he would wring every last drop from it to slake his thirst to right a deep wrong.

  CHAPTER III – Opening Time

  A simple motion of his finger summoned two retainers, appropriate tools already in hand. They approached the rough-hewn wooden crate which formed a centrepiece on the marbled, checkerboard floor he looked down on. A pause - Alexei wanted to savour everything about this moment.

  With an almost imperceptible nod of his head, the two muscular men set to work on the wood with crowbar, hammer and chisel. As the men tried to jam the crowbar into place between the planks, straps gouged into the tender flesh of the woman inside to each juddering impact.

  The whole crate slewed to the side with the force of the final, successful thump and Raven could hear the wood splintering through the earphones. Her incarceration was starting to fragment under the assault of hardened steel driven by obedient brute force.

  It was quick, almost frenzied, as the two men tore at the crate to satisfy their Master, vying with each other to show the depth of their devoted service. Care might have slowed them but the two men were possessed by a patriotism as hard as their muscles, having cut their teeth in the Spetsnatz. They also knew an American was held inside, enemy of both training and indoctrination, and so they ripped at the planks in a melee of sinew and metal.

  The first splinter pierced the latex stretched
across Raven’s bicep to lodge partway in her arm but the second stab ripped a scream from her as the end of the crowbar slashed across her thigh.

  The large man froze instinctively before snatching his head to Alexei.

  Alexei sat impassively, seeing the first flash of red on travel-tarnished black latex stretched across a shapely thigh. Perhaps it would hint toward her fate, give her something to reflect on and Alexei knew how such things would play on a fatigued mind. He had wanted to be the first to draw the American’s scream, but he nodded to the men to allow the destruction of the crate around Raven to continue. He would let that damage to his property pass.

  The wood soon disintegrated, dumping the woman onto her bowed back, driving the air from her with a grunt and causing one of the earphones to loosen. If that didn’t succeed in emptying her lungs fully, the kick that followed did the rest, shifting her into the position they desired. Another kick had her shift a little more.

  There was no discussion, no word of warning, no humane interaction at all. She was an object to be positioned and she moved as their kicks decided. All Raven knew was that her body was no longer hers to control as it bucked in a blind and useless attempt to deflect each strike while shuffling to where she thought right.