“Let’s play a game,” I told him. With a flick of my wrist, I snapped open the cylinder. Four bullets clattered to the floor. “You might know this one,” I said, showing him the remaining bullet. I rapidly spun the cylinder, which in general was not a good common practice, before closing it back into the chamber. “It’s called Russian Roulette. But see, me and my less than single brain cell have added a twist onto it.” I pointed the gun at his head, the hammer still upright. “I ask you a question, and if you don’t give me an answer,thenI pull the trigger.”
Kayl spat at me, but his mouth was so dry from being gagged that it barely qualified as a loogy.
“I take that to mean you understand the rules of the game.” I dropped the gun from his temple, walked around behind him, slammed the six and a half inch revolver barrel into his asshole, and pulled back the hammer. “Let’s get started.”
Chapter Thirteen
Blood and piss splattered the concrete floor of my whiskey room as I pulled the trigger for the second time. The hammer snapped forward, theclicknearly drowned out by Kayl’s cry of pain, fury, and fear, but no bullet discharged. A pause filled the room, where the only sound was Kayl’s blustering gasps of breath.
“Too bad,” I muttered to him before pulling the revolver’s barrel from the depths of his ass. Blood and shit coated the blued steel, but I made no move to wipe it down. I wanted him to see, so there was no doubt in his mind what was being done to him. “Now,” I said, coming around to stand in front of him, “let’s try this again,hoa pili.” I stared down at his tear- and snot-stained face, but he didn’t so much as flinch at my calling him a close friend. I swung out the cylinder to show him the single bullet still inside. “What did you mean when you said every fucked up thing in our lives has been your doing?”
Despite his condition, Kayl smiled up at me. There was a small amount of blood on his teeth, hinting that he’d bitten his cheek ortongue. “You haven’t figured it out yet?” His laugh was as rough as sandpaper. “Guess you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
“Maybe not,” I allowed. “But I’m not the one who’s playing Russian Roulette with his asshole.”
Something darkened on his face. He tried to spit at me again, but barely anything came out. I snapped the cylinder closed, and felt a pang of joy when I saw his wince at the sound. He visibly squared his shoulders, bracing himself for round two.
“Do you know the odds of Russian Roulette?” As I walked to the back of the whiskey barrel again, I saw him trying to turn his head enough to keep me in his sights. But his dislocated shoulder prevented him from being able to turn fully, and I noted how his spine stiffened the moment I stepped out of his periphery. Fear of the unknown was a fickle bitch. “Now there’s the obvious, it’s one in six chances. Obviously that goes down to one in five, then four, then three…with each trigger pull. UntilBAM!” I shouted, and something twisted and dark inside me laughed when he jumped. “Now those are only your odds if you don’t spin the cylinder between each trigger pull. But as you saw, I did spin again.”
This time as I pushed the barrel up his ass, I took my time, drawing out the pain and humiliation of the buggering. I felt no guilt or regret for my choices. Maybe if more rapists got an eye for an eye punishment, there’d be less rape in the world. With only blood as lubricant, I had to twist my wrist several times to get the barrel back into position.
I put my left hand on the small of his sweaty back. “Which means,” I continued, “your odds remain at one in six a lot longer. Now, we’re only just getting started so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not hear my instructions the first time: answer my question or I pull the trigger. And this is the only time I will repeat a question.” I paused to pull back the trigger, not wanting the cocking sound to be covered up by my voice. “What else have you been fucking up in our lives?”
Kayl took big, gasping breaths before letting out a shout of fury. “Do it! Do it! Pull the trigger! Just fucking do it!”
I shrugged. “If you insist,” and I pulled the trigger.
If done correctly,torture was messy. Sure there were fancy ways, pressure points and the like, that lessened the mess, but personally, I believed that if your victim hadn’t pissed, shit, and vomited on themselves, they weren’t scared enough. Fear and time, those were my two biggest weapons.
I didn’t know the hour. We were in a windowless room with no electronic devices and I kept the room temperature controlled to prevent the angels getting their share of my whiskey.
The stench in the room was potent, his fear the garnish on top of the cake. And despite the number of times Kayl had beaten the odds, my determination had not weaned. Each time I pulled the trigger, I made a point to walk around so he could see how close to death he’d been. Sometimes I left the bullet in the same chamber before I spun the cylinder, and sometimes I took it out, put it in a different chamber, and then spun. Either way, I always snapped the cylinder back into place before either of us saw where the bullet had landed.
“Stop!Stop!Please, enough!”
I paused, the muzzle of the revolver just barely touching his bloody sphincter. “And why would I stop, Kayl? Give me a reason.”
“I broke Lu and Aloiki up!”
My eyebrows shot up so high and fast that I was surprised they didn’t go flying off my forehead. “The fuck?!” I jammed the barrel back up his ass. Leaving the revolver there, I walked around to his front. “The fuck did you just say?” I demanded over his screams.
“Take it out! Take it out! I’ll talk, just take it out!”
“You raped mywahine,” I reminded him coldly. “It stays in, but I won’t pull the trigger if you talk. What did you mean you broke Lu and Aloiki up?”
He was all out of tears at this point. They’d long dried up, the snot starting to crust under his nose. He spluttered, head hanging off the whiskey barrel in defeat. The floor in front of him was covered in bloody vomit. Both his ankles and wrists were shredded from his failed attempts to break free of his bindings.
“Both of you were so fucking happy in your love lives, but I’m a patient man. I planted little seeds to see what stuck. Kalea was such a scared little bitch for years, and I had to be careful around her. It wasn’t until she started to gain back her confidence that I knew I could really start to fuck with her. But Lu?” He tried to laugh, and only ended up coughing instead. “Lu was made of tougher hide. A word here, a concern slipped there… I let her mind fill in the rest. And they were both so poor at communicating, it was like slowly injecting poison to a wound.”
I grabbed him by his hair and forced his face up. “I don’t need the mad genius monologue! Just tell me what the fuck you did!”
“I called her. Aloiki left to join Kahoku on that last mission. It didn’t take much, just dropping the question of where he was. All it did was make her question if he was where he said he was—which he wasn’t. Next day, I got word that they broke up and she moved to the Mainland.”
Holy fuck. I let go of his hair, and his head dropped like a lead balloon, slamming his chin down on the side of the wooden barrel he was bound to.
I couldn’t argue with his claim that Lu and Aloiki had been poor communicators in their first relationship. Both were so set in their ways, and their love had been explosive. But also toxic. Aloiki used to share Lu with menhechose, because he liked the domination. She was all for it, equally getting off on theirpower dynamic. Their home life was where they struggled, and there was no denying that Kahoku had used Aloiki’s rage for his gain.
It took nearly five years of separation for both of them to realize that they were miserable without the other, and their stubbornness was just their pride talking. The one thing they were not willing to lose again was each other, even if it meant changing some things about themselves and their lives.