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  Dark Matter

  An Extremely Dark Erotica

  Copyright ©2015 Brittany Adams

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Any questions, please contact the author at [email protected]

  Dark Matter is a work of fiction intended for mature readers. All sexually active characters are fictional, are consenting adults, and are over the age of 18 years. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  **This book is recommended for mature readers, 18 and over, unaffected by triggers. It contains scenes and situations that depict BDSM, some of which are graphic and might be considered disturbing.

  What you don’t know, sometimes can hurt you…

  Take two really messed up traits, put them together, and what do you get? Me, Lyric Ferguson, agoraphobic masochist. There’s a reason I’m this way. But that reason doesn’t matter right now because I’ve been kidnapped and left in the dark with a stranger, Nolan Kyrkos—sadist, assassin, and A-1, first-class dickhead.

  Neither one of us knows where we are, or why. And when our kidnapper gives me a task to complete—a task that is physically impossible, I realize I’m screwed.

  I’m going to die.

  But then I find a note: a piece of paper with information on it about me and Nolan. Information that couldn’t possibly be true. Because if it were, that would mean my whole life has been a lie.

  And Nolan might not be a stranger after all.

  “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

  ~Edgar Allan Poe~

  Chapter 1

  Secrets.

  Secrets come from shame. Shame comes from guilt. Guilt comes from that voice inside your head, that quiet whisper that says you’ve done wrong. But guilt can also come from the voice of others who are trying to manipulate you.

  As I jogged up Main Street and turned onto Maple Avenue, I thought about my secrets. My shame. That’s probably why I was in this mess to start with. A cold rain began to fall, and I walked a few paces before stopping and resting my hands on my knees. With no more warning than a flashing thought, my heart thudded and my chest squeezed, making it hard to breathe. The pavement began to roll away from me, so I straightened up and walked a few paces, keeping my hands on my hips. Standing still was the worst thing I could do when terror seized me this way.

  I had been dealing with this panic for a while now, leaving very few places I could go. Places that zenned my mind. Even grocery shopping had become an exhausting prospect requiring days of effort and planning. I would make a list of no more than ten items, then go through the aisles in my head, envisioning each object on its shelf. Finally, I would rearrange the list in the right order so I could move seamlessly through the aisles and get in and out as quickly as possible. Just thinking about it wore me out. That’s what agoraphobia does to you: first it imprisons you, then it zaps your energy.

  My neighborhood was one of those places I could just… be, without freaking out. I ran every day, even if it was raining and barely above freezing. And I was getting better, little by little. So having a panic attack this close to home should have been my first clue. I was always intuitive, but that day had been so helter skelter, I must have temporarily lost my groove.

  I was only two blocks from home, but I decided to push myself. Hard. I was angry, mostly with myself, but also with my boss. Today had been the culmination of a series of cluster fucks in my life. And I had to get over this or I might become homeless. I could become homeless. No denying it.

  No. More. Fear.

  So I went for one more lap around the block, looping unknowingly into the pivotal point where timing meets destiny. Where chance meets fate. Where my secrets began to unravel. Had I known what would happen… ah, hell. Who am I kidding? I’d have done everything just the same.

  Passing my house, I neared the Prendergast’s home, three doors down and across the street. About the nicest people I’ve ever known. You know the type. Always outside doing stuff, and when you walk by they wave and stop to talk to you like you’re old friends. One summer evening after a really bad day—the kind where you want to wrap yourself up in a blanket burrito and consume margaritas until you’re bleeding tequila—I had tried to run but ended up crying so hard I fell on the curb to gather myself. Mr. Prendergast must have seen me through his window, or maybe he was coming outside anyway, but he came over to check on me. He asked if I needed a safe place to stay for a while. It was the first time I realized that my secrets were not as hidden as I thought. Hard as I tried to cover up the darkest parts of myself, I was only temporarily shielding them. Everything’s bound to come out eventually. It was sadly comical. He was a psychology professor at the local university, and I had sometimes wondered if I could confide my secrets in him. If anyone could understand the warped space that was my mind, it would have been George Prendergast. I told him thanks but no thanks. I did not need a place to stay.

  As I came upon their house, I realized I hadn’t seen the Mrs. for a while, but she had been battling terminal cancer. And I thought my life was tough. It was then I felt that subtle twist in the gut telling me something bad was about to happen. Kind of like a force that hits you right before you get slapped in the face, warning you to cringe and duck. When I felt my gut twist, I instinctively turned around and headed home. It was probably just a lingering bad vibe from my unceremonious firing and the panic attack that was threatening my sanity at the moment. But I wasn’t up for taking chances.

  I walked up my short driveway, turning to go around back to get the pansies and relocate them to the front porch. We were supposed to have a hard freeze that night, and I didn’t want them to die. Taking care of my flowers during the dark winter months was the only thing that kept me sane, and the little petals were one of the few beautiful things in my world.

  Leaning down to pick up one of the pots, a face inside one of the purple blooms jumped out at me. If you look closely, pansies have a face in the middle of their petals. I honestly had never noticed before then. The face took me by surprise, its expression one of fear, the eyes spreading wide and the bearded mouth hanging in a frown. Arms appeared to be flailing out to the side, silently screaming for help.

  I stared at that silent scream as I heard the slick-wet sounds of footsteps approaching. I didn’t have the chance to turn around and see who it was. I didn’t have a second to scream out for help. And I didn’t have the opportunity to tell the pansy—whose face I had just seen for the first time—that everything was going to be all right. That I would be okay. Poor thing. Pansies shouldn’t have to live in fear. Yes. This was going through my mind at that exact moment I hung suspended between capture and unconsciousness. Between fear and denial. Between oh well and oh shit!

  But it wasn’t the pansy I felt sad for. It was me. The pansy was reflecting my own fears that hadn’t yet surfaced. This was a joke, see? All a horrible joke from somebody who thought that I hadn’t had a shitty enough day, a messed up enough life. Someone who thought they would show me what real tragedy was all about, so I would look back and see how easy every day of my life had been up to that point, and that I didn’t have a damn thing to be anxious about after all. Someone who knew my secrets. Every last one of them.

  Right before he cut off my air supply by pinching my nose and clasping his hand over my mouth, I caught a whiff of him. He smelled like rust and salami. It added a sick personal touch I wasn’t ready for. I didn’t want to know what he smelled like. It put him too close. I wanted him far away. Out of sight, out of olfactory range, out of mind.

  Oddly enough, his movements were fairly gentle for an attack from a stranger. It didn’t hurt or anything. I only felt a rising panic I tried to rationalize in my mind. It sounds weird, but I think I sped through the first few stages of grief, stopping right around the bargaining step.

  This is a trick. Am I on candid camera?

  I’ll kill the fucker!

  If I could go back, I would have gone out for coffee instead of coming home.

  Just let me live and I’ll start going to church again.

  But there were no cameras, and I couldn’t go back. And I knew I would never go to church again, so that promise was empty because it was made under duress. If God were real, he would have seen right through it. If he wasn’t real, he couldn’t hear me anyway.

  I reached around with my one free arm—he had the other one pinned to my side—and tried to scratch him, pull him off me, rip his jacket, whatever a 25-year-old, 5-foot-eight, 121-pound girl could do to keep her freedom.

  But it was all in vain. His hair was too short. And wet. Slippery. I couldn’t get a grip. And my nails weren’t quite long enough to do any damage, at least not from this angle.

  Maybe they’ll find DNA under my chewed off keratin.

  Water from the sky pelted my face as things went hazy. The warmth of his breath hit my neck, and he grunted, the vibrations from his voice hitting me physically. Every other detail could fall away from my mind and crumble to Never-Never land, but there’s one thi
ng I’ll never forget. It remains etched in my memory, a perfectly painful reminder in the deep recesses of my mind. It was something I felt right before consciousness slipped away.

  My attacker had an erection.

  It pressed against my backside as his arms and body held me in place. I remember being stunned, but then suddenly I became too weak to move. My fingers slipped down the side of his neck, slick from the rain. Warm lava coursed through my veins, all my emotions melting away, freezing temperatures be damned.

  There was only one man who could get hard doing something like this. And that was my ex, John Ragan.

  But John was dead.

  And as the dark rings encircled my vision just before I collapsed, I believed I was joining him in death, wherever he was.

  Chapter 2

  I was dreaming I was stuck in a glass jar and people were throwing pebbles and rocks at me. It was one of those domes used to store pocket watches with the little hook hanging from the top. I kept running behind the watch because I was worried the rocks would break the glass and hit me. But every time I ran to the other side, the watch would disappear and the pebbles would multiply. More and more pebbles. They were everywhere. All over the ground and all around me.

  I woke up to the sound of pinging, but my eyelids were heavy. Stuck. Like someone had glued them shut. When I was finally able to peel them open, I couldn’t see a thing. Darkness engulfed me.

  I was lying on my side. I think it was a floor. It was cold and hard, and my legs were bare, but at least I still had panties on and my tank top. Freezing temperatures gripped me from head to toe. My arm was asleep so I rolled over, ever so slowly because it felt like I was moving through quicksand. My tongue was even stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  I reached up and felt through my hair. The scar was still there. I don’t know if I thought it would be gone or if I was dreaming I had gone back in time. Had it always been that small? Maybe I had traveled so far in the future it had shrunk.

  Once on my back, I was able to pinpoint where the pinging sounds were coming from. Above me, a sliver of light crept through an opening in the wall. If I wasn’t mistaken, it sounded like sleet hitting a window.

  Sleet. Cold. Rain.

  You were attacked.

  The memory jolted me and every nerve in my body stood on end. I had no idea where I was or why. If I could just get up off the floor and look through the opening. My legs were so heavy, I wasn’t sure if they would support my weight.

  When had this happened before? Why was this familiar?

  John…

  But John was dead. Deader ‘n hell. Do people come back from the dead? No, people do not come back from the dead, unless you’re in a movie.

  Whoever had done this was hiding from me. Hiding in the dark. John never hid from anyone, especially me. No. He’d always done what he did in plain sight. He wanted me to know what he was capable of. Didn’t want to keep that one a secret. He was proud of the way he abused me. Showed that shit off. And I had craved it like a drug. Until it almost killed me.

  Someone else was responsible. Maybe someone connected to me losing my job today, or whenever that happened. I didn’t even know what day it was. I remembered sitting in my boss’s office—it seemed like today—and him telling me they had all made an executive decision.

  Even though I knew my boss was an asshole, I decided this couldn’t be connected to what happened earlier. It just seemed too ridiculous. Not unless my boss had an extreme vendetta against me and decided that firing me from my job wasn’t enough of a punishment for “wasting his time and making a mockery of his law firm.”

  My birthday was coming up, but so what? I didn’t have any friends anyway. No one to throw me a surprise party—or a surprise kidnapping. And now that I was jobless, no one to report that I was missing from work.

  Fuck my life really hard right now.

  I laid still for what seemed like a lifetime, not by choice but because I was too weak to move. I kept thinking someone would come in the room to tell me why I was here. Tell me my fate. Something. Anything.

  I glanced back up at the window again, sure this time that it was a window. The pelting had died down some, but it was still there. It was so dark my eyes couldn’t adjust, even with the tiny bit of light slicing through the window. It was like someone had sucked all the light that existed right out of this room.

  I reached my right arm across the floor, afraid of what was next to me. Small rocks littered the area. I picked them up and held them between my fingers, letting them fall back down. I did this over and over, my mind cloudy with confusion. The sounds of the rocks hitting the floor sounded like my dream, and I began to wonder if I was lying in a grave.

  ∞

  I must have drifted off again. When I woke up, the cold air cut through my skin, all the way to my bones. I shivered, feeling more alert this time. Reality began to sink in all around me. And with it, fear.

  My heart drummed, and I realized I had been caught. I was someone’s prey. But I had the strength now to actually move more than just my arms. I could get off this jagged floor and look through the hole.

  Agonizing pain crushed me like led weights, and I cried out as my body rolled upward into a sitting position. I reached around to my back and felt some pebbles stuck to my flesh. Pulling them off brought instant relief.

  I felt the wall next to me, running my fingers along the surface, still unable to see a thing. My hands would have to be my eyes. It felt like concrete, uneven and broken, just like the floor. Holes and pits were scattered along here and there. I reached up as high as I could, just to get my bearings, but I couldn’t reach the window. When I felt strong enough, I decided to stand up, holding onto the wall to keep my feet steady. My body seemed to be relearning up from down and left from right.

  Pain shot through my quad when I pushed off the floor. My hand flew over the spot, but massaging it only made it worse. After a few seconds, the pain subsided and I straightened my back.

  The room started spinning, and gravity began its cruel, cruel trick, pulling me to the ground. My body leaned to the right and I felt queasy all of a sudden. I gripped my stomach and leaned my head against the wall, sweat pouring out of my face, my back, my hands, every inch of me. If I had to pick a color right now, it would be bile green. I took in a few deep breaths and exhaled slowly, fighting the temptation to sit back down. Getting up had been such hard work, I didn’t want to go through it all again.

  This must be how vermin feel when they get trapped in your house. Always crawling around looking for an escape route. Hey, someone had put me in here. There had to be a way out.

  I fought the urge to vomit, suspecting that if I did, there would be a penalty. I swallowed and wiggled my jaw, focusing on my happy place.

  Where was my happy place now? Was it closer? Further away? It seemed much, much further away. It felt much, much further away. What was that expression, the closer you get to hell the more you’ll understand my point of view? No, that wasn’t an expression. That was something John used to say. There was no disputing I felt very close to hell right then. But I sure didn’t understand anyone’s point of view any better. Ah, but that was so long ago and this was now. I had laid that demon to rest with all my other secrets. Hadn’t I?

  I had always fantasized about moving to the California coast, but when it came right down to it, my happy place was really more of a time. Let’s see if I can explain this. If my life were a timeline with little happy faces and sad faces to represent the years, you would see mostly sad faces. Until that year before I met John. Then you’d see one big happy face. That’s where I go inside my mind, to that time. A lot.

  Talk about living in the past. I was at my best that year. Not to be cliché, but I had the world in the palm of my hands. I had finally put the tragedy behind me. Forgiven myself of the big secret. I had even let go of the hatred I had for my parents, particularly my father. That hatred was shredding my soul, and it felt so good to finally bury it. But I must not have completely buried it because I was still so easily sucked into John’s virulent world of lies. Looking back, I could have done things. Important things. I should have gone places. Fun, exciting places. I could have saved myself from the damage that was to come. The damage that ruined me for life.