Read Online Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) by Kimberly A. Bettes - Free Book Online Page A

gasped for air. With
his back to me, I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t think I wanted to.
    Moments
later, I didn’t have a choice. He whirled around and glared at me. He raced
across the room toward me and in a flash he was standing beside my mattress
looking down at me, still holding the poker.
    “This is
your fault,” he screamed, pointing the poker at my face.
    Still
pushing away sleep, I asked, “How the hell is this my fault?”
    “I went to
your room this morning to get you up and dressed. But you weren’t there,” he
said, his voice rising and falling as he spoke.
    “No. I’m
not there. Because you brought me down to this dungeon,” I screamed up at him.
“I didn’t ask you to bring me down here. I didn’t want this. So it’s your
fault,” I yelled, clearly having learned nothing yet.
    His
nostrils flared with anger. My attention focused on the poker and I thought
maybe I should stop yelling at him. I knew I should, but I also knew that my
back-talking sassiness was what he liked most about me. It was a fine line that
was sure to be the downfall of me once I stepped across it at the wrong time.
    For a
while longer, he stood over me, though he had at least lowered the poker and
now held it at his side. I watched as he slowly calmed down. His nostrils
stopped flaring, his chest quit heaving with his heavy breathing, and he finally
relaxed his grip on the poker.
    As he
calmed down, so did I , though I was still terrified.
I’d watched him kill Stephanie. And if she was already dead before I woke up,
then I’d watched him beat the hell out of a corpse. Either way, I knew I wasn’t
dealing with the average feller. This man was truly a psychopath, flying from
one extreme to the next in the blink of an eye. Professionals who had spent
years studying and researching people like him didn’t know how to deal with
them, so how was I supposed to know how to handle him? And unlike the pros, my
life depended on it.
    He tossed
the poker aside, but too far for me to reach. Even if I turned myself around
and stretched my body as far as it would stretch, I wouldn’t have been able to
reach it with my foot. Even in his madness, he was smart enough to know not to
leave it where I could get to it. That made him even more dangerous in my opinion
because even when it seemed that he’d lost all touch with reality and his
thoughts and emotions, he still knew what not to do. Scary.
    Thinking
of a way to get back on his good side and back to the main floor of the house,
I asked, “What are you going to do now?” I hoped he didn’t detect the tremor in
my voice.
    “I’m going
to have to get rid of it. It’s going to start smelling soon, and I don’t want
you to have to smell that.”
    Good. He
was looking out for me, in a sick sort of way. All hope wasn’t lost. I felt
certain that soon, maybe later today or tomorrow, he’d take me back upstairs.
He still liked me enough to not want me trapped down here with the smell of a
rotting corpse. Of course, my hope was destroyed when I asked for food.
    “Ron, what
time is it?”
    “Why? Do
you have somewhere you need to be?”
    “Yeah. I need to
be at home with my family, but since that isn’t possible, I was just
wondering.”
    Glancing
at his watch, he answered, “Seven thirty.”
    “I’m
hungry, and I need to pee.”
    After
staring at me for a few seconds, he put his foot against a plastic bowl that set
on the floor between Stephanie’s body and me and pushed it my way. I watched
the bowl slide toward me and stop a foot or so away from the mattress. I
reached out and pulled it the rest of the way to me. Looking inside, I thought
he was joking. He must be.
    “What’s
this?” I asked, looking up at him.
    “If you’re
hungry, eat that. It’s what I fed Stephanie until she quit eating. Poor thing
starved herself to death,” he said looking over his
shoulder at her body.
    “No, I’m
pretty sure you beat her to death with that there poker.” When I saw