GENERAL WARNING FOR STORY: ADULTS ONLY. Violence, blood and gore, coarse language, adult themes, coercion, and sexual content. If you don't like it then don't read!

DISCLAIMER: Same as chapter 1.

A/N: I'm grateful for all of you leaving me lovely messages of encouragement and liking the story! It's hard when you don't know how your writing's being received and all your reviews mean a huge lot :)

EXTRA WARNING for this chapter:
This chapter is brutal. I managed to disturb myself writing it. There's blood and gore and rape (but not necessarily what you'll be expecting) as well as some seriously twisted mind-messing.

Not for the faint-hearted!

~ Nyx ~

CHAPTER 4

Victor Creed was Death personified.

Strangely, after all the horrifying events of that night, it was still the sight of him standing there that was to become the abiding image of him that came to mind when she thought of him. A cut of the night impervious to the howling blizzard, the tails of his black trenchcoat flapping amidst the dense swirls of hail and snow, gleaming blood dripping from his fangs and claws. And those dark eyes, aglow with bloodlust, staring right at her.

They came three hours later in the dead of night, masking their approach in the sudden blizzard that had engulfed the high mountain peaks.

Three long hours, a series of one hundred and eighty slow minutes that had rolled arduously from one into the next, spent sitting there quivering on the floor after her legs had given way beneath her, staring at the door handle as she waged an internal battle over the impossible decision. Victor had spelled out her best chance of escaping him, a head start until dawn. But it was on his terms, with her holdall of vital supplies confiscated and probably destroyed to pieces by now, and even before the icy winds began howling across the mountains she knew that such a venture would only serve one man and one purpose – a hunt for Victor Creed, with the culmination as promised to fuck her raw. Yeah, thanks, but No Thanks.

Not that the alternative held much more appeal – remaining on the premises like a trapped deer just waiting to be pounced upon – but she knew she'd have the teeniest bit more chance of escape if he wasn't already tracking her departure. Surely he couldn't watch her all the time, he was bound to leave her unguarded sooner or later. True, he might attack her in the meantime if she waited too long, but he'd also said – she recalled with a wince – that she'd be able to walk for a while longer if she stayed put so she had to hope that he'd either meant what he'd said or that he wouldn't abuse her too much for a little while at least, and she'd look for her opportunity in the meantime. Logically, she felt it was the right decision. Suppressing her primitive instinct to hightail it out of there as fast and as far away as possible, however, was another matter entirely.

She hadn't heard anything over all the howling outside and the winds buffeting the shutters. The first hint of trouble she detected was the creak of a soft, heavy tread outside her door. Her breath froze in her lungs – but Victor kept moving and his careful steps quickly fell beyond her range of hearing. Then the wind suddenly whistled through the lodge for a brief second before being cut off by the thud of the front door closing.

She wavered in long moments of indecision before curiosity finally won out and she found herself creeping cautiously down the dark corridor. She tiptoed through the flurry of white that had swept into the hallway in the wake of the mutant's departure and through into the den over to the windows at the front of the lodge. The world outside had transformed from when she had taken in the sight earlier, now a muted gloom tinted with faint light reflecting in the dense blizzard. Peering out into the maelstrom of hard pellets of snow flying every which way, she caught glimpses of dark shadows through the ebb and flow of the thick white flurry.

Seven dark figures dashed at a half-crouch for the house, three on one side, two on the other, and two straight down the middle. She saw the silhouettes of handguns and rifles before they ducked under the porch. They waited. One second, two seconds, three – the middle two separated themselves from the shadows and crab-walked, still crouched, across the porch towards the door.

Sofie ducked away from the window and sprinted back to her room in the gloom, grabbing her boots on the way from beside the front door. Pressing the door shut quietly, she shoved her feet into the boots and made a scrambled effort at the laces before throwing on her waterproof jacket. It was too thin to provide decent insulation in such weather as this but it was better than nothing.

The noise of the storm suddenly leaped in decibels, whistling through the house as someone opened the front door. Cold air slithered through the gap under the door and whispered around her ankles.

Sofie grit her teeth. She had a pocket knife and flashlights and a myriad of other things that would have been extremely useful round abouts now, if only she had her holdall with her.

Real helpful, Victor.

Her eyes landed on the wooden chair by the side table. She crept over to it, hefted it silently above her head, and positioned herself by the hinged side of the closed door. Her eyes flickered between the window and door just in case, not wanting to be caught out.

She had no idea whether these men were after her or Victor but she knew she had no friends with a fetish for creeping stealthily around in the dark dressed all in black. So when the door handle turned ever so slowly, the door opened in stealthy inches and a dark figure stepped silently into the room, she had no compunction at smashing the chair down over the guy's head.

"Ugh!" He collapsed in a heap.

She barely saw him fall before she leaped over his swearing shadow – only to smack straight into a second man she hadn't seen behind the door.

But luck was on her side. His startled surprise at finding her literally flying into his arms made him hesitate for a split second, all the time Sofie needed to yank herself free. He reached for her but she shoved him hard, adrenaline giving her strength, and the back of his head connected with an audible crack on the doorframe.

She left him groaning and legged it down the corridor. The front door was wide open. She shot out into the swirling snow.

She heard one of the men behind her shout in the instant before she was swallowed up in the storm.

"Sofie!"

So it was her they were after. It didn't make her stop. In fact she pushed on harder, stumbling through the rapidly building snow on the rocky ground. Their cries reached her faintly through the blizzard.

"Stop!"

"There's no point running, Sofie!"

"We don't want to hurt you!"

The last was a woman's voice. Sofie pushed on. Her eyes were tearing up and her face and ears stinging from the biting cold wind. A low-hanging branch whipped her cheek as she dashed passed a tree. Her toe caught on something, she stumbled, found her feet and kept running.

"Get back here!"

"Stop, Sofie!"

A mass of black barrelled at her from out of nowhere. Her instinctive half-scream was lost in Victor's wild roar. She threw herself to the ground and the stygian shadow leaped over her.

Sofie glanced behind her to see a man flung fifteen feet into the air, bent backwards at an unnatural angle.

"MUTAAAANT!" somebody screamed.

Multiple shots were fired, strangely muffled in the storm. Victor staggered a step but otherwise seemed unfazed. His clawed hand disappeared right into a man's mid-section as he practically carved the guy in two.

Sofie stared slack-jawed, somehow knowing that she was safe from him at this particular moment, entranced as the gory painting unfolded before her very eyes.

Victor dropped to all fours and made a great leap at two men huddled behind an outcropping of snow-crusted rock. Fangs ripped out one man's throat, the other had his neck snapped with a sickening crunch. Victor was off again and in the blink of an eye he had smashed the fifth man's head to half the size nature had intended and then tore an arm clean off the sixth man, sending the severed limb flying like a comet with a trailing jet of blood, the hand still clenched on the semi-automatic pistol.

Victor drew up and took stock of the carnage around him.

White stained with warm splatters of red, glistening body parts cooling on the snow.

Then his head swung towards her.

It was an eternal moment, their gazes locked in a spark of connection that they couldn't describe. For that one endless moment the storm abated, the world disappeared. All that existed was Victor's savagery and Sofie mesmerised by his raw animalistic power.

He blinked – and the world rushed back amidst a great howling of white. He turned his attention to the seventh figure.

It was the woman who had called out earlier. Sofie jolted in recognition – it was one of Blaine's many on-again-off-again bit on the side who also moonlit as a hired gun. Cannelita, Sofie had once heard him call her. She was part of the harem of stick-thin, willowy women who always seemed to be loitering in skimpy bikinis by the pool, shamelessly flirting and making out with Blaine. Sofie had happily left them to it.

Cannelita looked like an entirely different person now. She was shaking softly, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Her usually sun-kissed Mediterranean skin was unnaturally ashen, making the red spray of more than one dying man's blood over her face stand out in stark contrast. But the most disturbing thing was the way she stared blankly at the gutted body at her feet, her brown eyes shockingly vacant.

Victor's mouth slanted into a crooked grin. He collected the surviving victims by their necks – the woman who stumbled along in dead shock and the three-limbed man who promptly began flailing in blind panic – and trudged back to the lodge.

Sofie didn't know how long she stayed crumpled there, chilled to the bone and her skin burning from the icy wind. God only knows how many times she looked out into the darkness, the mountain obscured by night and blizzard, how many times she looked back towards the light that switched on at the lodge. Between a rock and a hard place, indeed.

She wavered between berating herself furiously for her earlier decision – What the hell had she been thinking? She should have taken all the head-start she could get and legged it the moment he'd released her! Foolish, foolish woman! – and, in the next moment, quivering in renewed fear at what had just happened and being inordinately relieved that she hadn't invited Victor's full attention on herself by playing his twisted game. She shuddered as her over-agitated imagination conjured up all sorts of sickening eventualities when – definitely when, not if – he caught up with her.

But then her distressed gaze cast out into the churning storm and she was horribly tempted again to run. Even knowing that it would be the death of her out there, ill-equipped and clothed only for milder conditions as she was, therein lay the possibility of freedom. A tiny ray of hope that was a heavenly balm to her soul embittered by eleven years of captivity, the blizzard sang out at her full of promise...

She was pulled back yet again at the thought of Cannelita and the stranger with the amputated arm trapped back at the lodge. Never mind that they shouldn't have come after Sofie in the first place. What Victor might do to them... What he might do to the woman...

Did Sofie have it in her to do something? Anything? What would Victor do to her if she tried to intervene...? As she shied away from that thought, however, Freddy's blood-curdling scream echoed from the darkest recesses of her mind.

She creaked painfully to her feet. Frightened almost out of her mind, fighting her demons and the cowardly voices clamouring in her head, she leaned into the driving wind and plodded one step after another back towards the lodge.

The light, she realised as she approached with her teeth clattering from the biting cold, came from the side of the building. A trap door half submerged underground, the snow had been cleared like black angel wings where the corrugated iron slabs had been swung open to reveal concrete steps leading down.

Her legs locked up, refused to go any further. That was not a good place. She knew it as clearly as if there had been a sign saying This Way To Hell.

"Oh, fuck," she muttered.

She tried to will her feet to move but her heart wasn't in it. Her heart didn't want to be anywhere near here. So she considered leaving, running away, but her heart also cowered at the thought of Victor catching her and her feet still refused to cooperate. They had well and truly dropped anchor.

"Fuck," she repeated.

"I did offer."

She yelped, leaped clean off the ground and almost fell over. The voice had been right in her ear and true enough, there was Victor, not an arm's length away, as solid as a giant granite block in the buffeting wind.

"Jesus Christ!" Sofie gasped. "I thought you were –"

– playing with your latest victims, she finished silently in her head. She couldn't bring herself to say it aloud.

Victor quirked a questioning brow.

"... down there," she finished lamely. In the back of her mind she tried, and failed spectacularly, to recall what on Earth had possessed her to return to the mutant's lair.

He gave her a grin full of evil tidings and made a sweeping gesture to the open trap door. "After you, frail."

She tasted bile.

In one of the cells of the concrete bunker the man was chained by his legs and remaining arm to the wall. He was a blathering wreck, screaming obscenities at the mutant one second and begging for his life the next. She could still hear him clearly as Victor completely ignored the poor man and pushed her into the next cell.

Cannelita was chained to the floor spread-eagled, lying silent and unmoving except for the constant tremors racking her body. Vacant, unblinking eyes stared into thin air. She was nothing but an empty shell in a body automatically ticking on.

"Oh God..."

Victor crouched and grabbed the dark hair to lift the woman's face for a closer look. "She's gone," he observed as indifferently as he might note that they had run out of carrots in the larder.

"Oh. My. God..."

His eyes swung up sharply to Sofie. "Don't tell me you're losing it too."

Her frazzled fear was beginning to form into something harder. "Victor, she has to get to a hospital."

"What, and spoil my fun?"

She barely heard him. She burned with an unshakable need to do something. This was wrong. So wrong. "They both do! We need an ambulance. No, a helicopter." She suddenly remembered the blizzard. "Shit."

Huge hands clamped down on her shoulders. "They ain't going nowhere."

She shoved his hands off, barely registering the action as the cogs busied themselves in her brain. "Mountain rescue! They might still be able –"

A growl was all the warning she received before his hand clamped around her neck and she was slammed against the wall, her feet clean off the floor. A strangely detached part of her mind wondered if she'd end up with a longer neck seeing as how his hand was so large that it seemed to stretch her head and shoulders further apart, but the rest of her took up the more rational pursuit of desperately trying to pull his hand off.

"They ain't going to hospital!" he growled in her face.

"But they'll die!" she croaked.

"They will anyway! I'll skin them, chop them to pieces –"

"You can't do that, they're people!"

"I'll do whatever the fuck I please, frail."

"No! You can't just... do things like that!"

"Oh, but I do. That's who I am, frail. Ain't nobody been able to stop me before, and ain't nobody gonna stop me now. Least of all you."

Her fearful anger really wasn't healthy for her. She knew it even before the insults started flying out of her mouth. "You pigheaded, obstinate, overgrown –!"

A dark, almost demonic shadow eclipsed his face. The next moment he slammed her down to the floor right beside Cannelita and held her there by the neck.

But it wasn't Sofie that he attacked. Not directly. He kneeled between Cannelita's spread legs and began shredding her clothes.

"Victor, no!" The only one screaming was Sophie. Cannelita was catatonic, no awareness in her eyes whatsoever even with the claws slashing her clothes and skin.

"Please, stop! You don't have to do this! Please! Vi –"

He unzipped his trousers, tugged them down with his black underwear, and all of a sudden she lost her voice. God help her, against her own volition, she looked.

Her eyes almost fell out of their sockets. She had once heard that blue whales packed the largest equipment on the planet and African bull elephants the largest on land. Now she could add to the list – Victor Creed must have been the most well-endowed of the entire male population of the human race. Overgrown indeed...

Victor regained her attention with a squeeze of her neck. Caught staring, her face burned at his intensely smug sneer. He shifted, bracing himself off the floor with the hand not holding Sofie down and positioned himself at Cannelita's entrance.

Fierce brown eyes seared into horrified blue, ensuring he had her complete attention before he plunged into the body beneath him. Sofie flinched. His hand around her neck was tight enough to restrain without suffocating her, and as he built up a steady rhythm and systematically crushed the catatonic woman into the concrete floor, she was rocked in time to each and every powerful thrust and dull jingle of chains. Sofie could only stare, her mouth agape in a silent scream, feeling every slam of his hips as if he was really hammering into her. On and on he went, relentless, the pace mounting, the hand on her neck becoming hotter, tighter –

Abruptly he released her. But Sofie didn't move. She couldn't. Victor roared his release, head thrown back, bared fangs gleaming white and his neck muscles bulging, locking his crushing grip on the unresponsive body beneath him. Claws sliced through flesh, fingers crunched through bone, and the poor woman's body finally followed her mind into death.

Victor wiped himself on shreds of the woman's clothes and zipped up. He grabbed the unmoving frail under the arms and shifted her away from the spreading pools of blood, propped her into a sitting position against the wall before leaving the cell.

For several bone-chilling seconds Sofie was alone with the woman who had once been called Cannelita, accompanied only by the faint echoes of the blizzard somewhere above their heads. The screaming man had fallen silent at some point, she didn't know if he was still alive. If he was he likely wouldn't be for long. She stared aghast at the naked, bloody body, not wanting to see but finding it impossible to turn away from the grim spectre.

She quaked deep down inside, her overwrought emotions shaking, swelling, spiralling –

She only managed to tear her gaze away when Victor returned with a hose that he attached to a tap in the wall. He then moved to crouch before Sofie, studying her face, seeing the awareness returned to her eyes.

With building momentum, the pressure in her head and heart snowballed, until she burst in a great pinnacle of fury that pierced through the numbness.

She glowered belligerently at his darkly sated face.

"You're one sick piece of work, Victor Creed."

A/N: Blimming hell... *deep breaths*

Does anyone actually read these sorts of stories? Be great if you can let me know what you think!

~ Nyx ~