Running Wilde (#Wattys2015 #Urban)

Ch. 7 | Rock-A-Bye Baby (Part I)

Hey readers, here's the first part of the new chapter (woohoo!). I REALLY didn't like what I wrote before, hence I didn't post it because you guys deserve only the very BEST (with the occassional typo because I have a tendency to write whilst under the influence #LoveMeDontJudgeMe) lol. Anyway, here's the first part just so you can see that I haven't been pissing about.

Please VOTE + COMMENT if it gives you feels ^-^ 

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Six hours, forty-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds. It had been six hours, forty-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds since Aiden had walked out of the basement and left Ava dangling from the ceiling in tears. He knew because he had been timing it on his phone the moment he set foot outside of the bleak grey main room in the basement with the bright fluorescent lights. For six hours, forty-seven minutes and twenty-two seconds, Ava-Marie Lockewood was denied comfort, human contact and nourishment. By the time the seventh hour struck she would have run through every emotion pertained to her situation –anger, fear, resentment, denial, self-pity, sorrow, and once the seventh hour arrived -surrender. She would be so exhausted from channelling all of her energy into trying to process and escape from the mental and physical prison that Aiden had constructed from the jagged pieces of her shattered reality that she would just give up, and that was when he would finally acknowledge all of her unanswered cries for help.

It was always tiresome to wait out the first few hours with a hostage; they made such a terrible racket as they stormed through the phases, but if you kept them uncomfortable enough and didn’t attend to their basic human needs, sooner or later they would fall silent and accept that their tragic fate was in your hands. Of course you had to make sure that you caught them before they wore themselves out and fell asleep, because once they had had a rest from their living nightmare and actually had a chance to dream of better days, they’d wake up and realise that they had something to fight for, and then you’d have to start the waiting process all over again. Aiden was anxious to get Ava out of there so he could initiate the next phase of his torture.

Over the years, Aiden studied the people he captured and found that a certain personality type followed a certain pattern. He had passed some of his waiting time by thoroughly scouring through her Facebook profile to better understand her so he knew what to do with her next. Ava was a humanitarian. Like Aiden, Ava had a saviour complex, but hers was pure. She was passionate about making the world a better place for everyone else, even if she couldn’t benefit from it, which is why she participated in so many good causes. Ava’s father had provided her with an exceptional life, making sure she wanted for nothing, making sure that she knew that she was loved, cared for, and that she had his support (no matter how radical her charitable endeavours). Ava was happy, and all she wanted was to spread that happiness to other people, requiring no personal gain, not like Aiden did. 

Ava was something beautifully rare; she was made of so much unfiltered light and love that it almost bothered Aiden that he had crashed into her world so hard that he left cracks in her skin. Although she had proven to be an angel on paper, Aiden could sense wildfire in her veins. It flared to life when he touched her, making itself known by the wicked way her cinnamon skin flushed rose gold and burned like a double shot of Appleton rum, the way her toasted early autumn eyes flashed like afternoon sunlight peeking through the quivering leaves, and the way her short, sharp, shallow breaths became heavier, struggling to take flight from between her pleasantly parted lips. That inner fire was craving to consume her and burn her golden halo of virtue to blackened ashes of pleasurable sin.

That is how Aiden would ruin her; his darkness was going to slip between the cracks in her skin and fill them with gasoline, then present her with a match disguised as a new cause to fight for; him. Once she reached for him she would catch alight and it would be all over for her -the price of Aiden’s ‘salvation’ was Ava’s destruction.