17. She Is The One.

The rage that had ignited in Damon the moment he'd seen those paintings and knew that Nick had used his vampiric powers to see into Mimi's mind, how he'd found her different sides, from the sex beast on up, and Damon's jealousy had flared up, igniting a rage inside him, a rage he didn't even want to hold.

He felt that hot red flame in his mind, and he gave in to his rage. Now nothing was going to come through as he was going to teach his wife a lesson, and teach her right then and there, he still considered her his wife and once they were married, he would continue to train her, using methods that others might not understand.

At first, he would stalk and try to get his victim to panic, and when she fought back, it made the rage escalate; the victim had to submit and fear him, and her panic and fear were a big part of the lesson. Still, he didn't give up even when Mimi went out on a gig.

He went to get his victim. He enjoyed her confusion. If the rage hadn't been on him, he would have easily sensed her stress and distress at what she had been forced to do, but no, he had used her memories against her as the rage weakened his judgment to see the consequences of his own actions.

 When he had drugged the victim and picked her up, he drove to the place where the lesson was being held; there, he carried her into the house, stripping her naked and laying her on the cold steel table.

He took a strong spiked chain, and with Mimi's right hand, he placed the shackle firmly on her delicate wrist and, with his strength, squeezed the shackle tightly, smelling her blood as the spikes bore into her flesh. He squeezed the shackle tightly around her wrist so that there was no hope of getting free.

The shackles were silver on the inside, and he smelled her burning flesh, smiled coldly, and now fastened her left hand above her head, then took her right leg, pulling her down on the table so that her arms were stretched very tightly. As far as he could, he pulled Mimi and now fastened her right ankle to the shackle in the same way, attaching the chain to the end of the table so that Mimi's legs would also be stretched out and spread. So that she would be exposed, helpless, and in pain. Perhaps he would get a taste of genuine fear from her first.

 Then there was the spiked collar, also silver, and it had spikes, hollow spikes he could inject medicine for, as these spikes would be directly into her carotid artery and sunk into her vein. He relished seeing the blood dripping from her neck as he tightened the collar around her neck. The front of the collar also had spikes, and they would sink directly into her throat, preventing her from speaking or screaming. He cannulated her and put the bag on the rack, ready for her to see, but did not yet turn it on.

I woke up tied to the table. I slowly got sensations all over my body, and they were not pleasant. First, I was naked, my arms and legs stretched as far as they could go, silver burning my wrists and ankles. Every breath I took hurt when I realized I was wearing a fucking collar.

The room was well lit. The walls were white; this was some kind of steel table I was on, and the chains were biting into my flesh when I tried to move my arm. I had no room to move, and this position was making it difficult to breathe; the collar wasn't helping. My head was still messed up from the drugs, and I was struggling to even get my vision to work. Something was embedded in my throat so that I couldn't make a sound. 

Damon was sitting on a bar stool, watching me. He was wearing a white tee shirt and black jeans, and his eyes were jet-black. The black veins were also spreading around his eyes.

His voice was crisp, sharp, and relentless. "Good morning, student. You're almost ready, so let's get started. This is your lesson, so try to listen and learn. This is simple. I have here three daggers. One silver, one platinum, and one gold, and all three will inject that metal into you every time I strike. You get ten strokes from each one, then I break all your ribs and another stabbing and breaking the ribs. We'll see how long you last. If I get bored with your ribs, we can move on to your spines. You won't get away with it unless I let go, and the lesson ends only when I see that it's gotten to the point. You can't fool me now, darling."

Damon stood up and started. Each series of blows was hard, fast, and savage, and the agony spread through my torso like wildfire. He stabbed with vampire speed, and my body didn't even have time to feel some of the individual blows as the agony began to mount and burn, ripping me apart. Now, he wasn't even enjoying himself yet and doing this slowly as he weakened me first.

He enjoyed breaking each rib and twisting them out of place so that they didn't immediately snap together, starting with the uppermost ones, which were almost at the collarbone. And then he broke my collarbone in passing. 

He sent various psychic pressures into my head and also dug up my memories, forcing me to go through some part of some memory. I didn't know which knife hurt the most; all shoved metal into me that stung and ached; the pain was excruciatingly gruesome; it wracked my soul. Damon talked a little.

If that pain or ache wasn't enough he dredged up the memory of how hard it hurt when Spike shoved me full of silver and aconite, somehow he made the two sensations merge and the agony almost incinerated my mind, now there was no escape no relief. 

I shook, I sweated, and I tried to make a sound, but nothing came. My eyes streamed tears, and the cruel look on Damon's face would not leave his face for a moment. The anguish clouded my mind, and I felt more helpless than I had ever been; I couldn't even reach the safety of my hiding place in my mind.

My consciousness didn't shut down as Damon hit me with stimulant after stimulant, and now I couldn't understand. I couldn't think of anything else but feeling helpless, pained, weaker, and frightened, even though he hadn't even sent the fear and terror yet.

 Every stab of the knife he stabbed into Mimi's body made the rage come on, combust with ever greater flame and ferocity. The rage prevented Damon's self-control from working, Damon's reason too. There was nothing but the endless fury he unleashed on the woman in front of him.

Everything was permissible, and now was not the time to think about the actions and their consequences. Every blow, every strike felt right, and Damon noticed hours later that his rage was subsiding at least a little, or it felt like it was, but the reality was that far more had passed.

He could smell the blood. He was covered in blood spatter himself, and the feeling of Mimi's bones snapping in his hands just felt so good as it helped his rage. He didn't realize that he was literally taking his rage out on Mimi when he could have found another victim.

Still, when Mimi endured it all, and this had to be taught, he taught. The rage didn't make him feel pity, no tenderness, nothing normal that Damon would have normally felt. The rage made him show his worst side to Mimi, and he enjoyed it. He was so enraptured that he couldn't even remember exactly every minute of what he had done or said.

He did tell me how many times he had stabbed me. We had now had 330 strokes. When my ability to heal began to fade, he was still cracking my ribs, not quite with the same fervor as before, but with enough fervor that I lost consciousness several times out of sheer pain. When he noticed that my healing ability was fading, he took the drugs.

" Darling, 390 strokes, and you're not healing very well, but no worries. We will continue with the lesson. Now I'm going to give you a little extra drugs. They'll add a nice little spice to this by taking you away from reality."

He'd stick drugs in my liver, my pancreas, my spleen. I was starting to be in other worlds. He put the fucking bag of drops in my drip.

He went on; rage gave no mercy, it had to be vented, but he was also now using his psychic abilities as a weapon, and he literally attacked Mimi with everything he had. He dredged up the worst experiences from her head, put them out, and stabbed her. He lifted her up and continued to calm her down and strike.

When she pressed against him, he took a golden knife and plunged it straight into her stomach looking into her drugged eyes with satisfaction. He had taken the collar off so he could slit her throat open. He also got to enjoy as she struggled and writhed desperately and weakly in his grip and helplessly in pain. 

I was standing, and I was hurting and badly. He kept bringing up memories, so I was, at any given moment in my memories, scared, distressed, and terrified. Someone held me and reassured me, don't worry, it hurt again, the anguish was ripping me apart and hard.

Sark said something or Krycheck, or I was there in the bubble, helpless; I couldn't stand. Somebody, at some point, it was Spike, or even Bran holding on, and again I was hurting so damn badly. My ribs hurt; the pain and agony stabbed me like a knife every time I tried to breathe, and I couldn't breathe properly.

My stomach pained me terribly, and the pain didn't stop. My heart was so painful that I couldn't breathe. My thighs hurt, and my back hurt. I was so confused, and someone always made me calm down so that the fear and terror didn't get the better of me, and still, it hurt. 

"I told you, darling, you'll learn, you see, it's all right. Good girl, just listen to the heartbeat, calm down, it's all right."

Horror, fear, pain, and speech all got mixed up in my head, and I no longer knew what was true and what wasn't who was hurting me. Someone was holding me against him, and then I felt the now bigger knife sink into the middle of my stomach, and Damon was really twisting it there, holding me still.

"You might not be going to be a new model right away, I hope. Won't you, darling?"

 Oh my god, the pain was racking me hard. The torment was ravaging my body, taking away my sanity, my abilities, and my strength. I felt myself getting weaker and weaker. My body wasn't holding up as well, and I was losing consciousness more and more out of sheer pain.

When I woke up, every place of my body was on fire. Stomach, chest, thighs, back. All were hit by one big knife after another. Then Damon put me back on the table and waited for me to recover, stabbing all the time. He slit my neck open several times, slashed across my stomach, and made me hold my own bowels in my hands. He kept talking, and I couldn't understand what he was saying, only the menacing tone of his voice, the darling words, and the passionfruit that permeated every part of me, smothering me.

Then I was sometimes lucid, weak with fatigue, and listening to my own ragged breathing as I tried to breathe, it hurt too much but my body needed oxygen now and I had to breathe even as the pain slammed through all the shields I had tried to develop in my mind.

Damon's shirt was wet with my blood, his hands were bloody, and there were splatters all over the room. I felt so lonely knowing Damon wasn't going to help, I'm not going to tell him what happened at the gig. He doesn't deserve to help. That memory would not be used as a weapon against me if he ever saw the need to give me another lesson.

 Sometimes, he would bite his wrist and spill his blood on my stomach to heal me for a while, and then it was good to stab me again. Mimosa said she didn't dare jump out, and I realized that Mimosa was also affected by fear and terror. I told Mimosa she didn't have to.

I was just a toy for Damon to vent his rage on, and now I couldn't understand or even love him. I was too broken, too abused, too much in anguish, and he had crossed so many lines in this business that I decided I had had enough. No more, now I could no longer understand, fight, or struggle; try to be and endure. My limit was reached.

 Damon stopped stabbing me and healed the wounds in my front again. But only my skin, not any of the internal mass that had once been my organs. Then he came to me, his eyes still black, merciless, and smiling coldly; he put both hands on my rib cage and began to squeeze my rib cage together with sheer force.

I felt rib piece after rib piece break, and the squeeze was even harder as he noticed how my rib cage began to give way. He watched me carefully to make sure that I stayed conscious. Then there was more stabbing and slashing, terror and fear, reality blurred, and a nightmare of pain took its place.

Now, the knife was plunged deep and pulled upwards, slicing my stomach open. In different places each time. Then another chest squeeze. He slammed his fist into my sternum and continued his squeeze. And the stabbing and slashing.

Finally, I didn't react to anything anymore as I couldn't take it. Damon stabbed and smashed my chest three more times.

Then he looked at me and said, "Hopefully, darling, this lesson will be enough for a while, but don't worry, you will remember this. "

I felt my pulse weakening. The darkness I knew was foreshadowing death crept into my field of vision, and Damon just stood and watched with a cold expression; I felt every shallow agonized breath my body tried to cope with, and my heart barely beat at all. The darkness was deeper, and the world faded away; there was only darkness. The pain stopped, and even though I had been killed so many times and had believed myself immortal, there was a moment just before my consciousness completely shut down where I feared or doubted if I would ever wake up again. Suppose he killed me for good? Then it stopped, and the darkness came.

Damon felt his rage begin to fade, and he crushed Mimi's ribcage, stabbed, slashed, and the rage faded away. He was already exhausted when it finally died down, and he spoke to her, intending to start dressing her wounds, but she stopped breathing, her dark eyes gazing glazed over nowhere through the half-open lids. Damon could no longer feel her thoughts, no longer hear her heartbeat. Her dry lips, now blue and pale all over, covered in blood spatter, were cracked, and her skin pale too.

Damon sat down on the barstool. He was exhausted, and he watched the dead woman for a while, still not hearing a heartbeat. He felt a tiny spark as he pushed as deep as he could into Mimi's empty mind, and it made him act. The lesson was now over.

He showered himself, washed up, and was still numb and tired. He felt no remorse, nothing. Then he took Mimi's body to the bathtub and rinsed it. The white skin and the open wounds all over Mimi's body were like ugly gaping mouths, and Damon couldn't bring himself to feel any remorse. The relief from rage burning his insides was just too much; it felt too good.

He lifted the woman's body back onto the table, retrieved the large bandages, and covered all the open, gaping wounds. But it didn't heal at all. He didn't fix the ribs or heal the wounds. Then he picked her up, wrapped in a blanket, and took her to the car. He drove back to the house and carried her to one of the bedrooms, to the bed. It was eight hours before Mimi's heart began to beat faintly and another two hours before she opened her eyes. 

I woke up in bed in pain, aching all over, and the pain threatening to stun me instantly. Damon was sitting in a chair looking at me, his expression neutral, as if he didn't care about my pain. He stood up and came and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me.

"Welcome back, now you rest, darling, and then you let the lesson go properly. I will say this only once. If you ever go to bed with any of the originals. We're finished. You understand. Then I never want to see you again. Then you're no longer my wife, not a vampire, not even a normal one if we ever get married. Eternity is a long time, and I'd spend it apart from you. This, darling, this is a promise. I promise you this. You understand. I don't promise easily. But this, this, I promise."

I said nothing in reply. I had decided that enough was enough. If his jealousy over a trifling matter should reach such proportions that he would stab me, drug me, abuse me for two weeks, killing me in the end, then now I would have neither him in my bed nor his help.

But I'm not going to tell him that. I'll fucking fix myself when I get time. Now, I let my anger get the better of me, but I kept my expression neutral and didn't say anything. I'd already learned to control myself. The gigs taught me effectively. Damon just looked at me, then he took something out of his pocket.

He gave me two capsules and said, "Swallow; they will help you sleep in the morning or when you wake up. It's already a new day, new ideas. I don't know how wild this is going to get."

He made sure I swallowed the capsules. I took them gladly because I was in a hell of a lot of pain, but I was so exhausted I couldn't even make a sound if something was hurting badly. I knew it wasn't going to be anything wild. I felt one arrhythmia after another hitting my heart; my breathing was very bad, and I wasn't at all sure I wasn't going to die again.

 Sex was the last thing on my mind, and I knew it would take time to heal, but I would do it all by myself. The capsules started to work, and I felt how heavy my eyelids were. I tried to find a position and eventually let the drug take me to sleep, where I was hurting all the time.

But no such luck. The drug didn't completely knock me out and didn't take away the pain. I was half asleep and suffering. I was literally crushed, and I had no organs even in shape for the whole damn drug to work; I dozed off, let the pissed-off feeling all over my body and yes, cursed my life.