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The clock on her bedside table clicks over to three a.m. Kirsty’s fingers drift idly over the puzzle box cupped in her palms, her gaze focused on the etchings emblazoned across the surface and yet her thoughts a million miles away.
Fatigue pulls at her bones, ringing her eyes in shadow, and yet sleep refuses to come. There’s too many horrors waiting whenever she closes her eyes - her vile uncle laughing as he’s ripped to pieces, her wicked stepmother bloodied and wrapped in chains, her father -
A sob fills her throat, chokes her, but Kirsty swallows it back, her fingers going tight around the box.
For a moment the desire to throw it is so overwhelming she nearly succumbs to the urge. She should have destroyed the thing days ago, should have tossed it into the fire and let it smolder within the ashes of her father’s house, and yet here it sits within the bowl of her palms, cold, sharp, unfeeling.
Patient.
It’s almost comforting, in a strange way, as though there were someone in the room with her, their gaze heavy upon her worn face. She stares into the lacquered surface of the box and does not see herself staring back.
She sees him. The Cenobite. The Hell Priest.
Pinhead.
Her breath catches in her throat, fingers going tight around the box, but she doesn’t throw it, doesn’t cast it from her sight. She stares into its surface, into the face of the entity that has haunted her bloodied dreams, and her thumbs slip along the arcane symbols in a pattern that seems to be etched into the depths of her soul, her pulse rushing in her ears.
The whir of shifting mechanisms steals the moisture from her mouth, her lips trembling as the center of the puzzle box rises from its chamber, twists, and eases its way back home.
The nondescript walls of her rented room begin to crack and quiver, light spilling from between the gaps in the plaster. The puzzle box drops from Kirsty’s numb hands, fingers stiff and frozen even as her breath burns in the column of her throat.
She knows what’s coming. Who is coming.
His silhouette fills the threshold, light spilling across his leather-clad shoulders and the crown of pins decorating his skull. She waits for the others to appear, and somehow isn’t surprised when they don’t. This summoning was not meant for them.
“Kirsty Cotton.” Her name sits heavy in his mouth, strange on his tongue. Warm, as though he were greeting an old friend. She hates the way it makes her shudder. “Tell me, are you ready at last to receive our gift?”
“Your pain,” she croaks. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it? That’s all I’d ever get from you.” Pain, horror, heartbreak, the kind that razes at her flesh like a knife.
“Sensation,” he corrects, black eyes flashing in the dim light of her bedside lamp. “The likes of which few shall know, and even fewer shall deserve.”
“And I deserve it?” she bites out, her fingers twisting into fists atop her naked knees.
The entity’s lips twitch in the facsimile of a smile. “You ache for it.”
Kirsty’s breath catches in her throat. It burns in her mouth, sits bitter on her tongue, aches against her teeth. Her eyes narrow into angry slits.
“You lie,” she spits, her stomach churning with denial. “All you want is pain. All you give is pain.” Images of her father’s bloodied corpse fills her mind, discarded and left to rot. She grits her teeth against her rising tears and glares into the placid face of the Hell Priest. “It’s all you’ve ever fucking given me.”
The Lord of the Cenobites says nothing, his black eyes trained unerringly on her damp cheeks and bared teeth. It enrages her, his silence, his presence, and she finally gives into the urge to wrap her fingers around the puzzle box and toss it to the floor at his feet. It clanks loudly against the hardwood, but even so, Pinhead’s eyes fail to drift from hers, as if the damned box doesn’t even register to him.
Rage floods through her blood at his unbroken stare, her skin prickling with it, crawling with it. “I gave you Frank,” she hisses. “I gave you what you wanted and what did I get in return?”
Pinhead’s placid stare refuses to falter. “You wish for a reward.”
“I wish for my father back!” Kirsty screams, and the tears come then, hot against her flushed cheeks. “I wish I could forget any of this ever happened, I wish it would stop hurting, I wish I could sleep without seeing - “ She cuts herself off with a frustrated cry, dragging a shaking hand over her wet eyes.
The Hell Priest’s visage swims before her blurred vision, swaths of pale white skin, black leather, and blood.
“Your father is gone,” his deep voice rumbles down the length of her spine. “The hurt remains, to remind you. I will not rid you of it.” His gaze bores into her own. “But I will give you sleep. Pleasure. Should you wish it.”
Kirsty swallows, saliva sticking in her throat. “And the pain?” she asks, her voice weary, small.
Pinhead dips his head. “The pain has been dealt.”
It’s a trick, Kirsty thinks. A ruse, a trap. And yet part of her knows it to be true. Part of her wants it to be true, to sleep, to feel something other than the numb ache of loss, the horror of blood and torn flesh and her uncle’s poisonous words spilling from her father’s lips.
To feel, to forget, even if only for a night.
She nods.
The faint rattle of chains is her only warning before cold iron explodes from the shadows of her room. Kirsty yelps and squeezes her eyes shut, bracing for pain despite the cenobite’s earlier assurances that there would be none, yet her skin remains unblemished, her blood unshed. The chains simply wrap around her wrists, pulling them taut and forcing her body down upon the mattress, kicking the breath from her lungs.
She cranes her neck as the soft thud of footsteps echoes across rough hardwood, the Hell Priest approaching with the same passive expression upon his face but a new depth to those dark eyes.
She’s distracted from his approach by another chain bursting from the darkness, the end topped with a hook that catches at the collar of her shirt and tugs.
Kirsty gasps as her worn, white tee rips in two, it’s frayed edges splaying over her torso and baring her flesh to the cenobite’s gaze. Goosebumps prickle across her skin, legs shifting restlessly as the Hell Priest reaches her bed, presses a knee to the mattress, and settles between her thighs.
She expected him to be cold, somehow, for his body to exude a chill that would turn her blood to ice and drive some sort of clarity into her head - remind her that she should not want this, need this, not from him.
And yet the hips that slot against her thighs are warm, the palms that drag along her quivering sides and stomach leaving a burning trail in their wake rather than gooseflesh. Her breath catches at the bite of blunt nails sinking into her skin, the pleasurable ache left in their wake throbbing through her core. She’s already wet, she realizes, wrists straining fitfully against her bonds as the Hell Priest drags his palm over the swell of her breast and catches her nipple beneath his thumb, rolling the nub into a stiff, aching peak.
“There is much I would show you,” he rumbles, his black eyes intent upon her face as she writhes beneath him, teeth sinking into her bottom lip with each drag of his skin against hers. “Much I would do with your flesh. How I would mold you - “
His bulge presses against her clothed pussy, achingly hot even through the layers of cloth that separate them, and Kirsty curses, unable to resist thrusting shallowly against him. She pants as the length of him drags against her, the pressure of his cock heavy against her damp panties. The chains wrapped around her wrists clank heavily against the bedposts as she struggles to drive him where she needs him most.
“Please,” she chokes, her body burning, sweating, aching.
“Sublime,” the cenobite breathes, and then there’s the sound of fabric ripping, the chill of leather replaced with hot flesh, and a ragged shout spills from Kirsty’s lips as the Hell Priest presses his swollen cockhead against her dripping pussy and sinks in, in, in.
“Oh god,” she moans, her curls sticking to her brow as she’s filled to the brim, taken, consumed. The sorrow that had wracked her bones since her father’s death, the rage that had burned her up from the inside out, the fear that had wreathed her dreams in blood - they’re driven to the far recesses of her mind in the wake of such sharp, biting pleasure, the Hell Priest driving into her with such force that her body rocks atop the rumpled bedsheets and her mouth hangs open, hungry for breath. Another hard thrust, the cenobite’s fingers wrapped tightly around her hips, and Kirsty keens, her voice thickened not with desperation but relief.
It’s too much, her nerves razor thin and set alight with every thrust. Her legs wrap tightly around Pinhead’s hips in a desperate bid to ground herself before she flies apart and is reformed as something else, a creature reformed in his image, molded by his hands, made new, complete. Sublime.
Staring into his black eyes, her face flushed and sweating and wreathed in damp curls, Kirsty realizes abruptly what the entity before her had known all along -
Her body, her soul, her suffering - they had been his from the moment she first touched her fingers to that box. Her anger in the aftermath - her fear and desperate entreaties for another path than the one he offered - were nothing more than the foolish denials of a blinded little girl, but she was blind no longer.
What he wanted, she would give. What he offered, she would take.
Kirsty closes her eyes, and surrenders.