The Honeymoon Hideout

By Ayn Mawaddat (Zainab Shahzad)

Ada stood facing the mirror, admiring in the reflection the swollen face, the bleeding genitals and bruised skin all across the body. She smiled staring at the mirror for not long, signalling some kind of an evil victory. Then her tears took over. Her outburst was so gradually transforming that had the neighbourhood within the radius of several miles been occupied with settlements every heart would have tremored with fear from listening to her wailing shrieks and curses.

She cried for a long stretch of time, perhaps longer this time, before she assembled her spirit from the everlasting lapses torn between the bouts of silence and sobbing. The last time she'd cried so hard was when she was informed her father's body was discovered from an underground cellar cave filled with human skeletons, situated in the dense of the woods wildly infamous for man-hunting wildlife.

She stood facing the mirror again. This time it wasn't her nude reflection, the sight of her lens, it was the messy bed, the disoriented comforter and the pillows stained with streams of maroon brown distributed unevenly. Underneath the comforter a man lay positioned like a starfish slumbering with intense levels of comfort and peace. She watched him sleep through the mirror, then smiled like before - though her smile was more devious, this time mainly because her mascara had flowed with her tears and smudged her face.

Finally, she turned around and walked to the head side of the bed. She stood close to the sleeping man with her eyes dilated and sight frozen at the vegetative state of her companion in bed.

Silenced by the chaotic screams playing and replaying in the back of her mind all the while she stared at him, her daze instantly broke when her cell phone rang. She looked at the phone lying next to him and casually answered it.

"Hello Ada" the caller said

"Um" she replied.

"There's a client asking for you. Wants an appointment tonight. He’s heard through a friend of some special service you apparently provide at your honeymoon hideout."

"You know my rule - one client a week, so why do you waste time?"

"He's willing to pay twice the actual fee, he looks psyched, doesn't want anyone but you."

"I said not tonight," Ada said with a blunt tone revealing rise in temper.

"Ada not that I want to force you, but a word of caution," the caller said softly yet with a touch of austerity, "Mr. Zohaan knows your clients are declining, more likely disappearing again. We've not heard lately from three of your clients. Say yes to this guy and I figure the closure of the investigation before they dig deeper."

"Haha," Ada said mockingly, "You wish, anyway fix it." She sternly added before hanging up, "credit my account before noon and ask him to drive to the hotel before dusk. I'll be there my time."

She walked toward the washroom before reminding herself this was her way of serving justice. Under the warm shower while washing the blood off her body, she scheduled routinely, her upcoming activities for the day beginning from clearing away the mess to driving the corpse to the underground cellar cave located next to her apparently abandoned tree house - her honeymoon hideout, to sanitizing her BDSM weapons, to getting seductively dressed to lure her next hunt into her trap.

She had to greet her next victim before nightfall exactly like the first time she was greeted to her first rape commissioned by her father.

By Ayn Mawaddat (Zainab Shahzad)