by Britney King
Several times I turn my head to the side and vomit, the side of my face moist, my throat and neck covered in it.
I think I hear music on the radio, gravel crunching under the tires, as they move along the road. Sometimes there’s a sharp buzzing sound, and other times, it’s Henry’s voice I hear. As my eyes flutter, open and closed, I see him there, sitting next to me, even though I know this is impossible. Henry is dead. But when I drift, it feels real, the warmth of his lap and my head resting against his thigh. Occasionally, he leans down and whispers something in my ear. He rattles the information off in Henry’s way. He does not try to comfort me, he only lists the instructions off methodically, and while I know it is a dream, that it isn’t real, somewhere deep in the pit of me a sob escapes. I want to believe.
Keep your attitude strong internally, but, Liv, whatever you do, do not show this to your captor. Instead, show physical signs of surrender or submission. Remember: it’s all an act. Head down, shoulders hunched forward, walk in a shuffle, acquiring a slight limp or feigning injury, illness, or weakness. Speak low and softly. Address your captors with a conveyed fear and respect. Cry. Act as though you’ve given up. This is how you give yourself some advantage.
Role play your weaknesses. Develop a fictional “story” for yourself around it. This will not only help you stay in character, it will give you a fake “breaking point” (a point where you break down and pretend to be emotionally destroyed, as though you’ve completely given up), if you are being tortured or hurt for information or amusement by your captors. Think about your family, think about them being in your position, imagine witnessing something so horrible happening to your children that you can’t get over it. Whatever it takes, do it. It’s your only shot at survival.
And remember all the things we went over. Force yourself to recall your training, our hours upon hours in the air, discussing cases like what you are facing.
You are an attractive woman, Olivia. You must work to make yourself less attractive. Use dirt and filth, fake your period, illness, change your posture, and set your face with an uninviting scowl. But make sure you understand your captor first. You do not want to end up as a throwaway captive, if you could have used your sexuality to your advantage.
You need to buy yourself enough time and opportunity to escape, and in the meantime, you need to do whatever it takes to survive and remain healthy up to that point. The sooner that opportunity comes, the better your chance of survival, if you do manage an escape.
Try not to stand out in any way. Playing a weak and submissive person affords you the element of surprise if you do have to overcome your captors. It makes you less of a threat. They will grow lax; they will not watch you as closely.
Most binds can be fairly easily removed and worn down with any rough edge or friction. Getting out of restraints is not as difficult as it will seem. Most material stretches.
But most importantly, don’t forget to remain aware. Mimic the way a cat steps outside. Stop and smell the air, listen and watch. Slowly transition. Not only will this provide you information about your surroundings, it will make you seem weak and fearful.
The next time I wake, large hands dig into my underarms while my legs, outstretched, flop along haphazardly. I am being dragged across a hard floor, assumingly toward the running water I hear. Or maybe that’s just my mind playing tricks. The pounding in my head drums incessantly, making it difficult to tell what is real. I don’t want to open my eyes to find out.
I have to.
The room spins, the world as I know it shifts and tilts, and without warning, I vomit. He drops me, and I roll onto my side. My face welcomes the feel of the cool tile, as I lay there dry heaving, the man stands above me, his hands on his hips, making it clear this is not what he expected. I look up at him, my expression pleading. “We have to get you feeling better,” he says, just before I close my eyes, lay my head next to my vomit, and pass out again.
Sometime later when I regain consciousness, I am in a dimly lit room, tied to a bed. Tears flood my eyes, and a whimper escapes my lips.
It comes to me in flashes, each time I fade in and out. This time is no different. The gun. Waking up on the plane, zip tied and thoroughly restrained. The dead men in the seats next to me, staring blankly ahead. Tires on a gravel road. Ripped vinyl. The sour smell of vomit. The cold shower. The softly spoken words. The smell of sandalwood.
Tethered at my wrists and ankles to the frame, my restraints have some give, thankfully, but when I shift, a burning sensation floods my senses. There is nowhere I do not feel it. My hair is wet, my neck is stiff, and worse, when I attempt to turn my head, I discover I can’t. I’m wearing some sort of neck brace.
Of what I can see, the room is spacious and well decorated, the kind of place that feels homey. It doesn’t look remote, or unkempt, but rather the kind of place that someone might visit or find, which gives me hope. Considering hope, I go through the list of things I know. I assume that I am somewhere in Alaska, as that is where we were headed, considering there was a flight plan. Still, I have no idea where in Alaska, if that is even correct, nor how long I have been asleep. We could be anywhere. What I do know is that the walls around me are made of logs. I am in a bedroom.
I sense that I am being watched. Somewhere close, but not too close, I hear the faint sound of music. Opera. I smell fire, burning wood and smoke, cinnamon and food cooking.
Aside from the neck contraption, I am wearing wool pajamas that I obviously did not put on myself. My lips are bone dry, my tongue heavy in my mouth. My eyes want desperately to close. My mind beckons sleep. It’s my only escape.
But knowing I can’t prolong the inevitable; I do what must be done. I struggle, loudly, so as to let him know that I am awake. Better to get this over with, I tell myself, even if my insides are screaming it is a terrible mistake.
He moves slowly into the room. “Oh, good. You’re awake. You had me worried there for a minute.”
I can see him only partially, from the corner of my eye. But I can feel him. His strong presence, his determined energy. “Here,” he says, shifting the brace on my neck, which allows me to have a little more movement. “This should help.”
He takes a roll of duct tape off an antique table and tears a piece off with his teeth. Walking over to the bed, he places it gently over my mouth, despite the fact that I refuse to keep my face still. “You could scream all you want but no one would hear you. That’s not the purpose of the tape, in case you’re wondering. I just don’t want to get bit. At least not until we’ve become better acquainted.” He smiles. “I’m sure you understand.”
I watch as he unfastens his belt and holds it in his closed fist. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this—how patient I’ve been.”
I fight against the restraints. At least initially. He picks up scissors and holds them close to my face. “I really hope you aren’t going to make this difficult.”
Opening the scissors, he cuts my pajama pants from one end to the other. My breath comes faster now. No matter how much one wants to hide fear, it takes more control than you realize you are able to summon.
“Shame,” he says. “I really should have thought this through.” He can’t remove my pants without undoing the restraints, hence the scissors.
“It’s okay,” he tells me, holding up the torn pants. “There’s more where that came from.” He smiles and then leans in and kisses the tip of my nose. “Please don’t make me dose you again.”
My fingers and toes clench and then flex and soften, clench and soften. “Trust me,” he whispers, smoothing my hair away from my face. “You’re going to want to be awake for this.”
He lifts my top. My bra has been removed. He kisses my breasts, hungrily, before slowing and taking one nipple in his mouth. After swirling his tongue around it several times, he bites hard. Then he looks up at me and smiles. Tears prick the corner of my eyes. He cups both breasts and squeezes. “God. If you only knew how long I’ve wanted to do that.�
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He moves his hands slowly down my body, caressing, prodding, offering commentary along the way, saying he’s getting to know the lay of the land. “You’re so beautiful.”
He fumbles between my legs, which makes me think he’s inexperienced, until I realize he’s testing me, trying to find my breaking point. “I have so many things I want to ask you, Charlotte. So many. Thankfully, there is time.” He dips one finger inside me, and that does it—he has found the point he was searching for. My hips buck wildly. I realize it’s pointless. Tied to this bed, all of the bucking in the world is not going to set me free or stop what is about to happen. At some point, the course was set, and the momentum has carried me here. His will is obviously strong. “Tell me…how many people have you seduced and then killed?”
He slips another finger in. “This many?”
I bite my lip until I taste blood. I count the lines in the ceiling. He adds another finger. “This many?”
When he laughs, I understand, the worst is yet to come. He is a professional. He’s given this moment a lot more thought than I ever have. He has the home field advantage.
“You should know, Charlotte,” he whispers, as he hovers over me. “What goes around comes around.”
I quiz myself on the capital of each state. He parts my thighs and enters me. As he pumps away, I go through them alphabetically, getting all the way to Vermont. Montpelier. It goes against every fiber of my being and all of the training I have had. But I will not give him what he wants. I will not show fear.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
JC
It happened quite by accident. Said another way: I didn’t mean to see it. To put it nicely, she is a difficult captive, and I guess you could say, there’s a part of me that was curious. I had to know. Did I do the right thing? Did I choose well? I don’t know if it’s the same for women, but all men think this way.
The term ‘trophy wife’ exists for a reason.
Selection is important.
Is she out of my league? But not so much that I have to worry (the last thing a man wants is his pride tested) just enough that she looks like a catch, making me look better in turn? Is she going to live up to my expectations over the long haul? Is she going to let herself go? Is she going to get fat like her mother? And if she doesn’t live up to the expectations of who I need her to be—if she does get fat like her mother—how do I get rid of her with the least amount of damage?
I suppose those questions swirling around in my brain hour after hour is what leads me to check the cameras. I need to know that she is missed. I want to know that I have gained something important. I want to know how her family is holding up, and maybe, just maybe, if I glean a bit of information about her daughters, I can use it to my advantage, spoon feeding it to her so that she’ll give me what I want.
And what is that? At this point, I have it down to a science. Believe me. What I want is for her to desire me as much as I desire her. Isn’t that what everyone wants, really? Isn’t this the very definition of love?
How rare and precious the timing of this is, I am coming to understand.
I realize that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It will take sweet time to get used to one another. How much time is the question. I read the other day that it only takes four minutes to fall in love. Considering our situation is a little more challenging than your average meet-cute, I entertain the idea that it might take a bit longer than that.
In the meantime, I am keeping her comfortable. She is lucky. Luckier than she seems to realize, given her incessant tears. On one hand, the crying ignites deep and unbinding lust. It rolls through me like a throbbing tooth, the ache a strong desire to possess her, to have power over her. On the other hand, it’s horrible, these never-ending, extravagant displays of emotion. The sobbing grates on my nerves, cinches my gut, makes me ill, makes me ask myself if I’ve made a mistake.
She has it better here than many people in third world countries. How easily she forgets. How easily I forget. It’s always like this in the beginning.
Excessive displays of emotion. How funny, these days, all the fragile snowflakes, the people cry over the silliest things, the petty injustices of the world. It’s easy to focus on such things when the big things, the real scary things, are not beating down your front door. How endearing it is that people think they’re so safe, that they live under this false illusion that kidnappings and ransom are far-off experiences, not something that can happen close to home. It’s too bad. That illusion is a facade.
Believe me, I do this for a living. Well, not a living exactly—that’s a lie. My grandfather was an oil man, as was his grandfather’s grandfather. What I do is not for the money, but for the love of the chase. For sport, you could say. A very time-consuming but rewarding hobby.
To date, I’ve had thirteen wives. Not legal wives, but what you might call marriages of the heart.
Training women is my specialty. It’s an art, developing another human being into what you want them to be. Maybe I sound like the crazy one, but the reality is, we all do it. Some of us are simply more forceful and honest in the way we go about it, while others spend years—decades even—duking it out using pathetic forms of manipulation and dishonesty. That’s your average marriage, anyway.
Training women is not so different than training a dog. It’s difficult and unrelenting at first, but eventually, with consistency and a proper amount of communication, which is best learned in the form of reward and punishment, they, too, become eager to please.
When it works, it’s almost easy. It’s satisfying. When it doesn’t, they die. Usually, they die. It’s common to eventually get bored. My grandfather taught me that. He bred horses and later hunting dogs.
He always said: A dog’s life is maybe a decade and a half if you’re lucky, and then you get to start over. A marriage, on the other hand, thanks to an overabundance of fairytales, is supposed to last forever. But nothing lasts forever. Which is how it’s worked out that I’ve endured widowhood thirteen times. It’s also how Charlotte Jones came to be wife number fourteen. I think our demons could play beautifully together.
Forgive me, for before. I went off on a tangent. I meant to tell you about the cameras. Never look back, my granddad always said. Solid advice. If only I’d heeded it.
If it takes four minutes for a person to fall in love; it takes less than that for everything to turn to shit.
Which is exactly what happened when I flicked on the feed to that camera. As it so happens, Mr. Jones is indeed missing his wife. He is also not who he said he was. Not in the least. It seems surprising to me that someone in his position would be oblivious to having someone not only intrude in their home but set up shop, watching his every move.
But then, if I had a nickel for every stupid move highly intelligent people made, well, I’d be rich. Wait. I am rich. But you get my point.
I learned two things by turning on that camera. Two very bad things.
One, Michael Jones has blood on his hands. And lots of it. Turns out, I have kidnapped a very valuable assassin. Turns out, I am a dead man walking.
I listened to him in his office. I listened as he made endless phone calls. I listened as he ranted and raged. I watched as he paced, relentlessly, at all hours. He made endless arrangements about getting his prized assassin back. He didn’t speak of his wife like you might a spouse. He spoke of her like a commodity, like a product that means a lot to him. And, interestingly enough, according to his phone calls, it appears that she has no idea her husband is the one ordering her to make the hits. Something I find very hard to believe. Something I plan to get to the bottom of.
In the meantime, certain things are starting to make a lot of sense. Things that I wrote off over these last few weeks as I watched her. It turns out, Michael Jones, when not building houses, has ties to the mafia.
How nefarious, for such a meek-looking guy.
How interesting.
Although, that’s not the half of it. It gets better. I notic
ed Mr. Jones comes and goes from his daughter’s room at odd hours.
At first, I thought maybe the girl simply missed her mother. This, or maybe was helping her with her homework. I thought a lot of things. But then, I went back and searched through old footage and found the coming and going happens to be a regular occurrence when Charlotte is out of town. And then, twice, it was clear as the girl came out after him. When I zoomed in on her face, it looked exactly like her mother’s. The twisted and pained expression is a familiar one. It’s exactly what her mother looked like as I slid my hand between her legs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Charlotte
When he enters my room, he brings food. Eggs and bacon, which make me want to vomit. The sight of it makes my mouth fill with saliva. The smell twists my stomach into tight knots. I have zero inclination to eat.
My nerves are on edge. My rage at being in this position is taking on a life of its own. It is an angry, living thing, gnawing and roaring along the insides of my skin.
I think of the first time I laid eyes on him, and then the second, and best of all, the third.
That was in Fort Lauderdale. I had been watching Dan’s daughter. I don’t know why, but on occasion, whenever we were in the same city, if I had the time, I made a hobby of searching her out and following her.
Maybe I wanted to see if Sophie was like her, if being half-sisters, they shared any characteristics. Maybe it was guilt for having taken her father away. I had learned what that was like, after all.
Anyway, people put their every move on social media, and Janine Thomas-Moore is no different. I watched her at Estero. By that point he had been stalking her for about a week. I didn’t know why, but I knew enough to know that whatever the reason for his interest, it wasn’t for anything good.