Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have tried to flirt with my boss, but firing me just for saying hi? And having me rushed out of there by a security guard? That was way uncalled for. And Heather completely over-reacted yesterday. I’ll try to patch things up with her, but if it doesn’t work, then her loss. Well, that’s what Sarah would have told me, anyway.
And there’s no point in sitting around and wallowing. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s idleness. I am going to go out and start filling out job applications today. I’m going to find another job before the week is out. I’ll talk to Heather and apologize for snapping at her, and hope that she forgives me, but if not, I’ll learn to live with it. I’ve lived with much worse.
Sarah used to call me “Tam with a Plan”, because I was always making plans. Plans to pass my classes in high school with a 4.0, plans to use those excellent grades to snag a scholarship, plans to get a summer job, plans to save money from that job, plans to use my savings to move to a big city and get out of my little podunk Midwestern town.
I’m still unsettled, but I’m feeling better as I head to my closet to pick out some interview clothes. Hopeful. Optimistic. When I stride out the door, I’m playing Sarah’s words of encouragement through my head like a self-motivation soundtrack, marching toward all the good things the day will offer me.
Chapter Three
Tamara
I wait until one in the morning to use my keycard to enter Smith Acquisitions. There’s a security kiosk with a guard at the front, but I know the layout of the building, and I know how to avoid him. Just in case Jorge is working, I brought a canister of pepper spray with me, tucked safely in my pocket.
I go in the back, march up the stairs as if I own the place, and head straight through the ballroom.
And I walk into a scene from a horror movie.
The room is dark, and at first I try to tell myself that I can’t actually be seeing what I think I’m seeing.
A shadowy figure holding a knife in his right hand, looming over the splayed-out body of a man.
It’s a practical joke. It’s an hallucination.
No. I smell the new-penny scent of blood. It’s real.
My heart speeds up, jack-hammering so hard I’m sure it’s going to burst out of my chest, Alien-style. I’m sick with terror.
The man looks up and sees me, and he moves in a blur. I turn to run, then a blow to the side of my head sends me sprawling. I scrabble for the pepper spray and drop it, then I see it go flying, kicked out of my reach.
I’m going to die for a dollar store purse. Here in this darkened room. Tonight.
I should have just left the purse behind. I should have followed orders. I should have gone straight home like they told me to, and never come back to this beautiful slaughterhouse. Then I would never have seen what I’ve seen. I wouldn’t be gagging on the coppery reek of blood, cringing at the feet of the man with the knife.
Joshua Smith.
The most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. But no, that can’t be right, because he’s going to end me. There’s nothing beautiful about that.
The only light in the room comes from a single table lamp with flared, frosted glass shaped like a tulip. And I’ve stumbled on a nightmare, one that has grabbed me with sharp talons and is dragging me straight to Hell.
The man lying on the floor at Joshua’s feet is Jorge, the security guard. He’s not dead yet. His eyes are bulging, and he’s trying to talk, but all that comes out of his mouth is bubbles of blood and horrible gurgling noises. He’s lying in a red lake that’s spreading across the parquet floor.
With shaking hands, I reach out to him. I’m going to press my hands against his wounds. I took a first aid class once. I chant the instructions in my head. Apply pressure to the wound. Slow down the blood flow.
Why? There’s no ambulance coming for him.
But that’s what you do. You see someone hurting, you try to help them. Even a pig like Jorge.
I’m going to die very soon, but I’m going to die as myself. As a person who helps.
“Don’t.” The steely command slices through the air above me.
Fuck you. Why would I obey the man who’s going to kill me?
I don’t even look up. I ignore him and press my hands against Jorge’s chest.
Suddenly a hand grabs me by the hair and yanks me back, hauling me across the floor.
“I said don’t.”
Instantly my scalp is on fire. I howl in pain and my hands fly up, grabbing at his wrist to take some of the weight off, because I feel like my whole scalp is about to be ripped from my head.
This is it. This is the end.
I slash myself with blame. I’m an idiot. This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have come back for the purse.
The purse is nothing. It’s cracked black plastic, with a fraying red heart set into the front panel. But to me, it’s priceless. It was one of the last things my mother ever gave me. She shoplifted it, just like the few other things she gave me over the years. It was the only time she remembered my birthday.
And now it’s going to be the end of me.
Joshua drops me, and I lie at his feet, a puddle of weak, mewling terror. I’m staring at the floor, my muscles locked and rigid with fright, too afraid to look at him.
The truly horrifying thing about seeing him stab Jorge was the calm, practiced way that he moved.
I stood by the empty bar, frozen in shock, when I first spotted Joshua crouched over the dying security guard. As he jabbed Jorge in the abdomen, I heard his taunting voice. “Oh, does that hurt? Cheer up, right now you’re in the least pain you’ll ever be in for the rest of your life. I’m very good at this. I can make you last for hours, but they’ll feel like years.”
He was admitting that he’s done this before. And it was clear from his gloating tone that he loved it.
He kills people for fun.
Joshua Smith, billionaire owner and CEO of Smith Acquisitions, the hottest, sexiest, most sought-after bachelor in Manhattan. And add to that list…serial killer.
“Look at me,” he intones.
This part is familiar. Ghosts of my past shiver down my spine. My stepfather’s voice echoes in my ears. “Look at me when I talk to you, you little bitch.”
I hunch my shoulders, bracing for a blow, desperately locking my gaze on the floor. I’m the little girl hiding under the blanket so the boogeyman can’t find me. Looking at him will make this real.
My mind is torturing me. Every serial killer movie I’ve ever seen flashes before my eyes. Blood, spilling intestines, gouged-out eyes. Hours of agony worse than anything I could ever imagine, images of knives and saws and icepicks, sounds of screaming, women gone limp with their dead eyes staring at nothing… I know how this ends.
“Please don’t kill me,” I choke out, my voice wavery and weak. I can’t look up. I can’t watch my own death descending.
Sheer terror sizzles down my nerves. I try to move, but I’ve lost control of my body. I am liquid with fright.
His voice rings out above me, like God speaking from on high, but he’s not God. He’s the Devil in a gray silk suit. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Liar.
“Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone!” It’s a pitiful lie, but my brain is numb and stupid with panic. I am scrabbling for the magic words that will save my life.
He’s silent, so finally I look up at him, tears streaming from my eyes. Joshua looms over me, my terror painting him as a giant. The face looking down at me has graced society magazines and the gossip column of every major paper in the city. The camera loves him—the glossy black hair, the cheekbones you could cut yourself on, those sapphire-blue eyes, the cruel, sensual curve of his upper lip.
He smiles down at me, gently. “Tamara. Of course you would. If I let you go, you’d run right to the police.”
“I won’t, I swear, I swear!” My cry is whiny and shrill. I loathe myself for it.
His voice frosts over. “Don’t kee
p lying to me, Tamara. It’s boring. I hate boring.”
I stare over at the security guard, whose chest is heaving with every tortured breath. “Why did you stab him?”
“Because he tried to rape you.”
I look up at him in horror. “You…you did it for me?” I didn’t want that. Jorge was a pig and a vile human being, and I would have been happy to see him jailed, but butchered? On my account? Nausea curdles in my belly.
Joshua’s dark brows draw together, and he shakes his head. “No.” There’s mild remonstrance in his voice. I’ve disappointed him by not understanding. But what is the right question? The right thing to say? Everything rides on this.
I fail to come up with anything that will save me. He stares down at me expectantly, waiting. It’s like this is some kind of cruel game to him. He could end me right now. Why doesn’t he? What other option does he have? Because he’s right—of course I’d go to the police.
Finally, I choke out the question I don’t want to ask but must. “If you’re not going to kill me, what are you going to do with me?”
A smile curls his lips, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. His smiles never reach his eyes. “I’m going to play with you.”
His words hang in the air then explode like bombs, shredding me with terrible possibility. And then I see it in his right hand. A hypodermic needle. That means he’s going to take me somewhere else. Somewhere he can take his time with me. My throat closes with panic. He told the man on the floor that he could make it last for hours.
Not that, not that—please just kill me quickly.
Mad with fright, I strangle on a scream. My muscles start working again, and I scrabble away from him on all fours, scuttling for the doorway. He jabs me in the ass with the hypodermic, and I cry out in pain. It’s like being stabbed with a red-hot knitting needle.
My right butt cheek throbs, and a sensation of great weariness washes over me.
I struggle to form words. My lips feel thick and rubbery. “Pleash, let me go… I have friendsh… I told them where I wash going tonight…” Saliva drools from my mouth.
“Did you really, now?” His voice is dry and amused. “You’re a very poor liar, Tamara. But we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that later.”
Oh God. Oh no.
“Arrrr you going torshure me?” I don’t know if my words make sense anymore. My cheek is pressing against the floor, and I can’t feel my body.
Joshua kneels next to me and strokes my cheek with his finger. “You don’t get to ask me that. You want to know why?”
No.
“Yeshhhh…” I can’t see anything. I am numb. I pray to stay numb forever, but God has never been that kind to me.
I think he says, “Because I am fate, and you are nothing.” But his voice is coming from so far away.
Chapter Four
Joshua
The first one to die was Remus. He drowned in an icy pond in the dead of winter, under a pale blue sky.
I think Remus was around six. My father made him strip down in the sub-zero weather.
My father stripped down too, dropping his clothing into a pile in the snow. I’d never seen him naked before. He had scars on his body.
I was only a few years old then, but I’d already learned a lot about survival. We all had.
Even before they entered the pond, Remus’s lips were blue and his skinny body was shaking, but he didn’t say a word or beg for mercy. He knew better. He followed our father and marched right into the frigid water. They swam across the pond, then turned around and headed back. Halfway across, Remus sank. He disappeared, the black waters swallowing him. My father glanced over at him and kept swimming. He didn’t miss a stroke.
We were all lined up on the shore, watching. My mother included. She stared straight ahead, her eyes on Remus the whole time, obeying orders.
I would never admit this to anyone, but I still felt fear back then. And I was sick with it. But I also felt anger, and contempt. Why was Remus so weak? Why hadn’t he saved himself?
When my father emerged from the lake, he didn’t shiver. The man wasn’t even human. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and sandals—clothing my father had picked out for me on this snowy day—and I was shaking so hard my teeth rattled. Somehow, as he approached, I locked my muscles tight and managed to force myself to stop. My other brothers didn’t. My brother Romulus, Remus’s twin, shook the hardest of all, and even worse, he had tears in his eyes. My father slapped him so hard he fell to his knees. Romulus lost the hearing in his right ear for the rest of his short life.
My twin brother, Charlemagne, sneaking glances at me, managed to suppress the worst of his shivering. He was quick on the uptake, like me, figuring out the rules of survival early. In the end, it wasn’t enough to save him.
My mother stared straight ahead.
Fortunately for me, that day, most of my father’s wrath was trained on my mother.
“Weak,” my father sneered at her. “They’re all weak. Because of you. My genes are strong. Yours are poison. You’ve ruined my sons.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered, the way she’d been taught.
We headed back through the woods, and her head drooped in despair. He would punish her for Remus’s failure—after making her watch her son die.
Her screams that night twisted through the air. He made sure we heard them. Our rooms were in a row down the hall from theirs so that we’d hear everything he did to her. Their couplings were always agony for her. That was all we knew of sex. A man’s cruel laughter, the dull thud of blows, a woman’s wails of pain.
Sometimes she needed time to heal. She’d limp around the house, dragging her body around, whimpering in pain with each step as she cooked our meals and washed our clothes and scrubbed the floors.
When that happened, he’d bring another girl home for a while. Never women, just girls, middle-school age. He kept them in the basement downstairs, until my mother healed and could serve him again the way a wife should serve her husband. My mother had been one of those girls, once. I found that out from her when I was in my teens. She thought she’d been eleven when he took her, but she was no longer sure.
I am nothing like my father.
But I absorbed his hard lessons, learned many things from him. On the day Remus died, I learned not to cry, or shiver. I haven’t done either since.
I think about that as I look at the man standing in front of me. He’s shivering violently. Weak.
Tall, distinguished with dabs of gray at the temple, still wearing his suit, although it’s filthy and stained now, after a day spent in my little deep-woods bunker.
Baxter Warburton III. Such a good man. Married to the same woman for thirty years, father of five. Pillar of the community, chairman of a philanthropic board that dispenses money to shelters for homeless women and children. Oh, and in his spare time, he has a fun little hobby he thought nobody knew about. Rapist and murderer of young male prostitutes.
He likes to tie them face down, take them up the ass with a giant dildo until they bleed, then cut their throats. Apparently, he’s been impotent for some time now, and this makes him angry.
Years ago, I invented a piece of software that detects patterns of disappearances among those who usually aren’t missed—prostitutes, boy whores, runaways, society’s cast-offs. Find a cluster of victims, and you’ll find a killer. It’s one of the methods I use to track down the best prey of all—men who prey on others. Often, such men are worthy opponents.
Unfortunately, Baxter is as far from worthy as a crippled kitten. Apparently, he’s not so tough when he’s faced with a man rather than a boy. He’s weeping and dribbling snot, and he’s already wet himself. There’s a disgraceful wet spot spreading over his crotch.
Is that why I feel so empty?
I should be feeling fierce joy. This is the part where I toss him a knife and urge him to save himself from me. Where I let him feint and jab at me again and again until I finally disarm him. And then the chase
through the woods. The inevitable capture. The slow, ritualistic carving. The screams caressing my ears, then fading to silence.
The feeling of release.
But I’m restless and can’t concentrate. Images of Tamara keep forcing themselves into my head.
Mental pictures of her naked. Submissive. Crouched at my feet, the word “Master” falling from her plump pink lips.
Her imagined cries echo in my ears. “Please…don’t hurt me… I’ll do anything you want…” And the thought of what that “anything” could be sends a rush of blood to my groin.
I’ve never done anything like this before. Never taken a woman. Frankly, I’ve never wanted to have to spend that much time with anyone. Prolonged contact with anyone makes my skin prickle and burn as if I’ve run through a swarm of bees.
But ever since I met Tamara, strange feelings have taken up residence inside me. I don’t know how to name those feelings. She woke something up in me, a different kind of appetite than any I’ve experienced.
The only emotions in my mental lexicon are the darker ones. Contempt. Cruelty. Lust. Greed. Either I was born without the ability to access the softer emotions, like love and tenderness, or they were beaten out of me as a child. Either way, I don’t know what they’d feel like.
I’ve read the dictionary definitions. I’ve read romance novels and watched romantic movies in an attempt to understand. All I learned is that I have as much in common with those people as I do with a granite outcropping or a supernova. It’s hard to believe we’re spun from the same basic materials.
I can mimic the appropriate emotions long enough to pass for normal in my day-to-day interactions, but I can’t feel them. I’m a computer that hasn’t been programmed the same way as everybody else.
When I first laid eyes on Tamara, I found her intriguing and disturbing in equal measure. I couldn’t decide what to do with her, so I pushed her away from me and observed her from a distance.
I considered seducing her and experimenting with a “relationship” for the first time ever, but as time went on, I decided against it. She had a weakening effect on me. She was Delilah to my Samson; she scrambled my thought processes, made me less efficient.
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