“No, you cannot.” I look at her across the sea of frothy bubbles. “I’m going to ask you again, Toy, why did you try to kill yourself?”
She sits up abruptly, exposing her shiny clean breasts. Again I feel my cock stirring. God, she’s magnificent when she’s fierce. “Because you made me into something I wasn’t. Something disgusting. Something I hated.”
“I hated it too,” I murmur before I can stop myself.
She launches herself at me so quickly that I barely see it coming, and throws her full body weight on me, screaming like a banshee. My head bangs painfully against the tile wall, and her nails claw at my face.
Furious, I scramble out of the bath and haul her with me, dropping her onto the tile floor. Water sloshes everywhere. I kick her in the ribcage, and she lashes out with her leg, hooking it behind me, and brings me down to my knees. She’s screeching like a madwoman the entire time.
I slap her in the face, twice, so hard that her eyes briefly lose focus. Then I grab her by the throat and squeeze until she’s gurgling and wheezing and her face goes red. The whole time, she’s glaring at me with a killing rage.
When she settles down, I release my grip a little bit.
“You motherfucker!” she howls. “You put me through hell for nothing! For nothing! And you lied to me just to control me and make me weak, you revolting little bitch!”
“It worked, didn’t it?” I taunt her because I’m angry. And I grab her wrists and pin them over her head, lying on top of her on the soaked bath rug.
I’m rock hard again, but her mood has flipped. I can feel her body go rigid with disgust underneath me, her flesh practically trying to crawl away from mine.
It hurts me.
“Settle down,” I snap at her.
“I will chew your face off in your sleep, shithead! Coward!” Her body is as stiff as a board underneath me.
I squeeze her wrists hard enough that she grunts in pain, but she never stops glaring at me. “Listen the fuck up, because this temper tantrum shit is going to get old fast. I’m not going to let you go, and I’m not going to kill you. And I’m not going to let you kill yourself. So you can just get that out of your head right now.”
She doesn’t say a word, and her gaze drifts off to somewhere over my right shoulder. She’s ignoring me, dismissing me from her mind. I need to give her something more.
I loosen my grip on her wrists. “I’m going to say something I’ve never said to anyone before. I made a mistake. This situation with you… My entire survival drive depends on me seizing control of everything and everyone around me, dominating every human being who gets close to me, but with you… I went too far, Toy. I won’t go that far again.”
“Tamara.” Her beautiful brown eyes bore into me, trying to stab me to death with the force of her hatred.
“I prefer Toy, and I’m still in charge here, sweetheart.” I see a little flicker on her face, a twitch of muscle that she isn’t even aware of, and I remember that she always reacts that way when I call her sweetheart or baby. I decide I will do it more often. Positive stimuli to get positive results.
“When I lied to you, I thought I was helping you.” At her disbelieving laugh, I shake my head. “Truly. I was afraid you were going to force me to kill you. You’re so fucking strong. It was so hard to break you down that I needed to cheat, and that was weak of me. You’re right about that. It was beneath me. The truth is, the director at the homeless shelter and your landlord both reported you missing within a few days. Your neighbor Heather never did, but she also moved out of her apartment right after I took you. The director never gave up. She’s been a thorn in my side, going back to the police again and again. She organized the employees at the shelter, and they’ve been calling too, checking up on the case several times a week.”
Her muscles relax a little and tears shimmer in her eyes. I bend down and kiss her shoulder.
“Are you actually apologizing?” Her voice is husky with emotion. Not for me, I know. For her lost friends, her lost life.
“That’s not something I am capable of doing.” I make my voice gentle, and I stroke a wet lock of hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear. She stares up at me, eyes shining. So beautiful. My precious, lovely Toy. “I don’t want to lie to you again, and to say that I was sorry would be a lie. Being sorry would require a conscience, and I’m not wired that way. In my world, I define right and wrong. For me to apologize would mean that I was saying I thought what I did was…bad. You want me to be honest with you? I’m not sorry. What is right is what benefits me. End of story. But I am saying that I should not have gone so far when I punished you. And we’re going to have to work out a new set of rules and a new way to get along. Because I’m not going to lose you.”
“Why?” she demands despairingly, her face twisting with anguish. “I just want to be free. I hate it here. I hate you, and if I could kill you, I would. I will keep trying to kill you, myself, and Elizabeth, until I succeed. Do you not understand that?”
“I do. And all I can do is watch you day and night so I can protect you from yourself,” I say, and something dull and ugly that might be sorrow flows through me. I cannot bear to make her into a helpless slave again, and I can’t bring myself to end her life, so sooner or later, the inevitable will happen. I’ll slip up. She’ll kill me, or herself, or Elizabeth.
And yet I’m still not going to kill her. Even to save myself.
Once upon a time, I thought she was nothing like me. Now, as I look down at her wretched face, I see tiny facets of myself in her. Survivor of a poisoned childhood, someone who put themselves back together and came out stronger for it. She’s got hidden reserves of toughness that I never even glimpsed. And she’s got a mean streak in her too.
I like that about her. I like it a lot.
I like everything about her. If I were a normal man, I’d say that I love everything about her. She makes me wish that I could be what she needs, what she deserves.
But I am the man that I am, hard and unchanging and incurable.
I lean down and press a gentle kiss to her forehead. “Come on. We’ll go into the media room and watch a movie together—you can pick the movie—and then we’ll go to bed.” She goes stiff again. “What?”
“Watching movies just hurts me. It’s like looking through the bars of my prison at what I can never have.” Her shoulders slump and her muscles melt completely. Tears brim in her beautiful eyes and spill onto her cheeks. When I bend down to kiss them, she twists her head away. “For the love of God, Joshua. Please. I’m begging you. I want this to end. You could do it painlessly. If you’re not going to kill me, end my suffering. Let me go.”
I slide off her and sit up. She sits up too, hugging her knees and staring at the floor. Tears are streaming down her face now. I’ve made her cry oceans. The thought drives a splinter into my soul.
“Things will be different now. I won’t put you back in the cell, ever again. We’ll resume our sparring, and I can let you get on a computer that’s not connected to the internet, and you will sleep in my room. You will have to speak to me with respect, and as long as you do that—”
She’s shaking her head, her long, wet locks sliding across her back.
I have just offered her so much. It should be enough, right? I don’t understand what the problem is here. “You’d rather be dead than spend time with me? You’d rather be dead than let me make you come every day, feed you exquisite meals every day, give you the run of my library and any movie or TV show ever, talk to you, laugh with you, spar with you, dress you in the most beautiful clothes…?”
She shakes her head, crying quietly.
I heave a sigh of frustration. “Okay. It’s still not going to change my mind. I’m a selfish bastard, Toy. I don’t understand my feelings for you, but I can’t be without you. I need you, all right? When I think about losing you…it…it’s not what I want.”
I groan out loud at my utter failure to say what I mean. “I can’t find the right wor
ds for this, Toy. I’m articulate in many ways, but I’m not fluent emotionally. But the bottom line is, I can’t do it. Don’t ask me again. Instead, I’m going to make you content to be here. I will find a way. I always get what I want, Toy. You’re wasting your time trying to fight me.” Yes. This is a challenge, and I will solve it.
I will.
I have to.
I scoop my miserable, heartbroken slave up in my arms and carry her toward my bedroom.
Her body is limp; she’s not bothering to fight. She’s a sleeping tiger, though, and I can never let my guard down around her again.
When we get into the bedroom, I carry her over to my closet and set her down, keeping an eye on her as I fetch her a T-shirt to sleep in. We’ll go to bed early. I’ll chain her to the head of my bed, so she’s sleeping right next to me. A woman sleeping next to me, all night long. That will be a new experience. New experiences are good, aren’t they?
I don’t know. Looking at her miserable face is a drag on my mood. I’m actually being affected by someone else’s emotions. My earlier elation has fizzled, and whatever sick, leaden feeling has taken up inside my chest now, I hate it.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tamara
The days drag by as I try to adjust to this strange new life. The rules are not clear anymore.
Joshua takes me into the sparring room every day, and he trains me for as long as I want. Two or three hours. He’s teaching me all kinds of dirty tricks. How to escape various chokeholds, how to gouge out eyes, how to turn anything into a deadly weapon. Hide heavy objects in a pillowcase and use it to smash someone’s brains out. Use a lighter and a can of hairspray to make a flamethrower. Where all the tender, vulnerable spots on the body are, and how to strike them to instantly disable someone.
There’s a tiny spark of hope in me. The skills he’s teaching me are actually useful. Joshua let his guard down once, and I got access to the razor. Maybe it will happen again.
I hate that tiny spark of hope, though. Giving up, preparing myself mentally to die, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Hope is dangerous. Hope will weaken my resolve.
He’s hard on me when we’re sparring, and I’m murderous. I’m sincerely trying very, very hard to maim or kill, but of course I never do. Sometimes Joshua puts on a thick, padded suit with a mask and lets me practice eye-gouging, throat strikes, groin-kicking.
Our sparring sessions always end in fucking. Always. Rough, hard, glorious. I struggle at first, then submit every time, and it’s like it’s part of our sex play. I could refuse him, but the horrible truth is, I crave it. His mere presence, his heated glance, makes my sex damp with desire. The more violent our sparring, the more I want him. Pinned down on the floor, writhing underneath him, fighting to get away but really wanting it…just like the fantasies I used to shamefully entertain before I ever met him.
He resumes bathing me and shaving me in the morning. I let him cuff me to the tub without trying to fight, because I find it heightens the pleasure for me. And that ends in fucking too. That’s sweeter and more tender. I get the best of both worlds from him—soft, gentle sex, and brutal, hard fucking. I have an amazing sex life. Several orgasms a day, and they’re always mind-blowing, explosive, shattering.
If I wasn’t his prisoner, he’d be the perfect lover.
But I am his prisoner. I finally go and try that front door that used to taunt and terrify me, and of course it’s locked. I knew it would be, but I still stand there and cry as I uselessly yank on the doorknob.
At night, at the dinner table, as I sit there with one ankle chained to the chair and the chair bolted to the floor, he tries to draw me out in conversation. I keep my answers monosyllabic and dull.
He starts telling me about his childhood, not as if he’s looking for pity, just as if we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, getting to know each other. Except the childhood that he tells me about is so horrifying that it sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel, and it frequently kills my appetite. His casual discussions of his brothers’ deaths bring tears to my eyes.
The worst of it, to me, is that it could have been stopped early on. There were several visits to their deep woods cabin by concerned social workers—who apparently weren’t that concerned after all, because each time, after a brief visit, they left the family to their fate. The murderous eyes of Joshua’s father burned into his family’s flesh as they spoke politely to the state employees. Those idiots didn’t even bother interviewing the family separately—they did it right there in the room with Lenin Montgomery watching them. And they swallowed all the lies and went back to their offices content.
Apparently Lenin was able to put on a human face when he needed to, just like his son. But the similarities stop there.
Lenin Montgomery was a pedophile rapist and an insane survivalist with the world’s most warped notions of child-rearing. Brutal, day-long physical fitness drills. Forcing his children to run miles through the woods in the summer heat without water, to sleep naked outside in the winter, to catch and kill animals with their bare hands. Setting them against each other, making them fight and not letting them stop until someone had drawn blood. Constantly pounding his sick, twisted vision of life into their vulnerable heads. All that predator-versus-prey crap. “Eat the weak.” You’re king, or you’re nothing.
Killing Joshua’s siblings one by one. His mother, a frail, beaten-down thing, sitting by dully and not fighting until the day his father buried Joshua’s twin, Charlemagne, alive.
Joshua, watching his mother die and feeling absolutely nothing.
The sound of Charlemagne’s death rattle. The way Joshua describes it, carefully and precisely, with words leached of emotion, I can actually hear the horrible sound in my head.
The reporter who guessed that Joshua Smith was living under an assumed name was right. Joshua’s name, originally, was William Montgomery. As in William the Conqueror, because all the boys in the family were named after powerful leaders. The last name Montgomery might have been a lie, given that their father was a sociopath who lied about everything. Joshua had done some research into his family after he killed his father, and couldn’t find any evidence of where they’d come from.
I understand him now, although I don’t forgive him. The compassionate part of me wants to climb into a time machine and travel back to Joshua’s childhood with an Uzi, to rescue him, to rescue all of them. I can empathize with Joshua’s dark urges. I don’t just want to go back in time and kill his father, I want to drag it out for weeks of hideous torture, drinking in every scream.
But I stay hard. I stay strong. I’m sorry this happened to Joshua the same way I’d be sorry if it happened to anyone, but it doesn’t excuse what he’s done to me.
As the days march by, he talks to me about his business over meals. He tells me how he selects companies to acquire, and the various ways that he makes sure that he gets what he wants—some legal, some not. He’s designed software that allows him to hack into just about anywhere, so he’s always got an unfair advantage.
He’s giving me an education and a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at high finance. He’s telling me all his secrets, confiding in me like a lover, making me feel special.
When he isn’t wearing his icy mask of hate, he’s funny and witty and entertaining. I saw that side of him when I was working for him, sometimes, how he’d show his appreciation to employees who’d excelled in their positions and they’d just light up. His approval is sweeter than honey. He’s still a hard-ass, still controlling and sinister, but there’s something sexy about that too.
But I keep my walls up. This man tortured me and locked me in a cell, and he is the reason I will never be anything more than a chained-up puppet, existing only for his amusement. My world has shrunk down to the interior of a well-decorated prison because of him.
One day at lunch, when he’s talking about how he hunts his victims, he tells me about the software he uses to find the murderers. At that, I perk up, briefly.
“You could sell that to police departments, to the FBI,” I say after he describes it to me. “It could save so many people.”
But he shakes his head. “A large part of my process is illegal,” he says. “Once my software does the preliminary work of identifying disappearance clusters, my next step is use it to hack into numerous email and social networking accounts and bank accounts of the victims, friends and family and employers of the victims, and suspects. The police could never do what I do. They’re hamstrung by the law.”
Disappointed, I go silent again. I still refuse to speak to him in more than monosyllables, unless we’re sparring.
So he starts offering me things. Trying to bribe me.
“Since you haven’t tried to kill yourself in the last three weeks, I am willing to take you outside.” He springs that one on me at dinner one night.
It’s already been three weeks since I was released from my cell? Fuck me. What’s it like outside now? It must be late fall, at least. Maybe winter. I’m hollow with sorrow and despair at the thought of how long I’ve been here.
This is the only life that I’ll know, locked inside these walls. The months sliding away into years. Unless I finally manage to kill him, or myself.
“No,” I say, looking at my plate as I eat.
“Interesting. Why not?”
Interesting. My misery is interesting to him. I glare down at my pasta. “A glimpse of the outside world, as a patronizing pat on the head for being a good little girl? It would be torture, not pleasure. It would remind me of the freedom I can never have again.”
“I didn’t say a glimpse. We could walk outside every day that the weather permitted.”
“You could take me for daily walks like a dog chained to your leash, you mean? Again, no.”
He sighs, as if he’s a parent dealing with a very trying toddler. “Your sulky attitude is getting very boring, Toy. What would make you happy aside from freedom?”
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