“I wouldn’t touch your filthy twat if my cock was wearing a full hazmat suit. Touch me again and you’ll withdraw a bleeding stump.” I release her wrist, and she’s crying as she scurries off. That cheers me up considerably.
I lean against the bar and close my eyes and think of Toy. Sweet, broken Toy. How will I ever fix her?
Chapter Twenty-Three
Toy
Master is gone all night and most of the next day. When he enters the playroom, I can see he’s furious. I’ve never seen him quite like this before. That icy mask of his rarely slips, and when it does, when he’s mad at me, it’s still a cold, controlled kind of anger.
But today he comes boiling through the door, eyes blazing with rage. I hold as still as possible, so panicked that my breath sticks in my throat. He seems to be moving in manic fast-motion.
He stalks over to me and practically rips my collar off. Then his hands close around my throat and he pulls me to my feet. I’m gurgling in panic; I can’t breathe, and my hands flail and slap at his wrists. Instinctively, I try the Krav Maga technique that he’s taught me. I bring my hands down on the insides of his elbows, and my knee comes up toward his groin. He twists away easily.
He eases up a little bit, enough that I can breathe.
“Your technique still sucks, Toy. Fucking useless at everything, aren’t you?”
I start to cry. “Yes, Master, I’m useless. I’m sorry, Master.” I would die right now for one kind word. I’d die happy.
“Somebody is looking for you, Toy,” he snarls. “Someone has been bombarding the fucking press with messages about you and implying that I’m behind your disappearance. The police interrogated me for hours today. They ambushed me with all kinds of information that they shouldn’t have access to. I was forced to do a press conference, upping the reward for information leading to your return. Who knows that you went back to pick up your purse that night? Who would have that kind of information? Other than your former neighbor, who could be behind this? I know it’s not her, because she never reported you missing.”
A shock wave rolls over me and my knees give out. He hauls me to my feet, and I stand there for a moment as the implication of what he just said floods my body with light and warmth.
Somebody cares about me. I am not invisible. I am not worthless like Master tells me over and over.
But who? If nobody reported me missing in the first place, why would they suddenly be after me now? “I don’t know who would look for me, Master. I have nothing and nobody.”
He’s staring straight into my eyes. Anger flickers over his face. “You have me. And I am everything.”
I bob my head as much as I am able with his hands closed around my throat. “Yes, Master.”
“The person who did this has been sending anonymous emails to both the police and the newspapers. And they’ve been naming me as a suspect. You must know who it is.”
“Heather was my only friend!” I protest weakly. “I mean, I thought she was my friend.”
“Somebody at the place where you volunteered?”
“Nobody that I know of, Master. If they didn’t report me missing after a month, why would they start now? Master?”
The thought of that place… Tears start running down my face and I can’t stop crying. Oh God, I miss my old life. That’s why I never think of it, because it will sap the last bit of my strength and it won’t matter because no matter how miserable I am, there’s nothing I can do to escape this.
“Stop crying,” he snarls. “Right fucking now.”
“I c-c-can’t.” I’m having some kind of breakdown. I can’t remember how to breathe. I’m shaking so hard I’m almost convulsing. Images of the people back at the shelter flood my mind, summoning up a drenching wave of misery.
“You c-c-can’t?” he mocks me, and throws me to the floor. I curl up and hug my knees and wail, rocking back and forth.
He goes down on his knees next to me, grabs my hair and yanks my head up. “Who?” he screams. Who is this angry man? He never used to lose control like this. “Who did you tell about me?”
“Only Heather!” I cry. “I swear, Master, I swear!” Tears and snot run down my face, and I’m gulping in panic because I can’t make him happy but I must make him happy.
He looks down at me in disgust. “Wash your face.”
He uncuffs me and storms toward the door. He doesn’t even bother to put the collar or the ankle cuffs on me, he’s so angry.
Then he pauses in the doorway and looks back at me with a great weariness on his face.
“Your technique when I choked you, it was good,” he says. “It would have worked on anyone but me. You’ve gotten much better, very quickly. You’re actually a natural.”
He waits expectantly.
“Thank you, Master,” I whisper, and as he walks away, the thought springs unbidden into my head. Fuck yourself up the ass with a nail-studded baseball bat, Joshua Smith.
How dare he lie to me just to make me feel badly, when I’m spending every waking second trying to please him? How dare he expect me to continue living like this, when there’s no reward, no acknowledgment, ever? Hearing him admit that he lied to me about my technique makes me so angry I want to cut his throat and watch him bleed out.
And wait, wait, wait…something else…
My mind frantically picks through everything he just said.
“Upping the reward for your safe return…” If nobody knew I was missing, then why would there be a reward in the first place? Master certainly wouldn’t have made it public and offered a reward unless someone had come looking for me.
Wild fury seizes me. He lied to me. That lie was worse than anything else he’s ever done to me. He lied to me knowing how I was abandoned by my own mother and how that haunted me with self-loathing. His lie broke my heart, made me feel worthless, made me feel ugly and invisible.
Something in me snaps. I can’t submit anymore. It’s the beginning of the end for me, and I can’t even wrap my head around what that will mean.
I stagger off to the bathroom to wash my face.
As I’m walking down the hall, trembling with fury, it hits me.
Mark.
The man in the doorway.
There’s a strong possibility it’s him. He knew where I was going. He talked to me about work sometimes. He used to work in computer security.
Fear fills me.
I am terrible at lying to Master… No, fuck that, to Joshua Smith.
He can see right through me. Just by looking at me, he’ll see that I’m trying to hide something from him. And he’ll torture me until I talk. I won’t be able to help myself. He’s a one-man Spanish Inquisition.
There is only one way to save Mark. And now that I think of it, one way to save myself.
I look in the mirror. I am Tamara Bennett. I have been kidnapped by Joshua Smith, who tried to break me and make me into something I’m not, but he failed.
I am at peace.
Joshua hurt me horribly when he told me that nobody was looking for me. Now I know the truth. There’s at least one person out there who cares, and that is enough. And that is worth dying for. This nightmare is about to end. I will finally float free away from here, and I will be who I want. Tam with a Plan. Tam who helps other people.
I start running the water in the bath. I fill it up with bubbles so he won’t see. The razor that he uses to shave my pussy is in a drawer with cans of lather and washcloths; I hide it in a cloth and carry it to the tub.
He finally got sloppy. My plan worked. I’m just not escaping the way I’d planned. But this will do.
I slash my wrist under the water, hunching over so the camera won’t see the look on my face. It hurts way more than I expected. It’s searing agony down my wrist, but the thought of giving Mark up to Joshua hurts worse.
Time ticks by, and I start to slide into oblivion. Warm, delicious lassitude swallows me, and I float away to freedom.
I wake up to horror.
&n
bsp; Because I’m not dead.
My wrist is throbbing, and I am restrained hand and foot on a bed.
Joshua is looking down at me, his face twisted with rage.
He says one thing.
“Why?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tamara
Panic floods my body, and I involuntarily jerk against the chains, then pull myself back.
There is only one way to stop him from interrogating me and figuring out the truth. I have to distract him by going on the offensive.
“Fuck you, asshole!” I scream at him. “You’re not my master, Joshua Smith, you’re a fucking crazy loser sack of shit! I hate being here, and I’d rather die than spend one more second with you. This isn’t living. This is Hell!”
He glares down at me, face flushing with fury, but for some reason I’m not afraid.
“You think this is Hell, you spoiled bitch?” he shouts at me. “Hell is watching your father kill your brothers one by one and waiting for your turn! Hell is watching your father bury your twin brother alive! Hell is your very first memories being of hearing your mother scream while your father rapes her up the ass! Hell is watching your daddy rape little girls and being forced to jerk off to it if you want to live another day! Hell is being starved, and burned, and cut, and walking barefoot through the snow all winter long!”
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I laugh, a harsh, horrible sound. “I’m fucking glad you suffered. I wish you’d suffered more. I wish your father had finished the job.” His eyes widen in surprise. He wasn’t expecting that from passive little Toy, or compassionate, caring Tamara, but I’m not either of those anymore. My pain and desperation have forged something new. “You took everything away from me. You destroyed my life! I don’t care if this is a gilded cage, it’s a goddamn cage, you asshole, you psycho, you nut job, and you make me sick!”
“I don’t make you sick,” he says, tightly controlled fury dripping from every word. “I make you come. I make you beg for it.”
“Yes, you had to make me beg for it.” I pour all my pent-up loathing and contempt into my hateful glower. “I didn’t do it on my own. I never would have. Just kill me and get it over with, you scum-licking pig, because I am Tamara Bennett, and I will end your disgusting life or die trying. I am not Toy, I was never Toy, and I never will be. You fucking failed at breaking me, like you fail at life, you piece of shit.”
Instead of answering, he turns and storms out of the room.
As soon as he’s out the door, I hear him shouting. No, roaring. An animal sound of pure fury. I hear glass breaking and a door slam repeatedly.
I’ve made the iceman lose control.
I smile to myself.
I shut my eyes and remember that I’m Tamara again. It feels so good to be Tamara.
With nothing else to do, I start reciting lessons in my head. Algebra. I invent algebra problems in my head and solve them. Then I move on to history. I start to recreate history classes from high school and quiz myself.
After a few hours, I realize that I’m crying, but I don’t feel sad. I feel weak and dizzy and I’m floating on a strange kind of high.
My kidnapper Joshua Smith comes back into the room.
“Why are you crying and laughing at the same time?” he demands.
Was I laughing? So many feelings are flooding my body that I don’t know what to do with them.
I look at him haughtily. “You’d have to be human to understand, Joshua dick-sucking piece-of-crap Smith. And by the way? You’re a liar, you little turd-breath asshole. You lied about nobody reporting me missing. You know why you had to lie? Because you’re fucking weak!”
He lashes out and slaps me, and my ears ring, and I laugh and laugh, spiraling up into hysteria. “Oh my God. My God. Thank you for proving my point, wussy girl. I call you weak and it hurts your sad little feelings, and you respond like a puppet because I jerked your string. You just slapped a woman half your size who’s chained to a bed! You’re so brave, Joshua! Did that make you feel good about yourself? Are you going to come now?”
Just fucking kill me already. What do I have to say to push him over the edge?
“Fuck this,” he growls. He undoes my cuffs. He scoops me up and throws me over his shoulder and carries me down the hall, down the stairs, heading for my cell.
“You don’t deserve a nice clean room. You’ll stay down here, cuffed hand and foot, in the dark. Enjoy your new life.”
“Good,” I spit at him. “I don’t ever want to see your face again, because you make me sick.”
* * *
Joshua
A week goes by, and I miss her every single day.
All day long, thoughts of her crawl through my head. I’m trying to orchestrate a takeover of a string of failing hotels, and I can’t think straight enough to concentrate on it.
Not only that, she’s not breaking this time. I don’t understand it. She talks to herself all day long, reciting what sound like classroom lessons. She looks up at the camera and laughs at me and insults me in every way possible, mocking my sexual skills, my general adequacy as a man, my need to make up lies to control her. She gloats about how many times she faked orgasms. Now, there I know she’s lying, because I felt her body clench around my cock and measured her panting breaths, felt her rapidly hammering heart as if it were my own.
And yet it actually—I have to admit this—on some level, it hurts my feelings. Feelings I didn’t know I had.
I sit in wonder at this strange, unrecognizable thing I’m becoming.
She hasn’t made me into a good man. I’m never going to let her free, and I still want to kill. Need to kill. If I weren’t worried about the phantom who’s nibbling at the edges of my life, I’d go out and kill someone new today. Maybe the judge. That would be fun. I’d enjoy it.
So if I’m not the old me, and I’m not a good man, what am I?
I play through various tortures in my head, imagining scenarios that might make Toy sorry she ever defied me. But it all feels hollow.
I thought I could rewrite her, and I failed. I believed that the minds of all prey were the same, that they could be permanently reshaped in any way I chose, given the appropriate stimuli or lack of stimuli. But the scrappy little fighter was lurking under the surface the entire time. I can torture her into obeying me, but I can never take away her free will.
One day, when Elizabeth goes downstairs with Toy’s daily gruel, Toy starts in on her. She mocks her, calls her old and ugly. “Joshua will never love you, you sour-smelling old bitch. Your twat reeks like a tuna sandwich someone left in the sun for a week. Do you see the way he tries not to breathe when you come into the room? It’s fucking hilarious.”
Elizabeth lets out a guttural howl and throws the bowl of gruel at Toy’s face. Toy just laughs at her and resumes her mockery. “Did you actually think he’d ever put his dick in that dried up snatch of yours? You dream about it all night long, don’t you? Do you touch yourself when you think of him?”
Her cruelty is breath-taking. Highly impressive. Worthy of me. Where did it come from?
She was never like that before. Can people actually change their essential nature?
Is that what’s happening to me?
Elizabeth flashes a frantic look at the camera on the ceiling, and her face crumples in mortification. She knows I heard every word Toy just said. She runs out of the room. She doesn’t come to me for new instructions, or for punishment for throwing the gruel. She runs straight to her room, and I hear the shower turning on.
She’s washing herself because she believed Toy, because she thinks she smells bad. Toy hurt her, which means I should punish Toy, but how? If pain and threats of death won’t move her, what will?
I watch Toy lying there in bed with the gruel slowly drying on her face. That drives me crazy. I don’t want Toy to be dirty. Elizabeth lets her up to use the grate in the floor as a toilet exactly three times a day, and she doesn’t get to wash herself afterward. I can feel
the filth crawling on Toy’s skin as if it were my own, and it makes me itch. Phantom stench drifts into my nostrils, roiling my stomach and putting me off my food.
I let the day drift by. When Elizabeth never comes to my office, I go find her in her room.
It’s the room of a grade-school girl. Her walls are crowded with framed pictures of fairy-tale couples. Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White—all of them pictured gazing adoringly at their princes. I used to think that she decorated her room that way because she was a case of arrested development—she stopped maturing emotionally after my father kidnapped her and raped her.
Encased in the amber of eternal childhood.
Now I realize that those fairy-tale couples represent her impossible dream: her and me. How could I never have noticed? Oh, right, because psychopaths lack empathy.
“Elizabeth! What the hell are you doing in here?” I snap.
She scoots back on her bed with the Ariel comforter and cringes away from me, refusing to meet my eyes. Her disobedience is a slap to my face.
“Look at me, you fucking moron,” I snarl at her. She flinches and makes horrible sobbing noises. I force myself to temper the anger in my voice.
“Toy was lying to you. You don’t smell bad. You do a very good job for me. You are very useful to me. Don’t listen to anything she says. She’s angry at me and taking it out on you. Her words are meaningless. All right?”
Elizabeth manages a dejected, miserable nod.
Then she looks at me hopefully and draws her finger across her throat.
She wants me to kill Toy. She has never before, in her life, requested anything from me, and this is what she asks?
That bizarre protectiveness flares up in me. I’ve committed such evil acts against Toy that any sane person would say I should be flayed alive, but if anyone else threatens her, I want to dismember them. It takes everything I’ve got to keep my voice steady. “I am not going to kill her. And you are not to harm her, or I will set you on fire and watch you burn. You will go down there tonight and wash her face off with a cloth and give her dinner.”
Tamara, Taken (The Blue-eyed Monsters Book 1) Page 19