I finally had an answer—I understood why I was in the cage. Wyatt. Wyatt Jackson. But having that name didn’t make it any better, because he wasn’t the one on the other side of the bars. He wasn’t the man with onyx-colored eyes. Wyatt was older. Plus, he was sweet and kind, not cruel. It had been well over a year since I stole from Wyatt—blackmailed him like all the others. I hated myself after I saw the hurt on his face when he heard the truth. He wasn’t like most of the guys I stole from—the men filled with so much lust that they didn’t want to talk about anything except their fantasies. Wyatt was open about being married—the problems he was having with his wife—and other things too. He mentioned family—brothers—they were big shots in New York.

Oh my god. I remember their names—Reynard and Mauro. He talked about them several times. Which one was younger? Reynard! That has to be the man with the onyx-colored eyes—and that means the other man has to be Mauro.

SweetSunshine18: Hey Wyatt!

MrWyatt2U: Hello, my little dose of sunshine. How was your day?

SweetSunshine18: It was good! I just got off work.

MrWyatt2U: Same here. Another day at the office…

SweetSunshine18: I still can’t believe you run your own company! That’s amazing!

MrWyatt2U: It was my father’s company. Technically, I just run the Chicago branch, but it definitely keeps me busy!

SweetSunshine18: I bet it pays the bills better than mine does. :)

MrWyatt2U: Yeah, but I bet it’s a lot more work. :)

SweetSunshine18: Probably so.

Mr.Wyatt2U: My wife just home with the kids from baseball practice. I have to go. I’ll probably be online later.

SweetSunshine18: I’ll be here…waiting! :)

I closed my laptop and sighed as I picked up my cell phone and saw an alert from my bank. I was about to be overdrawn and if I didn’t come up with some money soon, I wasn’t even going to get the alert when I finally did get a negative balance because I wouldn’t be able to pay my cell phone bill. My plan to find rich men online that I could blackmail was proving to be less lucrative than I hoped.

The first guy I found was by accident—just some creep who used the same name in the chat room that he used on Facebook. I was trying to scare him off when I started typing his personal information into the chat box, threatening to message his wife, and just hoping he would go away—then he typed something I never expected: Okay fine—how much? Please don’t tell my wife.

I never expected the creep to offer me money—I just wanted him to go away. That opened my eyes to an opportunity that I never imagined. If he was willing to pay, then I doubted he was the only one. I wondered how many married men like the creep were out there. As it turned out—a lot more than I expected, especially when I started going to some of the darker places online where sex was the only topic of discussion most of the time.

I had to take some risks at first. I set up an online bank under my real name but funneled the money through a PayPal account that had a fake name. I got an LLC set up in Wisconsin where it could be done privately, used that to open a bank account under my business name, and then I opened an account in the Caribbean to give myself one more layer of security. I even set up a VPN so that no one could trace my IP address and find out where I was—just in case.

As soon as I stopped visiting the regular chat rooms and moved into the ones that catered to people looking for sex, I started getting a constant stream of messages. The problem was that most of those messages were useless. They were people hiding behind a screen name. For every hundred random guys that contacted me, I was lucky if I found one that had enough detail for me to find the information they weren’t openly sharing. Then I had to determine if they could actually pay—and while I found a few that I was able to blackmail for a few hundred bucks, that wasn’t going to pay my bills.

Over time, I got better at what I was doing—better at finding my marks. I masqueraded as a sweet, innocent girl—young—inexperienced. It was actually the truth, but most nights I didn’t feel very innocent after an evening of filthy chatting with guys that were normally fairly unattractive to me. I had to use my camera, show them my face—tempt them with my body—and I had to watch them pleasure themselves. I encouraged them to show me what they were doing so that I could get them on video. But, getting them to trust me enough to get the information for my blackmail scheme took time—and time was money—money I was in desperate need of.

The message from Wyatt was unexpected because he messaged me on one of my older screen names—one that I rarely used after I started hunting in the darker places online. That profile wasn’t dripping with temptation like my other ones—and he just seemed to be looking for someone to talk to. I was going to ignore him since I was busy with my real targets, but then I saw where he worked—what his position was—and the dollar signs blinded me. I started trying to turn him into one of my marks, even though he didn’t fit the profile—I was the one who took our friendly chats the direction that would eventually get me the evidence I needed.

MrWyatt2U: Okay, I’m back. Sorry.

SweetSunshine18: No problem. I missed you!

MrWyatt2U: Did you?

SweetSunshine18: Of course! I like talking to you…

MrWyatt2U: I like talking to you too. I just feel guilty about it sometimes. I used to be able to talk to my wife, but she’s so busy with the kids now.

SweetSunshine18: Don’t feel guilty. It’s not like I’m going to tell her. :)

MrWyatt2U: I doubt she would care. All I do is complain about my life. She already knows that the marriage is…strained.

SweetSunshine18: That’s too bad. You seem like a good guy, and you deserve to be happy.

MrWyatt2U: Maybe…

SweetSunshine18: I bet I could make you happy. Want me to turn on my camera?

MrWyatt2U: If you want to.

Wyatt was struggling with a lot of things, but at the end of the day, he was still an older man that messaged an eighteen-year-old girl—looking for something. He just wasn’t bold enough to ask for it, so I led him straight into the temptation he was looking for—the place in the back of his mind that convinced him to message me in the first place. I made sure I was wearing skimpy clothes every time the camera was on—and eventually, he gave in. He told me how hot I was, how much he desired me, and I encouraged him to tell me more. It took a while to get enough to feel like I could blackmail him, and it really did rip out a piece of my soul to actually go through with—but I was desperate—desperate enough to shatter him in order to get what I needed.

I sat in my own sexual filth after the room was plunged into darkness and the afterglow from my orgasm began to seep into my veins. It should have been calming, but what the man with onyx-colored eyes—Reynard—forced me to do made me sick to my stomach. The worst part wasn’t that he made me do it in front of him. The worst part was that when he called me a dirty little slut and a filthy whore—it turned me on. He wasn’t the first man to call me that. I usually got called every name in the book when I laid out my blackmail scheme—by all of the men I stole from—except Wyatt. Wyatt just looked heartbroken. I asked him for a lot of money by my standards—fifty thousand dollars. He paid it without blinking, without saying another word to me, and then logged off. His screen name never logged on again—I knew that because unlike the others, I didn’t block him. I didn’t have the heart to.

If I’m in this cage because of what I did to Wyatt, then I deserve to be here.

The darkness didn’t send me into madness like it normally did when the lights went out. I just sat behind the black veil and cried. What else could I do? The answer I was looking for was worse than I imagined. I could have handled being in the cage for any of my sins—but Wyatt? The one I truly regretted more than any of the others? That just broke my heart. It shattered my will. It took away every bit of hope. There were times when I wanted to be punished for what I did to him. I expected him to lash out and when he didn’t, it felt like there was no conclusion. If he would have verbally destroyed me like the others did—I might have been able to move past it.

Was he so angry that he sent his brothers to do it instead? That doesn’t even seem like him—I can’t believe he would let them hurt me—even if I do deserve to face the consequences of what I did to him.

I was done fighting—done asking questions—done bargaining with Reynard. I didn’t need anything else from him except his wrath—because I knew it was Wyatt’s wrath being delivered vicariously. If a penance had to be paid, then I would do it. My comeuppance was my path to redemption, even if I never left the cage. Reynard obviously took pleasure in watching me suffer—maybe that’s why Wyatt decided he was the man to deliver my destruction. All I could do was willingly walk into the pain—accept my consequences—and face the agony of defeat. There was no happy ending—especially for someone like me—someone that got turned on when Reynard called me awful things. I really was the girl I pretended to be online. It wasn’t just a mask I wore for profit. That version of myself had always existed. I finally saw that—and that meant I was where I needed to be.

Locked away so that I couldn’t hurt anyone anymore.

Caged—so that I could wallow in my regret.