Love cannot be compelled—Russian Proverb
I COULDN’T STOP SCREAMING. THE SOUND coming from my mouth didn’t sound normal, I was losing my mind, because suddenly I had visions of Nikolai hurting me, of him… taking off his mask.
“Pleasure,” he whispered.
Nikolai held out his hands. “I can explain.”
“Explain?” My teeth chattered as I pulled the blanket around my body. “Explain what, you bastard? That you tortured me when I was sixteen! The masks…” I pointed at the masks lining the dresser. “You kept trophies of it? Are you going to kill me?”
Terrified and nauseated, I tried to scramble off the bed, but my feet tangled up in the blanket causing me to fall to my knees on the floor. My entire chest hurt with the effort to breathe. I had told him I loved him! My captor! The person who’d… made me… forget.
Everything.
It was too much, the memories, as if someone had unlocked Pandora’s Box, the pain in my skull so intense I was seeing double.
“Shh.” Nikolai held up his hands in surrender and kneeled next to me on the floor. “It’s normal to feel pain after the repressed memories come forward.”
“Don’t touch me!” I shrieked.
The scars on my forearms throbbed. How was that possible?
I scratched at them.
“No, no, Maya.” Nikolai gripped my hands. “You’re going to hurt yourself if you do that. Your brain is re-living the memories… and trying to manifest something in the present so that the pain makes sense. It won’t, and… you’ll end up killing yourself.”
He pinned my hands behind my back.
I squirmed against him and screamed as hot tears ran down my face. Escape. I had to escape. I had to get out.
The apartment was white, it had always been white. Everywhere was white.
The masks.
The couch.
Bile rose up in my throat.
Before I could react any more Nikolai reached into the top of the dresser and pulled out a syringe. I flailed against him harder, but he was too strong.
“Don’t! Please!” I sobbed uncontrollably. “Please! Nikolai if you love me at all you won’t hurt me!”
His dark eyes closed very briefly as he looked away and stabbed me with a needle directly in my arm and pushed the plunger.
My vision blurred. And it was weird, in that moment, I wasn’t afraid of what he would do to me. No, instead, my heart broke, because it meant he didn’t love me.
I was tied to the chair. He had cut me six times on each arm. I counted. The pain was horrible. He said pain was one of the only ways to quickly brainwash someone because mentally you didn’t think you could handle it, even though physically you could.
I asked him lots of questions.
He answered every single one.
“Why are you doing this?” I gasped as Nik made his final cut in my arm.
“You were in a tragic car accident” he said in a low voice. “Lucky to be alive, do you feel these cuts? They’re deep, from the glass in the windshield.”
“No.” I shook my head. “No, you did this! I didn’t mean to see it, okay? I’ll tell my father, if I just explain to him that I didn’t mean to.”
“What you saw matters,” Nik said tightly. “Your father cannot trust you not to say anything to anyone… your options are die, or this.” He pressed his palm against my forearms, I was losing more blood.
“You beat me.”
“No, that was him.” Nik said sadly. “How do your arms feel?”
“Heavy.”
“That’s from the impact of hitting the steering wheel, the glass from the accident missed your main arteries, you’re lucky to be alive.”
“You already said that.”
“Repeat after me.” He ignored me.
I refused to repeat.
Then felt more pressure against my forearms. “Repeat it, Maya.”
“I’m lucky to be alive.”
“Why?”
“Because the glass.” I frowned. Why did I feel as though I was reliving something that didn’t happen? “It missed my arteries.”
“The building you ran into was empty, thank God,” he said.
“Yeah.” The building. What building?
“It was a motorcycle shop, remember? You drove by it in order to get to your party for your birthday.”
“My birthday.” I felt tears well in my eyes.
“Happy birthday, Maya.”
I felt dehydrated, tired. Wait, where was I?
“Maya,” Something wrapped around my arms, I think the bleeding had stopped. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Yeah…” I frowned against the blindfold, only able to see a sliver of movement underneath it, black shoes rocked back and forth, back and forth, they were covered in blood, was that mine? “I um, got in an accident.”
“Lucky to be alive,” we said in unison.
“So lucky,” Nik whispered. “It’s good your father found you when he did, he was so worried.”
“My father?”
“Maya, how do you feel about ice cream?”
“Huh?” My mouth watered. I wanted something to drink and some food. Why wasn’t anyone feeding me? Why did I have a blindfold on.
“I love it.” I finally answered.
“Me, too.” He sighed as if the thought saddened him. “I’m going to take off your blindfold now… And it’s going to make you feel so much better.”
“Do I get to leave?”
He hesitated. “Not yet, I’m going to give you a gift instead. Remember you’re going to feel so much better once the blindfold is removed…”
“I’m going to feel so much better.” I repeated then shook my fuzzy head. “Did you say gift?”
“Something so you don’t remember the pain… so that when you dream, you dream of light.”
I nodded, my body trembling but I wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement. “I would like that.”
“Besides.” His hands came around my head loosening the blindfold. “You’ve done so well, you deserve a gift. You’ve been brave, so very brave. And I want to reward you for that bravery.”
“Really?”
The blindfold fell.
His mask was white, like something you’d see at a historic masquerade, the nose was elongated, at least four inches from his face, pointing downward, the mouth open so I could see his full lips and blinding white smile. It matched the mask.
Dark liquid brown eyes stared back through the two large holes next to the nose.
“Will you take off your mask?”
“I don’t take off my mask.”
“You can’t?”
“I don’t,” he said in a simple nodding gesture, his smile easy. “For you I would love to, but I can’t.”
My body was heavy, so heavy.
“You’re tired,” he said. “At this point you’ve been awake for over thirty-two hours.”
“What!” I tried to jump out of my chair but my body was too heavy, too tired, and full of so much pain.
“The car accident,” Nik stated. “It was very traumatic for your body.”
“Will I be okay?”
“Of course. I’m a trained surgeon. You’re going to be just fine, but it’s important that you stay awake for the next twelve hours just in case, do you think you can do that?”
“Yes.” I nodded once, twice, maybe three times?
Every time I moved he mimicked my movements, it was weird, like I was staring into a mirror though that was ridiculous right? My brain told me it was ridiculous, but for some reason it put me at ease, made me think, he was just like me, trapped in some weird white room.
I looked down, but was met by soft fingertips. “I wouldn’t… there is a lot of blood from your accident.”
“Okay,” I whispered, mesmerized by his dark eyes and the way his eyelashes seemed to stretch out past the confines of the white mask, he was beautiful, so beautiful, like a fallen angel.
“You are gorgeous, you know that?”
“No.”
“But young.” He sighed, sounding almost disappointed.
“I’m sixteen… I think.”
“Your sixteenth birthday, remember? The accident? In your brand new car…”
“My father told me not to drive.” I frowned. “But I did, because I wanted to make it to the party.”
“Of course you wanted to make it to the party. You were going to be late, after all.” His fingers caressed my face.
“That feels good.”
“I’m glad.”
“Will you keep touching me?”
His hand hovered near my cheek, as if he was hesitating. “I did promise a gift… and pleasure.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.” This time I said it louder.
“Yes,” he repeated. “Close your eyes.”
“But—“
“I said I’d give you a gift.”
“Okay…”
“But no sleeping.”
“Alright…”
“Promise me, Maya, no sleeping… that is not your gift.”
“I promise,” I said in a shaky voice, closing my eyes. It would be impossible to fall asleep sitting in a chair anyways.
“My gift is a story.”
“A story?” I opened my eyes.
“Shh, don’t you want to hear it?”
“Yes.” I did. I wanted something to distract me from the throbbing in my arms or the way my body felt like someone had dumped sand inside it. “Sorry.”
“Never apologize to me, Maya.”
“So—” I shook my head. “Okay.”
“Good.” He sighed then ran his fingers down my face. “You are beautiful, young, talented. You will be able to do anything you want with your life, do you believe me?”
I shrugged. I’d always been into science but didn’t get good enough grades, not that I was going to admit that.
“If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”
“I think...” I chewed my lower lip, the pain so intense that I had to take a minute and remember to breathe. “I think I’d want to help people… maybe become a vet or a doctor?”
“Doctor,” he said. “That fits you.”
“You think?” Nobody had ever complimented me on my life choices, at least that I could remember, which wasn’t much, everything was so blurry and out of focus.
“I know.” He said softly, his fingers still caressing my face like I was precious, desirable. “Keep your eyes closed.”
I squeezed them shut just as I felt his rough cheek against mine. I let out a little gasp as his mouth found my neck.
“Are your eyes still closed, Maya?”
“Yes.” I exhaled as the sensation of his mouth against my skin felt like the most wonderful thing in the world. “Yes, my eyes are closed.”
“When you leave this place… you’ll feel determined… so very determined to work hard, to get good grades, to study, to prove to everyone just how smart you truly are. Do you believe me, Maya?”
“Yes.” For some reason I did. I believed him. He was the only lifeline I had after being in hell for what felt like days. He’d given me water, hadn’t he? And he’d wrapped my arms after apologizing. He was… he was my everything right now, my life. “I believe you.”
“People will try to stop you, but you’ll continue on with your goals… even your father may try to dissuade you, and here’s the gift I leave you with… He will never have any power over you. Do you understand?”
“Power?”
“Your father, Alexander Petrov will never own you, he will never be able to tell you what to do, there will be no fear when you look him in the eyes, only sadness that he is missing out on the wonderful daughter he could know if only he’d look past his own selfishness. The gift I leave you… is peace.”
“Nik, I don’t feel peace.”
His mouth kissed down my neck again and then his warm lips moved across mine in a searing hot kiss. I wrapped my arms around his neck as he lifted me off the chair and into the air. My body ached everywhere but he felt so good, so warm, and I was suddenly chilled, my teeth chattering between kisses.
He placed me down on a couch and deepened the kiss then ran his hands down my hips. It felt so good having him in the places that hurt, knowing he would make it better.
I thought I heard him mutter a curse as he ran his hands up and down my stomach.
It was sore.
“Broken ribs… not by my hand, Maya, I would never hurt you in that way… In fact…” I could almost hear him thinking, I kept my eyes squeezed shut for fear that he would disappear or leave me if I opened them. “Every time you crack your knuckles it means you are remembering the bad, not the good. If you crack your knuckles I want you to pay special attention to your breathing then count to five and try to focus on your goals, focus on getting through school, focus on settling down, and focus on staying away from your father.”
“My father?”
“Promise me, Maya.”
“Okay.” I swallowed the dryness in my throat. “I promise.”
“Good.”
“One more thing… and then no more talking.”
“Yes?”
“Remember me…” he whispered, followed by another caress of his mouth. “Remember me in your dreams… not the pain, or the state in which you were brought to me, remember the pleasure, not the pain.”
“Remember the pleasure…” I repeated like an oath. “Not the pain.”
“Good.”
“Now what?”
“Oh Maya, now I show you what I mean by pleasure.”
My mind fast forwarded through moments where he cradled me, where he kissed my head, only to move down to my mouth. He only ever kissed me, barely touched me, but it was enough to fuel the fire of obsession for this man, the man who saved me.
The man who I thought had hurt me.
But had rescued me instead.
The hours went fast, my brain couldn’t catch up.
When the door opened to the room, the blindfold was put back on my face, and I heard my father’s voice.
“Is it done?”
“Of course,” Nikolai said in a smooth voice. “You brought her to me half starved, sleep deprived, and nearly dead, it took me less than twelve hours to finish your task.”
“She looks good,” my father said. “Why is she no longer bleeding?”
“I didn’t think it necessary,” answered Nikolai. “Now, if you no longer need my services?”
“One last thing…” My father grunted. “If I find out that you double crossed me, I will kill her.”
“Why should her life matter?”
“Because… I don’t trust you, and I never turned off the camera, though the sound was too muffled, I saw you touch her, I saw your want. And I’m not stupid, she could easily be triggered by any of the things you did to her. If she relapses, if she remembers, I will kill her and I know, the last thing you want is her death on your conscience. Then again, what would it matter since not only would I kill her, but reveal your family’s true identity to the media. Imagine what they would do if they found out who your ancestors were. You know, they still haven’t found that serial killer last year, what was his name again?”
“Fine.” Nikolai said in a cold voice. “But you have nothing to worry about, I did my best work…”
I was listening to them but it was almost like a dream.
I head more footsteps then Nik was next to me, whispering in my ear. “Butterscotch.”
It was impossible to keep my eyes open.
The next thing I remembered, I was in a hospital room waking up from a coma, and my mother was crying by my bedside… my father said I suffered such psychological trauma from the brain damage that I was lucky I wasn’t a vegetable. When I mentioned the man in the white mask, my father laughed and rang the nurse for anti-psychotic meds. They said to give me a while.
So I buried the memory and soon, it was nothing more than a weird dream induced by medicine, or so I thought.
With a gasp I woke up, to find Nikolai sitting on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. “So now you know.”
“How did you? I don’t understand.”
“Are you still afraid?”
“No,” I said in a calm voice. “But I am confused.”
“Hypnotherapy and brainwashing can work hand in hand but it’s imperative that the brainwashing take place before the hypnotherapy. Otherwise, it won’t last… you have to be open to suggestion and a strong mind is never open enough to suggestion or replacement of memories unless a severe trauma has taken place. The minute you left your dad’s whorehouse, you were beat within an inch of your life, starved for a week straight, only given enough water to survive, and when you ceased to remember your own name, when you cried out for death, they brought you to me. I’m always in white.” He shook his head bitterness twisting his lips into a non-smile. “Like an avenging angel… Your father has always been dramatic, the idea has always been so simple… take them from the depths of hell, give them heaven and offer them peace, and then, go through the stages of hypnotherapy. Did you know—” He laughed without humor. “—that ninety percent of people will agree with most statements if you repeat them more than three times? You have to be confident, convincing, but that’s without brainwashing, imagine what could happen if you were weakened physically?”
“But…” I pressed my fingers to my head. “I remember the accident.”
“I showed you pictures.” He sighed. “Of your wrecked car, and I did…”He swallowed. “Inflict some pain, I made the cuts on your arm because regardless of your mental state, I needed to show you I was in control and usually the only way to do that is through some sort of pain, it can be minor, I’m sorry yours wasn’t.”
It was too much to process. Almost.
“How did you get me back?” I whispered. “Why am I with you now?”
“Because I lied and told your father that the Italians knew where the rest of his whorehouses were… he believed me because ever since he attacked one of their own a few months ago, some key pieces of information have been missing. I asked for you… and told him I would take care of the Italians in return.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No… and there were... terms. He said I could have you for a year but that if I touched you and triggered one of the real memories of seeing him in the whorehouse with the girls… he’d kill both of us, so…” He stood and spread his arms wide. “I re-created a nearly identical room to the one you were held in, even kept masks nearby.” He walked over to the dresser then with a cry tossed it onto its side and slumped to the floor.
He was losing his mind.
Or maybe just allowing me to see he wasn’t as in control as I’d always thought.
Slowly, I slid out of bed and joined him on the floor.
“You should go,” he whispered.
“And where would I go? To my father’s house? The same one who tortured me for a week? No thanks, I think I’ll take my chance with the person who tried to save me.”
My body trembled all over again at the thought. He might not be my flesh and blood but he was still a father, he was supposed to protect me, not break me and scatter the ashes while laughing.
Warm tears streamed down my face.
Nikolai pulled me against him, wrapping a muscled arm around my body as I continued to sob quietly against his chest.
“I didn’t.” Nikolai cursed under his breath. “I didn’t save you. I made it worse, so much worse. Saving you, would have been trying to get you out of the building, saving you, would be handing you over the Italians and faking your death, saving you—” He turned to cup my face, his eyes filled with tears. “—would be letting you go, rather than keeping you for myself.”
“What if I want to be kept?”
“You realize,” he said, then swallowed slowly, his mouth inches from mine. “That you say you want to be kept by the very monster that made you believe you were in a car accident, by the same person who took advantage of a sixteen year old girl because he couldn’t help himself.”
“You kissed me, hardly a crime.”
“I didn’t just kiss you. I desired you. I wanted you, from the minute I saw you with your father that year, and it disgusted me that I was so much older yet was drawn to someone so young, so bright. You wore your emotions on the outside, while I’d been taught emotions were frivolous wicked things that would get me nowhere in life.”
“And yet the beast somehow still managed to turn into a prince.”
“I’m not your prince.”
“You’re right.” I nodded. “I think the beast is hotter anyways.”
He cracked a smile. “You should be sleeping, running, possibly screaming and pulling a gun on me.”
“But I remember,” I whispered kissing his mouth. “I remember you telling me to work hard in school… I remember you telling me how special I was… I remember everything…”
“I can make you forget again, it could be dangerous, and I’d have to disappear from your—”
I kissed his mouth hard, pulling him into my arms, our tongues tangled in a wild frenzy.
We broke apart.
“I had your picture in my room,” I blurted.
His eyebrows drew together in shock. “You what?”
“In my room. You know how some people have pictures of bands or move stars? I had pictures of you… you’d always been my idol, maybe that’s why I was so crazy to meet you, or maybe—”
“—maybe you just wanted to come home.”
“You’re my home,” I whispered tugging at his shirt.
“God, I’ve waited years to hear you say that.” His lips found mine again, and then he was tearing at my clothes, ripping them from my body as he laid me back against the cold slate floor. I didn’t care, I needed him, wanted him, with such desperateness it was hard to breathe.
Clothes flew over his head and then his warm body was pressing against mine, our mouths fused as he thrust into me without warning.
My head fell back, brushing the slate as he made love to me.
The piece that had always been missing, finally, with a resounding click, locked into place.